Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is truly a bedrock technology, serving as the global standard for enterprise application development.

The next release of Java's Enterprise Edition 7 raises the bar even higher for enterprise Java computing. RedHat has played a key role in this release as an active member of the Java development community including taking the lead in developing two new JSRs. 

To learn more, register today for the upcoming virtual launch event, planned for June 12, 2013.

RedHat development leads will provide overviews of their new JSRs in short breakout sessions during the upcoming launch. Pete Muir will give an overview of CDI 1.1 (JSR 346). Emmanuel Bernard, who took the lead in developing Bean Validation 1.1 (JSR 349), will also host a breakout session.

Attendees will learn about new ways to support increasing enterprise requirements; HTML 5 and dynamic, scalable applications; and a continued focus on developer productivity and technology integration.

Register  for the launch event today. Then come and hear from the experts about EE7 and come to Summit to hear where we think EE8 and beyond should be going.

It's official, Java EE7 has been approved overwhelmingly. This is great news, particularly for the updates to various components such as CDI and JMS. I'm proud of our continued association with the JCP and glad to see that we could get this out relatively on time. Now it's on to EE8. Furthermore, given the WildFly announcement last week, we'll be looking to implement EE7 as soon as possible.

And now for the annoying and frustrating aspect: it seems like we have no vote recorded! Whether through a fault in the system (it's happened before), forgetfulness (it's happened before) or insanity (no comment!) we appear to have no vote associated with EE7 and some related JSRs. If this is our fault then it's my fault, since I had the token to vote. I'm chasing this with Oracle at the moment, because I'm sure we did vote! But according to the records that didn't happen. If it turns out we didn't vote then a big Mea Culpa to the team and our communities!

For the record: we would have/should have/did vote Yes/Approved to all of them.

Over the years as JBoss and then Red Hat, we've tried very hard to ensure that we work as an open organisation helping our communities. Whether you're a paying customer using the subscription to get great support, or an organisation/individual who doesn't need support (maybe because you can self support) you're all important to the wider success of JBoss and enterprise open source. Now prior to Red Hat, we at JBoss would support pretty much any combination of projects and their versions, as well as the cross-product combination. Of course that couldn't scale indefinitely and when we were acquired by Red Hat we moved to a more stable and scalable solution: the products would only be based on a very specific version of each project at a given point. I won't go into the details of how we take the projects and create the products but suffice it to say that there's a lot of work done by the development teams, QE, docs and of course productisation. This work goes into the up stream community projects but it can take a while for us to create new community binaries that benefit from it, due mainly to the effort we have to put in to supporting our customers, building other releases etc.

Now it should not come as a surprise that open source is core to everything we do and everyone we employ. It's in our blood and we will do a lot to ensure it continues to be a success. Sometimes we hear that the community is lagging behind the products, or that we're not as responsive as some might want us to be because of our product focus. What we really want to do is give the best possible experiences to our customers and our wider community, with the best Java middleware implementations around. Therefore, we've been thinking long and hard about the problem and how to resolve it. It's not easy and there are a number of ways to try to tackle it. However, there is one solution we've come up with that I think allows us to continue to provide the best products and support to our customers whilst at the same time ensuring that our communities are able to benefit too in a much more timely manner. It is this solution that I want to announce today.

What we are proposing to do is pretty simple: from the point where we start to productise the community project (e.g., AS7.1) we will release all product builds that we create as a result of this process into the community (e.g., EAP 6.0 Alpha 1, which is based on AS 7.1) so that all developers within our communities or with our customers can take advantage of them immediately. There will be no other community binaries for that major release of the community project after that point because the product builds are effectively a superset and we hope more beneficial to most developers. Of course community builds of the next major revision of the project will happen in parallel so you'll be able to contribute to and track those separately, so it's not a case of replacing community with product-only binaries. We're also changing the download processes and license for EAP so that it is as easy for developers to get hold of these bits as it is to get the community binaries. The net result is that everyone gets to experience the product whether or not they buy a full subscription with support. Now of course the value of the full subscription is much more than just the product binaries and support, and we all hope that people will want to migrate to a full subscription, but it's not going to be a requirement unless you want to put JBoss products into deployment. If you are a developer then you can use the same binaries as customers with this new subscription without having to worry about evaluation periods, or missing critical bug fixes.

I believe this is a great step in the evolution of JBoss/Red Hat and enterprise open source in general. We're continually breaking down barriers to adoption of open source and enterprise middleware, whether by making EE6 much more easily consumable via approaches such as AS7 and CDI, or pushing into new communities with efforts such as TorqueBox or Immutant. With this change that I have announced, we're now removing another barrier by ensuring that all of our communities can get access to our product releases!

Onward!

Happy new year to those of you for whom the day has changed and of course to everyone else when it happens! I just wanted to cross-post a couple of articles I've written on some of the pet projects I've been working on over this festive holiday season. They're related to the Raspberry Pi, Fuse Fabric, Arjuna/JBossTS/Narayana, vert.x and MongoD. So if you're interested, check out part one and then part two. And once again, I hope everyone has/had a very happy new year!

I've been talking and presenting about cloud and PaaS for a number of years and each time I do, I say pretty much the same thing (and I paraphrase): "I think private (on premise) PaaS will be more important than public PaaS". I won't go into the reasons why, except to encourage anyone interested to check out some of the older posts. That's not to suggest that public Cloud isn't important or useful, which is why Red Hat has been making great strides with our OpenShift offerings, which we're proud to ensure remain open source. Over the last year or more, we've seen Java added to OpenShift, as well as JBossAS and EAP, and many other languages and frameworks are there too. The number of applications running on OpenShift has grown significantly since we officially released it last year and our community has increased much more.

However, although there is still a lot more we want to do on public OpenShift, the feedback we have been getting from community and customers has been the need for an on-premise offering. The intention with any on-premise PaaS has got to be that it's a cloud and not just a rebadged virtualisation offering and I'm really pleased to see that we've stuck to our principles with the announcement of OpenShift Enterprise. All of the things you've heard about OpenShift, such as its mission critical security (based on SELinux), flexibilty (multiple languages, frameworks etc.) and scalability (including, cloud bursting eventually) will be part of OpenShift Enterprise, the first enterprise PaaS. So what about JBoss? Well as I've said several times before, if you want an enterprise PaaS then you need an enterprise infrastructure (middleware), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that your favourite JBoss technologies and products will be coming to OpenShift Enterprise. In fact EAP and EWS (the production versions of the application server and Tomcat) are available already.

This is a very exciting time to be involved in middleware and the Cloud. I'm pleased that we can finally push forward on the larger vision we've been talking about for so long. And what next? Well maybe we'll be able to bring some of that ubiquitous computing cloud into the picture eventually

Onward!!

So Ray and I just finished our stint at the Devoxx keynote this morning to announce the names for voting. The video should be up soon but in case you don't get a good view of the Dilbert cartoon we used to explain the situation to the audience, here's the link. We were struggling with how best to let people know the difficulties in taking 1800+ submissions and getting them through the legal process, when Dilbert came to our rescue. I don't think we could have put it any more succinctly as this, so why bother?! Anyway, the voting process is now open and we'll be updating the pages on JBoss.org to try to add more flavour/meaning to the names that we eventually managed to get from the great submissions.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a name. There were many great names, but unfortunately we couldn't select the majority of them for reasons mentioned in the above cartoon. But the ones we have are good and I'm sure we can get behind whatever is eventually selected and make it a worthy successor to the JBossAS name! So get voting.

Onward!!

I just wanted to post a quick status update on the renaming of the core JBoss Application Server project. As you all know, we asked for the community to send in their suggestions for a new name a few weeks back. We were overwhelmed with the number of names we received (well over 1500!) With the benefit of hindsight this shouldn't have been a surprise, but the amount of names we received were a lot more than we expected. Unfortunately this has had an impact on our timescales. Whereas originally we thought that we'd be putting up the more popular names for a community vote by now, that hasn't been possible because we have had to go through these names and check them against trademark infringements etc. This takes a lot of time, proportional to the number of names we received and we're only just drawing that phase to a conclusion. So what this means is that rather than announce the results of the vote at Devoxx next week, we'll be announcing the names that we're going to vote on. At this stage we're looking at a voting period of a few weeks and that then takes us into the Christmas holidays, so we'll probably make the final announcement early in 2013.

I'm just back from speaking at CLASS (Cloud Assisted Services) Conference in Bled, Slovenia, where I was asked to speak on the Red Hat vision on Cloud. Ales was also there talking about CapeDwarf and Trustin gave a tutorial on building applications on top of Infinispan. There were a lot of other speakers talking about their experiences and vision for Cloud, and it was good to meet some of them and see that our thoughts are in line with those of others. Unfortunately I was only able to spend a couple of days in the area and just one day at the conference, but it was still worth attending. Some areas of interest included listening to Ken Ducatel speaking about what the EU have planned in terms of security and authentication standards for all cloud vendors operating wthin the area, and then real world Cloud uses from Kate at Argonne National Laboratories and Christine from AmpLab.

But another important reason for attending the conference was that it was my first time in Slovenia and to meet the entire team based in the area. I was already impressed with the team (hey, they're JBoss engineers, so what else should you expect ?), but Slovenia was much more beautiful that I had expected. Upon reflection, if I'd done my homework or been awake on the flight from Paris to Ljubljana airport, I'd have seen much of this from the air. However, I didn't and it was a very pleasant surprise. I hope to have further opportunities to visit the area in the future and next time I'll spend more than a couple of days!