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JBoss expanded its professional open-source strategy on Monday with new versions of key products delivering support for the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification.
Atlanta-based JBoss Inc. announced new versions of JBoss Application Server 4, Hibernate 3 and JBoss Eclipse IDE with EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 3.0 support so programmers can begin to develop and deploy EJB 3.0 applications.
In addition, JBoss announced the release of JBoss Portal 2.0, a new version of its open-source portal solution.
JBoss officials said the company will highlight the new technologies at the JavaOne conference next week in San Francisco.
JBoss Application Server 4 enables developers to get started with EJB 3.0 and JSF (JavaServer Faces) to create Web applications, create business logic with EJB 3.0 and persist data through the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API, the company said.
In addition, JBoss is including a tutorial called an EJB 3.0 TrailBlazer to help developers get acquainted with the new EJB 3.0 features, such as Java annotations and dependency injection.
Meanwhile, Hibernate 3 now offers support for EJB 3.0 annotations, entity manager and Java persistence API. And JBoss Eclipse IDE 1.5, based on the Eclipse open-source application development environment, includes EJB 3.0 and Hibernate tools that simplify development, with features such as an EJB 3.0 project wizard, a full port of the Hibernate console to Eclipse, a Hibernate XML mapping file editor and a wizard for reverse engineering database schemas.
“J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] is indispensable to enterprise IT environments, but its inherent complexity is daunting for most developers, which makes application development a challenging and time-consuming task,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management at JBoss, in a statement.
“Today, JBoss is bringing simplicity back to J2EE. We have stood behind the EJB 3.0 vision, we have helped shape the EJB 3.0 specification, and now we are making EJB 3.0 a cornerstone of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System so that any developer can program J2EE and harness the power of the platform as never before,” Connolly said.
Meanwhile, the new JBoss Portal 2.0 represents a core piece of the JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware System) and supports the Java portlet API specification—Java Specification Request 168 (JSR-168). In addition, portals developed with JBoss Portal can be customized based on users, roles, security needs and administrative settings, the company said.
Other features of JBoss Portal 2.0 include single sign-on support across portals and portlets, the ability to run multiple portal instances inside one portal container, and the ability to deploy portal instances in a clustered environment, among many others, the company said.
And to support the new offering, JBoss has hired Pierre Fricke as director of product management. Fricke comes to JBoss from Ideas International Inc. (formerly D.H. Brown Associates Inc.), where he was research vice president focused on application and integration infrastructure.
Prior to Ideas International, Fricke was a strategist at IBM in the areas of interoperability, integration, WebSphere, Windows NT, Unix, Linux and open source. At IBM, he was also an AIX developer, product manager and development manager.
“Today, JBoss has achieved mass adoption at the middleware layer with market-leading technologies like JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and Apache Tomcat,” Fricke said in a statement.
“Now, JBoss is moving up the stack and bringing Professional Open Source with mass-market economics to a critical enterprise technology. With JBoss Portal, JBoss has delivered an enterprise-quality product that reflects our longstanding commitment to open source, open standards and simplified development and deployment of J2EE applications.” <<p>