JBoss EAP 4.3 is Common Criteria Certified

It's been a while since I blogged about anything here, and I'm tardy on this one too. JBoss has been gaining momentum in the government space, but everyone that has any experience with working with our federal government knows, you can only go so far unless you go through the common criteria certification process, and get certified.

Well, I'm proud to say that JBoss EAP 4.3 is common critieria certified! This was a huge step forward for us, and a special thanks goes out to Anil Saldhana for leading this effort. Here is Anil's blog post on the subject as well:

JBoss EAP 4.3 is Common Criteria Certified

So, if your in the federal government space, and interested in our technologies, you now have a new choice of common criteria certified software for your use!

Yet More Reasons to Subscribe to our Enterprise Platforms

I wanted to return to this topic again, because it is a continual discussion that we have with potential customers, and I realized that there is another large reason for subscribing that I haven't talked about in the past.

In the last several months, security has come up many times internally and externally. With our JBoss.org software, we are really targeting making it very easy for developers to get up to speed quickly, and having everything locked down flies in the face of that goal.

With that in mind, what do we do in our productization process for security?

First, we have dedicated resources internal to Red Hat that handle security of the JBoss Enterprise Platforms. These resources do a review of our platforms from a security perspective, and we address any issues they find through configuration and bug fixes. This is a pretty standard process for most vendors, and we are no different.

Second, we lock down all the management and exposed interfaces. So, for example, the JMX console has no authentication requirements within the JBoss.org Application Server release. Within the EAP, the JMX console is secured with a username and password. While this is a simple example, it is very, very important. We find people with production web sites running on JBoss.org AS all the time with a completely unsecured JMX console. Now what does this mean?

Well, it means I can change the configuration of the running AS, undeploy the applications, and even shut it down completely, from anywhere in the world, without anyone knowing what happened! Ouch!

So, between the bug fixes that are addressed for security, and the locked down configuration, out-of-the-box, we add significant value to the subscription, and is yet another reason why you should subscribe.

JBoss Division of Red Hat Gives Birth!

Well, you might be asking yourself, what is this title all about? JBoss has given birth? What's that all about?! Well, it's about our acquisition of Metamatrix.

As some of you may know, we acquired a company by the name of Metamatrix, and Metamatrix is all about data federation. Metamatrix's technology was not open source at the time of the acquisition, and while we have been selling subscriptions to it, just like our subscriptions on our open source technology, it wasn't open source. Well, I'm proud to announce the birth of a new open source project into the JBoss family of middle-ware, and its called Teiid!

Yes, that's right, the new project is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work, by a great team of developers to open source the Metamatrix technology. We always said that we would open source the technology, and maybe some folks were beginning to doubt us, but we always live up to what we say we are going to do in the open source community, and its now officially here. When you have as large a code base as Metamatrix has, and you have some encumbered code that has to be replaced, it is a significant effort. All this had to be done, while simultaneously deliverying new functionality and patches to existing and new subscription customers. It's been a long road for the team, but its delivered! This will become the basis for all future products, which will be our Enterprise Data Services Platform.

I want to congratulate the entire team on mission accomplished!

You can find the new project, and the Eclipse based tools for it at the following links:

Teiid
Teiid Designer

Go download it, test it, look at the code, and get involved, even if its just feedback in the forums and mailing lists.

Enjoy!

JBoss Virtual Experience 2009!

I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that we at JBoss are doing a virtual trade show, called JBoss Virtual Experience 2009!

I would encourage everyone to register and attend this on-line event. It's coming up on February 11th, and since its an on-line event, there's no travel required, just your time. And as we all know, in these trying economic times, travel is being cut back at probably all companies these days.

What I'm most excited about is that there will be a live chat. I will personally be involved in that, and some of our open source project leaders will be involved as well, so this is your chance to ask questions live of some open source community leaders and JBoss division leaders. Please join us, I think you will enjoy the event, and get a lot of good information from it. I have included a link to the web site above, so go there, register, block your day off, and join us!

It's Official

Not to long ago, I blogged about passing the Java EE 5 TCK. Well, due to some issues with interpretation of the TCK license agreement, we didn't show up on the Java EE compatible page from Sun. Well, we rectified the issue to Sun's satisfaction, and with our GA release of AS 5, its now official.

We are certified Java EE 5 compliant!

You can see the proof here:

Java EE 5 Compatible Implementations

and you can go get JBoss AS 5 from here:

JBoss.org AS Downloads

Try it out. I think you will like it!

JBoss Innovation Engine Heats Up!

It's not often I talk about the individual projects at jboss.org, but in this case, I think the latest release of JBoss Cache deserves special mention. When you consider that our currently shipping EAP 4.3 release includes JBoss Cache 1.4, and the JBoss Cache developers just went GA in the community with their 3.0 release, the innovation engine is really heating up.

We released EAP 4.3 on January 11, 2008 (if memory serves me right), and in the intervening 10 months the JBoss Cache developers have release JBoss Cache 2.0, 2.2, and now 3.0. That's right, two major releases and a minor in ten months. This doesn't include any bug fix releases, and support of the currently shipping version! An awesome job, and its just another example of the strength of the open source development model. One of the other things that deserves special mention, is that JBoss Cache implements a new concurrency model called MVCC or multi-version concurrency control. This model provides for a transactional cache that can scale very well. The JBoss Cache team has done some extensive benchmarking, and the results are spectacular! Finally, because they have moved so fast, we have been able to include JBoss Cache 3.0 in the upcoming community GA release of AS 5! This in turn will become the release in our upcoming EAP 5!

Finally, for all the gory details, I'll point you to the JBoss Cache blog post announcing the release, and it has links to everything you need.

http://jbosscache.blogspot.com/2008/11/jboss-cache-300-goes-ga.html

Enjoy!

My Dream for OpenJDK

When Sun open sourced the JDK (finally a true reality), I was very pleased indeed. It was something the open source community wanted, and Java needed to continue to be relevant in the future. Having said that, I have seen some very positive things happening, much of which has been driven by the Red Hat OpenJDK team.

That team has created a complete open source tool chain to build and package OpenJDK for Linux. We are seeing all the Linux distributions rally around this, and it is very encouraging indeed. Having an open source JDK that is built completely with open source tools, and packaged for all the major Linux distributions is a great thing. It gives developers a platform that they can count on. While this is a great step forward, it isn't the total picture that I envisioned for OpenJDK.

I would really love to see other operating system vendors embrace OpenJDK for their respective platforms as well. Seeing the same base used across all operating system platforms will give developers what Java promised all along. Write once, run anywhere could truly be a reality. Having all operating system platform vendors embrace OpenJDK will yield benefits to developers in other ways besides consistency.

If everyone starts contributing to the same code base, then the network affect of innovation can take off in the OpenJDK community, and we can see real improvements across the board. Whether that be in innovations around garbage collection, innovations around multi-core support, you name it. All the best minds working together, versus working separately, will benefit all the vendors customers, and shouldn't hurt any one vendor either. A rising tide lifts all boats.

So, my dream is that all the operating system platform vendors would bury the hatchet on any past issues they may have had with Sun, and join the OpenJDK community. I would even like to see the open source community working on other JDK implementations start working in the OpenJDK community. We will all benefit!