It’s been just over 3 months since we created the JBoss MASS project and today we’re announcing the first major code contribution – The Migration Analysis Tool (MAT) was created by Mitch Mocle and team at Middleware Connections. The tool is used as a starting point for estimating the effort required to migrate a group of J2EE applications  from an Oracle/BEA WebLogic environment to a JBoss AS / JBoss EAP environment.

The tool produces detailed HTML reports covering Server Configuration, Deployed Applications and Class Dependencies. Read More on the MAT sub-project page.

This is an important first step. The goal of JBoss MASS is to provide a common place to develop tools for migrating to JBoss – if you have or are thinking of developing such a tool and think that Open Source collaboration might be a good way to enhance and maintain the technology – get in touch.

1. Introductions
2. Priorities
3. Define Charter
4. Scope of work

Dial-in numbers and Agenda are on the wiki :

https://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-13334

If you’re interested in contributing to the discussion or want to learn more – feel free to join us and feel free to add to the agenda.

A lot of interest in JBoss Enterprise Middleware is thanks to our proprietary competitors’ exorbitantly high license costs and completely disproportionate and poorly timed price hikes. While cost is certainly the main reason customers move – it’s not the reason they stay once they have made the move. According to recent surveys – Vendor Independence, Quality, Value and Innovation rank highly as reasons people prefer open source over the proprietary model. As IT organizations see their budgets shrink over the next couple of years migration to Open Source won’t just be for the technology savvy early adopters. As such – we need to be ready for what I think will be a much larger and quite possibly a mass migration.

Talking to some of our JBoss solution delivery partners and our own consulting groups it became obvious that there was a huge pool of knowledge, experience and expertise but no means to share the knowledge and learn from other’s hard-earned experience. We also found that many had developed solutions for assessing and automating application migration but none wanted the burden of maintaining those tools. Sounded like a perfect opportunity for a collaborative open source project and our partners unanimously agreed.

So today Red Hat and those same valued partners including Amentra, CityTech, Consilium 1, Exadel, Freedom OSS, RivetLogic, Unisys and Vizuri are launching the JBoss MASS project [press release]. Most if not all of the 12 project founders come from a consulting background and have real-life experience of managing complex migrations and without their willingness to work together this project couldn’t have started. The JBoss MASS project will act as an umbrella community for all things migration at JBoss but the immediate goals will be to build a knowledge base and assessment / automation tools to help people move quickly to JBoss App Server /  Enterprise App Platform from proprietary alternatives.

If you’re interested in joining us as an individual or corporation please get in touch, visit the JBoss MASS project page or swing by the design forum.