July 12th, 2007
Red Hat delivers middleware stepping stone to larger platform distribution in fall
Red Hat has cemented another large stone into the foundation of its Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 5.0, expected later this year, with the announcement of middleware solution EAP 4.2.
EAP 4.2, the company’s most comprehensive enterprise platform, weaves JBoss, Hibernate, and JBoss Seam into a single (integrated, tested, and certified) platform for Java applications. The new direction is an outgrowth of Red Hat’s announcement in April that it had decided to split its efforts into the traditional JBoss.org releases, following the traditional model, and the JBoss.com enterprise releases, for which Red Hat will sell support.
Key components in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 include JBoss Application Server 4.2, Hibernate 3.2.4, JBoss Seam 1.2, and JBoss Transactions 4.2.3. It also sports embedded Apache Tomcat 6, a web services stack, support for ful J2EE 1.4 services with extended support for the common Java EE 5 features.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 has been certified on different operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows; Java Virtual Machines from BEA, HP, and Sun Microsystems; and databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres SQL. It will also be available in seven languages.
Red Hat is moving closer to a full SOA infrastructure offering.
JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey blogged about the new release, saying that Red Hat had bundled in as many of the EE5/EAP 5.0 modules that had already been finalized, anticipating the next release.
The indication there is that there’s no time to waste in getting a full open source SOA stack to the market, one that Red Hat hopes sets it apart from the commercial and other open source alternatives.
IT analyst and blogger Tony Baer over at OnStrategies, wrote about the Jboss.org/Jboss.com split, when the announcement came out last April. He sees Red Hat as not buying to the Eclipse model and, rather, creating what he calls “its own parallel universe.”
EAP 4.2 is available now from the Red Hat online store or from resellers.
Dana Gardner is principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. For disclosures on Dana's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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