Jason Greene, platform architect for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, walks through AS6 milestones including Servlet 3, EJB 3.1, and JAX-RS support, then previews AS7's shift toward domain-based management and simplified configuration. Milestones are production-quality; GA expected fall 2010.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Jason Green. I am the AS project lead, so that would be the AS project for the project bullet point. My real-life occupation is, well, I just said I was a project lead platform architect for EAP, so, and we're working on AS6 Milestone 4, which should be coming out soon, hopefully.
Good.
Okay, so it says a GRAN app server. It's G-R-A-N-T. PA, PP server. But what were you going for? Was it granddad?
Is it an old lady? Or what's the status of the project?
It's cutting edge. So basically, the big thing, obviously, is AS6 is going to be an EE6 implementation with a specific focus on the web profile, which we think is the most relevant profile for developers. Currently the status is we've got 3 milestones that are currently out. You can download Milestone 3 right now, and Milestone 4 should be coming out in a week or two.
Can you tell us what's inside Milestone 3 today, and what can people play with and either report bugs or just use it and enjoy it?
Sure. So Milestone 3 has full Servlet 3 support. It has a good majority of EJB 3.1 features. The remaining features will be in Milestone 4. And Milestone 3 also has, of course, full integration of WELD. That's the implementation of JSR 299 context and dependency injection. Pete's here, so he can probably talk all about that and cool things you can do with that. And we have a number of other improvements. Like, we bundled mod_cluster, which allows you to do high availability distribution with load with intelligent load balancing and so on. So mod_cluster talks to a—
the instances of AS to say, hey, I'm up, I'm not up. Stop sending me flows of requests and so on and so on, right?
Exactly, yeah. And then it can also do things too, like look at the application server load and say, hey, I'm too busy right now. Send requests to somebody else. Sweet. Yeah, and a couple of other smaller enhancements. There's some other interesting frameworks that are included in EE6, like JAX-RS is fully integrated. You can use REST easy. To do RESTful web services with AS6.
And of course, JPA 2 should be in, right?
Yes, yes. And JPA 2, which most notably—
Ooh, and Bean Validation, right?
And Bean Validation. I win, Storm.
Yes.
Yeah, and with JPA 2, one of the biggest things is you can do type-safe queries with that, which is where the compiler can actually validate the syntax of your SQL or JPAQL. To be fair. So it's a lot of stuff in AS6 and a lot of stuff that you can use right now. And we've tried to— with the milestones, we've tried to actually make the releases of good quality. So it's not like alpha or beta, early beta release or anything like that. I think these are intended to be something you can use and get realistic results out of. So everyone should give it a shot. Send their feedback and ideas and patches. I like patches. And AS7? AS7.
OK.
So AS7, we started doing some of the early design of AS7. You can go on to jboss.org and look at the development forums. The biggest thing that AS7 is going to bring is domain-based management. So making life easier for administrators and also for developers too because we're going to be essentially centralizing our configuration into one user-friendly location. All elements in the AS will be configurable there. Things like connection.
Did you really say JBoss configuration and user-friendly in the same sentence?
I did.
Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, you know, so I have to honestly admit that maybe it hasn't been the easy— like, JBoss was always designed to be something you would hack on and be able to be flexible and do anything. And sometimes being able to do anything and everything can sometimes get in the way of making something that's super simple. A lot of times when you make anything simple, you have to lose functionality. So, AS7 is all about trying to bring simplicity but without losing flexibility. So, we'll separate the elements of extensibility into other places and have user configuration in one spot.
So, when is AS6 scheduled to be done?
The full release? So, milestone 4 is the last milestone for EE6 on the pure milestones, and after that we get into the first candidate release and then GA. GA will come out after that. So we're looking at fall for GA most likely. Cool.
