JBoss EAP 7 BETA Available !

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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Today Red Hat released JBoss EAP 7.0 BETA.  This is the culmination of a couple of years of hard work by the JBoss EAP team at Red Hat and the broader WildFly community. I would like to thank them for their dedication and hard work and offer congratulations on achieving another huge milestone and major step forward in establishing Open Source in the enterprise and JBoss EAP as the open source standard for Java EE.

JBoss EAP 7  is a significant release in every respect; the last major EAP release (EAP 6.0) was back in June, 2012 and after 4 minor feature releases and numerous patch releases, EAP 6 is now just 8 months away from entering its long-term maintenance phase. While EAP 6 will be fully supported for many years to come – all new development and new features will target EAP 7 and beyond.

While Java EE 7 brings a major set of new features to EAP 7 (see below) it’s only a small part of what defines JBoss EAP 7. There are many other major updates in the release to help us keep up with demands of our customers, industry trends and align with other Red Hat products and initiatives.

  • New high-performance web subsystem based on Undertow – supporting Servlet 3.1, WebSockets, HTTP Upgrade
  • Undertow can also be deployed standalone as a lightweight, scalable proxy / load-balancer.
  • Move from JacORB to the standard OpenJDK ORB
  • New high-performance messaging subsystem based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis – same searing performance as HornetQ with expanded protocol support and Artemis is now the standard message broker for all JBoss products.
  • Support for Java EE 7 – full and web-profile and Java SE 8.
  • Enhanced (JSR-352) batch support – including cluster support, management (liste, start, stop, resume) of batch jobs and IDE (JBDS 9.0) integration
  • Improved upgrade experience from previous versions of EAP / WildFly and better support for competitive migrations using Windup.
  • Improved JNDI, EJB, JMS and WS interoperability between EAP 7 and older versions – useful for side-by-side upgrades.
  • Ability to manage EAP 6 domain hosts and servers
  • Improved management console; easier navigation, and much better support for large scale domain configurations.
  • Graceful shutdown – allows servers to quiesce without aborting in-flight requests or transactions

Also the following features are available as Technical Preview :

  • A new JGroups based DistributedWorkManager
  • Execute JavaScript (using JDK8’s Nashorn), access JNDI and invoke CDI and JPA EntityBeans from JavaScript
  • HTTP 2.0 – connection multiplexing, header compression and server push

Major enhancements to Java EE 7 include :

A more detailed refresher on  on Java EE 7 features here.

As always – you can download the BETA via the Red Hat Customer Portal or from JBossDeveloper if you don’t have access. Release notes are here. And you’ll need some developer tooling to go with that – JBDS 9.0 is available for download here.

Give the BETA a try and give the team some feedback.

 

Oracle on OpenJDK

Posted on by Rich Sharples

These are encouraging signs that Oracle will continue to invest in OpenJDK and that it won’t follow the same fate as some other Sun Open Source projects like Open Solaris. I’ve long believed that OpenJDK has the opportunity to become the Linux Kernel for Enterprise developers.

Kurian discussed the roadmap for JDK 7 and JDK 8, which will be based on OpenJDK

“In addition, Oracle remains committed to OpenJDK as the the best open source Java implementation and we will continue to improve OpenJDK and welcome external contributors.”
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173712

“Oracle will work with the OpenJDK code base and the OpenJDK community
like Sun did. We will continue to develop the JDK in the open under a
GPL license. We welcome the cooperation and contribution of any member
of the community – individuals as well as organizations – who would
like to be part of moving the most widely used software platform
forward.”

http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/

Oracle and the Java Opportunity

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I guess there’s a chance that we’ll know more tomorrow but regarding the future of Java under Oracle’s control – I’m still neutral to optimistic and sticking to what I said 6 months ago :

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 !