Just 6 months after JBoss AS 6 was released, JBoss AS 7 (<codename>) is now available. Congratulations and a big thank you to Jason, Brian, Jaikaran and team. JBoss AS 7 is a major release in every respect and will become the technology underpinning for much of what we do at JBoss for the next decade. I believe it also represents a shift in the way developers will think about enterprise Java and it opens up new possibilities for deployment that were unthinkable 5 years ago due to technical and economic limitations.
If you’ve been following the AS 7 candidate releases (and AS 6 before it) then you already know that AS 7 includes some significant new features. I’m not going to list them all; but here are the highlights:
Developer Productivity
- Startup-time and memory utilization have been significantly reduced which leads to a much more productive developer experience – no more coffee breaks during deployments and restarts.This required some significant rethinking and a fair amount of innovation (something we’re good at apparently)
- The Java EE 6 Web Profile provides a much leaner, less complex platform for developers who focus purely on the web-tier – less to learn, fewer design choices – increased developer productivity
- More flexible and powerful modular classloader – less time debugging and configuring classpaths; more time writing applications
- Testable by Design with Arquillian with out of container testing for the business logic so developers can be more productive while delivering better quality applications.
Price / Performance
- It’s probably a little early to claim significant performance gain over the competition right now but request path performance is a goal and the hard work of tuning and performance improvements starts now, One early indicator will hopeful give you a sense of what we’d like to achieve is the recent SPECjms2007 submission from Red Hat. In and of itself – this is the first public benchmark submission from JBoss and while not all the competing JMS products are represented – we’re confident we can crush the competition.
- Stay tuned on this one.
Operational Ease of Use
- Some of the more significant advances in JBoss AS 7 are around the operational ease of use. The configuration has been completely refactored around a multi-node domain model, though the simple single-instance view has been maintained for developer use as well
- There are stable, easy to use management APIs – so AS 7 deployments can be completely automated from Java or any other scripting environment.
- New shiny, task oriented domain console that also allows you to manage multiple, distributed nodes.
Next post – how AS 7 relates to Red Hat’s commercial, fully supported distribution – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.
Anyway – time to stop reading and start playing : learn more about JBoss AS 7 here and get the bits here and provide feedback on community site.
Rich Sharples' Weblog 