RHEL 5.3 was released this week and one of the major new features is the inclusion of and full production support for OpenJDK. As I mentioned earlier – that’s great news for OpenJDK adoption and great news for RHEL and JBoss customers – Red Hat can now support a full Enterprise Linux and Java stack without having to pass the buck to third party JVM vendors.

JBoss Enterprise App. Platform is now certified with 46 platforms and database combinations and we will be adding additional databases in the coming months.

Note – there is 1 test failure reported (applicable to a very narrow set of use-cases) – see the JIRA to see if it applies to you. This issue will be fixed with the next CP release for EAP 4.2 and 4.3.

Inclusion of OpenJDK : OpenJDK is a high-performance, fully open source implementation of Java SE 6. OpenJDK is based on the same code base as Sun’s JDK, the most widely adopted Java implementation. OpenJDK in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 has passed the full Java SE 6 TCK and is compatible with all applications written for Java SE 6 and previous versions. OpenJDK is fully supported directly by Red Hat. With the integration of OpenJDK, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is the the first enterprise-ready solution with a fully open source Java stack when combined with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform”

This is good for OpenJDK, good for RHEL customers and good for JBoss (we’ll be announcing support for OpenJDK on RHEL 5.3 for the JBoss platforms real soon) – congratulations to everyone who made it happen.

Singapore’s Premier Regional Search Engine powered by Pentaho, RHEL and JBoss.

Another sucessful deployment for JBoss EAP, JBoss Portal and JBoss Rule – Daiwa Securities America.  Cheaper :

“Daiwa saved $300,000 by avoiding software licensing and hardware expenses that would have been incurred by sticking with the previous solution.”

and better as well :

Reliability is the bottom line. “If our portal were to go down today, it would be catastrophic,” said Dunstan. “The JBoss platform has been extremely reliable and stable. We have had no unscheduled downtime.”

It’s good to see Gavin King blogging more – 3 new posts this weekend. I hear that the Web Beans Reference Implementation is getting very close to an alpha release. Stay tuned.

Last but not least Red Hat and Ingres offer Open Source stack for ISVs.

What’s worse is that the new NT 6.0 kernel (the kernel that powers Vista and Windows Server 2008) isn’t competing strongly either. According to SearchEnterprise.com – Windows Server 2008 is a real power-hog compared to RHEL; a poor sign when just about every vendor in the industry is pushing efficiency and power savings. Even Microsoft’s friends at Intel IT have decided to ignore Vista – declaring that they won’t be upgrading some 80,000 desktops – that’s pretty significant.

A different perspective on our Solar system from the NASA’s Cassini probe – the pictures are simple yet stunning.

Bill Burke will be talking about REST and how the the new Java spec. – JAX-RS can be used to write RESTful applications and services.

Richard Stallman is ranting about London Underground’s use of FOSS for their new Oyster Card system – he thinks it’s unethical because the Oyster Card could be used to invade customer’s privacy. The system is built with RHEL & JBoss. Richard should go visit pretty much any  3-letter-agency in the world – I’m sure he’d find plenty of FOSS powering their ‘business’.

Bill Burke, esteemed JBoss old-timer and fellow at Red Hat continues to make progress with RESTEasy (an implementation of JSR-311 aka JAX-RS) – if my inbox is anything to go by – this is pretty hot stuff. Get it while it’s hot.

RHEL voted top server OS by channel insider – followed by Solaris 10 and SLES 10 – *nix all the way on the server. RHEL 5 also won a CODIE as did Red Hat’s Directory Server.

The JBoss SOA Platform has had a great start – here’s another customer story – Cybercity selects Red Hat’s SOA platform.