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JBoss
Marc Fleury, a former Sun employee, started JBoss in March 1999. JBoss is currently at version 3.0 and is a full-featured J2EE application server that contains everything from the HTTP server to the EJB container. JBoss is open source and freely available. Over the years, important contributions have come from great developers all over the world. The current core team has many members who are involved in setting the future direction of the J2EE specification standards, so JBoss tends to be a leading-edge J2EE application server. JBoss takes a very unique approach to implementing the EJB container. Marc Fleury likes to refer to JBoss as the “webOS.” At the heart of this notion is the microkernel-based structure. The microkernel allows JBoss to offer services and modules on granular level. For example, the EJB container is implemented through the combination of services and modules. Everything is tied together and managed through JMX, which makes it easy to see what’s going on and manipulate the container. Overall, it’s a very advanced infrastructure. Other noteworthy capabilities include the easy clustering through net boot and the farm deployment feature. In addition, the hot redeployment is a great timesaver that allows you to drop new .ear and .war files into the deployment directory, where JBoss will automatically pick them up, cycle the existing application, and deploy the updated version.
JBoss is the most downloaded J2EE application server ever, and its reputation and popularity continue to climb. There are no hard numbers yet, but from our experience, the vast majority of JBoss deployments are for development or internal consumption rather than production. This is not to say that JBoss isn’t ready for production; quite the contrary. There are some highly visible rollouts with JBoss from such clients as the Dow Jones Indexes and BASF.
The JBoss team embraces leading-edge techniques, and the new 4.0 version promises to go above and beyond the J2EE paradigm. Aspect-oriented programming is the driving force behind this latest version. Through aspects,
much of the declarative power of the EJB specification can be generalized and applied to plain old Java objects (POJOs). This is a good thing because EJBs have gained the not-altogether-undeserved reputation for being overly complex and unnecessary. Time will tell whether JBoss will succeed in this respect. Nevertheless, you can rest assured that they will always be pushing the frontiers of J2EE. The following table provides a summary of JBoss.
