“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

- with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.

There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.

The original report has this chart :

Update – Sunday 4/11/10

My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.

So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.

[As percentages of respondents - that's : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]

These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.

My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !

The JBoss team is expanding again – we’re looking to fill four PM / PMM roles – strong preference for location is Greater Boston (Westford, MA) :

Product Manager – Application Platforms

Product Marketing Manager – Middleware

Solutions Marketing Manager – Middleware

Technical Marketing Manager – Middleware

Submit your resume online via the above links and ping me if we’ve worked together in the past.

Apparently it was Apache Web Server’s 15th birthday yesterday – congratulations to anyone who’s ever been involved in the project. I doubt any would have thought that 15 years on, Apache would have become the dominant Web Server on the Web and the foundation of one of the most successful and recognized Open Source forges. For a history of the Apache Web Server and the Apache Software Foundation, head over to the ASF Blog.

Red Hat has been a supporter of Apache Web Server for a long time and has shipped and supported a version in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux for as long as I’ve been noodling with it. Last year we started shipping a standalone, multi-platform distribution as well – JBoss Enterprise Web Server. Earlier today we released the latest version of it and expanded our support for Apache HTTP Server to 14 different Operating System / architecture combinations. The exact component versions are listed here and there’s more information in the Release Notes. If you’re deploying Apache HTTP or Tomcat at scale – Red Hat also supports management of Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat alongside all JBoss products via JBoss Operations Network.

The JBoss AS team moved to a more rapid and incremental release cycle with the 6.x family and the second milestone was released today (release notes, download, repo.). The release was lead by Brian Stansberry and new features include :

• Servlet 3.0 / JBoss Web 3.0
• JPA 2.0 / Hibernate 3.5
• JAX-RS 1.0 / RESTEasy 2.0
• Microcontainer 2.2

More detail in blogs from Ales, Brian, Steve and Rémy. Congratulations to Brian on another on-time release and good luck to Jason and team for the next milestone release in a couple of months time.

DZone: With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, are you concerned at all about some of the potential changes that will come as a result, to the governance and licensing options to the OpenJDK?

Rich: I’m really not that concerned. There are all sorts of scenarios that people are suggesting. I still believe Oracle will do the right thing. They have far too much to lose, by either accidently or purposely sabotaging OpenJDK. They have a very healthy business based around Java. Creating unrest, creating any kind of distrust or fragmentation of the Java community really isn’t going to help Oracle. So I think they’ll do the right thing. I also think they probably have the ability to invest in Java more than Sun had over the last five years at least. Sun kind of had some fairly pressing financial issues. I think that, above all else, probably hindered some of the progress of Java over the last five years.

So overall, I’m coming in neutral to slightly optimistic. If things do go awry, I’m sure Red Hat the rest of the Java community will step up and help Oracle to get back on track. So, yeah, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

My only real concerns is that Oracle understands products and monetization much better than they understand community and collaboration so I think a misstep or two are more likely to occur than Oracle purposefully sabotaging Java. Harming Java will devalue their investment and their chances of getting a decent return.

On the positive side – I think there’s still huge growth potential for the Java platform – I see no reason why it can’t become the dominant standard for the enterprise – I personally think we’re at the start of the decline of Microsoft and Java is the only viable alternative to Microsoft’s enterprise foothold. Microsoft’s enterprise presence is not insignificant but neither is it guaranteed – it’s largely based on an historically well adopted OS and Microsoft’s missteps in that area are pretty well known by now .

Java needs some strong leadership, investment and a open, vibrant and growing community.

I raising my mug of tea to The Next Decade of Java !

There are only 9 days left to submit your talks for JBoss World 2010, in case you need them, here are some good reasons :

1. It’s in Boston, In June. It’s a great city and the snow and ice will probably be mostly gone by June.
2. You get a free conference pass, good for all Red Hat Summit / JBoss World sessions, keynotes, events, meals and parties
3. You get one free night accommodation (in a hotel)
4. It’s very likely IMHO that there won’t be a Java One this year – if you are looking for an opportunity to talk about what you’re doing with JBoss technology then this is *the* best place to do it.
5. If you want to get into the weeds with highly technical content – then there’s a new track for that.

Call for Papers end in just 9 days !

Red Hat Summit :: JBoss World :: Boston :: June 22-25, 2010

I think I’ve just about recovered from the last JBoss World. Chicago is a fun place and I’m glad I finally got to spend some time there; next year it’s in one of my favorite cities – Boston. From the email :

A comprehensive agenda allows you the unique opportunity to move between both conferences, and learn about open source advancements through:

• technical and business seminars
• hands-on labs and demos
• customer case studies
• networking opportunities
• partner displays
• visionary keynotes
• direct collaboration with Red Hat engineers

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Interested in presenting at the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World? Call for papers will open soon! Make sure to sign up for our “Call for Papers Alert List” on the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World website.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at the 2010 Summit and JBoss World in Boston, June 22 – 25, 2010.

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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.

This week we GA’d JBoss EAP 5.0. As you’d expect from a new release there’s a long list of new features, capabilities and APIs and at some point I’ll talk about those some more. But the intention of this post is to give you an idea of some of the other less visible things that have happened with this release. EAP 5.0 marks a key milestone in the evolution of JBoss and demonstrates where we’re heading with the JBoss Platforms.

Performance

We set some pretty aggressive performance targets for this release. By comparison to JBoss EAP 4.3 we see an increase in peak throughput of about 20%, faster response times and more scalable HTTP connection handling. Performance is an ongoing activity and we’re continuing our investment in improving it in future releases. Performance at any cost is interesting to few outside of Formula 1 and Rocket Science and it isn’t a goal – we’re specifically interested in price / performance using a broad range of typical, real-life workloads.

Quality

Popular Open Source technologies (like JBoss AS – on which EAP is based) have always had the benefit of a large community who actively poke and prod. and push the software in different ways; who peer into the design and code and offer improvements.The result is some pretty decent, efficient and well polished code. But with the JBoss platforms we go one (or several steps) further. For EAP we had a long and active Early Access Program. It started back in April and is only now winding down as FCS customers complete their work. The diagram Below illustrates how we connect the AS and EAP lifecycle, the upstream (AS) GA essentially starts our EAP Early access program. This allows enterprise customers to start using a stable (though incomplete) release with the full backing of Red Hat Global Support.

Obviously the diagram is a massive oversimplification – EAP is more than AS – it is the integration point for Seam, RESTEasy, the installer, mod_cluster and the Apache Native components.

With every release we also enhance our QE coverage; in the case of this release there was a bigger focus on Performance, Stress and Longevity testing using larger and more complex topologies and a broader range of workloads.

Lifecycle

We’ve also refreshed and restated our product update and support policy for all JBoss platforms – the hope is that it’s more clear, better aligned with other products from Red Hat and puts even more distance between us and our Open Source competitors.

Ease of Use

A while back we kicked of an Internal initiative called “Andiamo” – I talked a little about it at JBoss World, and Mark wrote about it recently. While much of what we have planned around Operational and Development Ease of Use is planned for release beyond EAP 5.0, EAP 5.0 does lay the foundation for some of the things we need to achieve. The new Microcontainer provides us a very flexible and powerful toolbox that will allow us to build the middleware platform for the next decade. Specifically around ease of use, and as a taste of things to come we did provide a first cut of the new embedded console (it replaces the old JMX and Web Consoles). It has pretty limited functionality right now but I think it achieves the goal of making simple tasks simple to do.

What’s Next ?

The EAP Springtime Release (nominally EAP 5.1) is well underway and we’ll be pushing for even greater performance gains as well as defining the target platform for an upcoming Common Citeria (EAL 4+) certification.

We’re also underway with the EAP Lancer Release (nominally EAP 6.0) which will be the first major output of the Andiamo work as well as supporting the new Java EE 6 platform.

Onwards and Upwards.