Interestingly, Salesforce.com were joined by a couple of other PaaS vendors in the MQ this year – it will be interesting to see if there really is a new wave of infrastructure bearing down on the established platforms. The contemporary PaaS offerings I see today under-achieve as general purpose developer platforms and that leaves them competing with IAAS based on more traditional / established technology (Java, .NET) on cost and convenience terms. It will be good to see “Cloud” get beyond the current over-hyped phase so we can see how this will play out.

More Red Hat commentary here.

JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

No sooner was the ink dry on the annoucement – the JBoss Portal team show you how to get JBoss Portal running in the cloud as well – which, as you would expect, is like running JBoss Portal anywhere else.

Our friends at Hyperic have created a nice dashboard for monitoring the cloud : CloudStatus – which I presume is all based on RHQ – if so JON 2.0 managing JBoss in the cloud can’t be far behind.

One interesting problem of on-demand utility computing – is knowing where you application is running or legally can run – will you need an export control license as your application follows the moon ? Which country’s data privacy legislation do you need to comply with as your application is migrated to where the cheap computing power is ?

Meanwhile – Google just won its largest GMail migration from Outlook/ Exchange – 1.5 million mailboxes. Now Google has to determine if it’s worth moving the cloud closer to the users to reduce international bandwidth requirements.

You can learn and or sign-up here – have your credit card handy

It’s interesting that we’re seeing (at least) three models emerge :

• Amazon’s utility computing approach (they’re fundamentally a bandwidth, MIPS and storage utility) – you choose what platform you want to write to (Linux, Java, etc.);
• the proprietary SaaS platform approach (SalesForce, CogHead – sorry guys). You trade convenience, agility for complete dependence on the vendor.
• a hybrid – Google App Engine, Facebook. I don’t think these hybrids have anywhere near the ability to lock you in as much as the true SaaS platforms. For example – Google is based on Python, Django – if you’re smart you won’t get locked in. Many facebook apps. also support other ‘distributions’ – so it isn’t really a sharecropping model.

As I see it – the only thing that might lock you in to Google and Facebook’s model is convenient access to their huge customer base – that’s what they’re selling. Take it or leave it.