JBoss Middle-ware a Leader Once Again!

Recently, we released our JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.  With that release comes some very exciting technology and news.

Gartner just released their report on the EAS (Enterprise Application Servers) market, and we are once again in the leaders quadrant.  Out of 28 vendors, we are only one of four to be in the leaders quadrant.  The others in the leaders quandrant?  Well, the usual suspects.  Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.  Pretty good company if you ask me.  This is also the fourth consecutive year we have been in the leaders quadrant.  Quite an accomplishment for us, and the only open source vendor in the leaders quadrant!  If you want to see more information on Gartners report, see the following links:

Gartner's Report

Red Hat's Press Release

Red Hat's Sales Link to the Report

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5, is a very exciting release technology wise as well.  It's our first Java EE 5 certified supported product offering.  While we provided the majority of EE 5 technologies for years already, with EAP 4.3, that was not a certified EE 5 platform.  This may also seem quite late to the market, but because of the capabilities we provided in EAP 4.3, our customers have already widely adopted EE 5 technologies, and now they have the complete comfort of knowing its certified too.  Besides EE 5 certification, here are some of the other technology highlights:

All new Microcontainer (MC) technology, replacing the old JMX based microkernel.  This new MC has been blogged about extensively already, but suffice it to say this gives us an entirely new foundation, that will allow future innovations.  You can see those developing openly in projects like TorqueBox (Ruby on Rails on JBoss) and JBoss OSGi, since the MC can support OSGi directly, and consume an existing OSGi runtime as well (very flexible).  This is just the beginning of a wave of innovation that will be possible with the new MC.

All new JBoss Cache integration with Hibernate, and the newest JBoss Cache, with multi-version concurrency control semantics (MVCC).  Much improved speed as a second-level cache for Hibernate.

Speaking of Hibernate, we also now have Hibernate Search in the platform as a supported component.  This is very exciting to me personally, as Hibernate Search solves a very common problem in applications.  Being able to get fast search results from a database, where SQL queries just don't cut the mustard so-to-speak!

Speaking about fast performance, EAP 5 offers some nice improvements over EAP 4.3.  In our internal testing we see much improved throughput.  We also see increased scalability on clusters over 4 nodes.  The clustering improvements come from improvements in JGroups and the new release of JBoss Cache that we talked about with Hibernate.

Finally, we have some exciting new capabilities in security, that Anil has blogged about fairly extensively, but I would like to highlight one thing that is near and dear to my heart.  We now have a single standard mechanism for replacing all clear text passwords in configuration files.  This is another big issue where compliance programs are concerned, and makes it significantly easier for customers to adopt EAP for those application workloads, and of course deepens our ability to penetrate the enterprise.