Saturday, February 9, 2008

Um... Has anyone seen JBoss?

Ok, can anyone explain why JBoss seams to have dropped off the map? The 5.0 version of the JBoss Application Server has been in beta for over a year! What's going on? I see a lot of the JBoss folks active in blogs and articles, but JBoss appears to be one of the only major server vendor who has not released Java EE 5 compliant server -- for God's sake, even WebSphere has a Java EE 5 server (although to be fair, it appears to only be their community edition -- still, WebSphere has a history of being 2-3 years behind the most recent spec, and even they seem to have made more progress)...

A lot of development seems to be going into Seam and Hibernate, which are both great products, but the Application Server has to be considered JBoss' bread and butter product... what's going on?

I will say that I've been using the JEE 5 features that are in the 4.2 version for some time, and they are solid -- why hasn't JBoss been able to take that next step with their server and achieve compliance? The lack of progress here has definitely made me think twice before recommending the server...

M

1 comment:

Alex Kochnev said...

Yeah, I know, JBoss 5 has been in beta for quite a while now. I do recall a note from Mark Fleury how they were concerned about Geronimo and whatever else, but what actually turned up as competition was Glassfish :-) So, time to fire up that Glassfish V2 and give it a spin.. I hear some really cool things about Glassfish V3. Additionally, especially now that JBoss is a part of RedHat I really start feeling a little bit of grubbiness creeping into them where they try all kinds of ways to make you start paying (yeah, I know they need to make money, but still). So, from that perspective, it's really nice that Sun doesn't try to push themselves onto you all that much, as they have quite a bit of other revenues coming in..