As expected, Red Hat Inc. announced Tuesday at LinuxWorld in San Francisco the availability of its Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server.
Open-source J2EE servers for Linux from companies such as JBoss Inc. have long been available. However, Red Hats application server entry, RHAS (Red Hat Application Server), marks the first time a major Linux operating system vendor has announced its own J2EE application server. This pairing of operating system and J2EE server has long been a staple for IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.
“Customers have been asking for an open-source application server that is fully interoperable with existing J2EE vendors so that they can leverage open source where possible while protecting legacy investments,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat. “The open-source Web and Java communities are flourishing and expanding, with organizations such as Apache, ObjectWeb and Eclipse driving the innovation. The application server was a natural next step for open source.”
Red Hat also announced that it will be testing RHAS to ensure interoperability with BEA, IBM and Oracle Corp.s J2EE application platforms. In addition, this trio of vendors contributions to the open-source community are being integrated into RHAS to help enable seamless interoperability.
The Raleigh, N.C., company also announced that RHAS supports all the major commercial Java virtual machines, including Sun SDK, BEA WebLogic JRockit and IBM JDK. Red Hat also plans to test and certify with such leading DBMSes as Oracle Database, IBM DB2 and Sybase.
The point of this plan, according to Red Hat, is to assure companies currently using J2EE on another platform that they can safely move it to Red Hat Linux and RHAS.
In this effort, Red Hat is receiving support from BEA Systems Inc. and Oracle. “We welcome Red Hat to the multiplatform application community and will support development and deployment of J2EE applications and Web services to Red Hat Application Server using Oracle JDeveloper 10g,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracles senior vice president of server technologies.
RHAS is built on numerous open-source Java projects. These include EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) from ObjectWeb Consortium JonAS and the Tomcat Web application server from the Apache Software Foundation. Red Hat will support its RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) line including support for the IA-32, Itanium and PowerPC architectures.
The new J2EE server will share RHELs business model. It will be sold as an annual subscription that includes technologies, maintenance and various levels of support.
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