Tag Archives: jboss

FREE JBoss Workshops in Boston and Washington DC – May 22

Interested in learning about JBoss Middleware technologies in Boston and Washington DC ?

Attend our FREE hands-on workshop to hear how the innovation and technical capabilities of Apache projects can help you reduce the time and complexity of integrating all facets of your business including devices, outlets, and partners, on premise or in the cloud.

Learn all about reliable messaging, A-MQ, JBoss Fuse, service orchestration using hands-on labs. Register here!

jboss-workshop-boston-may22

Attend this FREE hands-on technical workshop to learn how to reduce the time required to update applications, service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments, and business processes with the latest business rules and policies.

Learn about Business Rules Management System and Complex Event Processing using hands-on lab. Register here!

jboss-workshop-washington-may22

JBoss xPaaS: aPaaS, iPaaS, bpmPaaS, dvPaaS, mPaaS on OpenShift

JBoss xPaaS is a set of services that provide the powerful capabilities of JBoss Middleware as cloud based services on OpenShift.

Generally PaaS refers to aPaaS or Application Platform as a Service or ePaaS or Enterprise Platform as a Service. This means making an application server, such as Red Hat JBoss EAP, available in the cloud. This has the usual advantages:

  • No need to install the application server on your local machine. You need a running insance of JBoss EAP, spin it in the cloud. You need multiple instances, spin all of them in the cloud.
  • No provisioning, procurement, installation, configuring, etc of the app server.
  • No tech support required to maintain your hardware, operating system, application server, etc.
  • Capital expenditure is significantly reduced although operational expenditure may increase slightly but this more than outweighs the benefits that come along with it.
  • Integration with popular IDEs is prevalent.

OpenShift has offered aPaaS for Java EE 6 with Red Hat JBoss EAP/JBoss AS and Java EE 7 with WildFly for 2+ years now.

In addition to JBoss EAP, JBoss provides a rich set of middleware services for building highly complex and sophisticated applications, all working seamlessly together. Some of these are:

  • JBoss Fuse is an open source ESB with capabilities based on Apache Camel, Apache CXF, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Karaf and Fabric8 in a single integrated distribution.
  • JBoss BPM  is an open-source workflow engine that can execute business processes described in BPMN 2.0. It enables enterprise business and IT users to document, simulate, manage, automate and monitor business processes and policies.
  • JBoss Data Virtualization is complete data provisioning, federation, integration and management solution. It connect access data from multiple, heterogeneous data sources (connect), easily create reusable, business-friendly logical data models and views by combining and transforming data (compose), and make unified data easily consumable through open standard interfaces (consume).
  • AeroGear provides flexible and extensible libraries to simplify mobile development across platforms and cut common repetitive infrastructure tasks.

JBoss xPaaS provides a developer preview of all of these services on OpenShift.

xpaas

Interested in aPaaS using JBoss EAP ? Get started here!
Interested in iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) using JBoss Fuse ? Get started here!
Interested in dvPaaS (Data Virtualization Platform as a Service) using JBoss Data Virtualization ? Get started here!
Interested in bpmPaaS (Business Process Management Platform as a Service) using JBoss BPM ? Get started here!
Interested in mPaaS (Mobile Platform as a Service) using JBoss AeroGear ? GET started here!

Complete details at openshift.com/xpaas.

 

FREE JBoss Integration, BRMS, and EAP workshops in Atlanta, Dallas, Montreal

Interested in attending free workshops in Atlanta, Dallas, and Montreal ? Learn the best of JBoss technologies and meet the experts ?

jboss-workshop-integration-atlanta-apr29-2014

Attend this hands-on technical workshop to hear how the innovation and technical capabilities of Apache projects can help your reduce the time and complexity of integrating all facets of your business including devices, outlets, and partners, on premises or in the cloud. Register here (FREE).

jboss-workshop-brms-dallas-apr29-2014

Attend this hands-on technical workshop to learn how to reduce the time required to update applications, service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments, and business processes with the latest business rules and policies. Register here (FREE).

jboss-workshop-way-montreal-may6-2014

Join technical experts from Red Hat to gain a deeper understanding of Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). This one day workshop will provide you with a path to migration from other vendors, various deployment options, advanced clustering techniques, and centralized management of your application environments. Register here (FREE).

 

Rapid Java EE Application Development using Forge 2 (Tech Tip #17)

How do you rapidly build Java EE applications in an IDE-agnostic way ?

JBoss Forge is your answer!

This short video shows how to:

  • Rapidly build a Java EE application from scratch using Forge 2 CLI
  • Create JPA entities and add properties to them
  • Add Bean Validation constraints
  • Create JSF scaffolds and REST endpoints
  • Deploy the application on JBoss EAP running in OpenShift

Complete detailed instructions followed in this screencast are available here.

Enjoy!

 

xPaaS: Making PaaS Enterprise Ready

Red Hat announced xPaaS last year as a rich set of middleware services for building highly complex and sophisticated applications, all working seamlessly together. This is beyond the current state of PaaS where mostly an application container is provided as a service, aka aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) or ePaas (Enterprise Platform as a a Service). Red Hat envisions xPaaS incorporating integration software to create iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), process management and rules management software as bpmPaaS (Business Process Modeling Platform as a Service), mobile capabilities as mPaaS (Mobile Platform as a Service) and MBaas (Mobile Backend as a Service) – all in one unified environment.

xpaas

Red Hat is very well positioned to deliver xPaaS as it can easily leverage the rich portfolio of Red Hat JBoss Middleware and offer these capabilities as services within our public PaaS offering, OpenShift Online, and our private PaaS offering, OpenShift Enterprise. All of these xPaaS services, including aPaaS with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, iPaaS with JBoss Fuse, bpmPaaS with JBoss BPM technologies and JBoss BRMS, and mobile services with AeroGear, will be provided under a single PaaS environment. Enterprises will not be forced to go to many different PaaS environments in order to obtain what is necessary to build a true, n-tiered enterprise application.

Listen to an overview of xPaaS in this brief video:

xPaaS – making PaaS enterprise ready! Learn all about xPaaS at red.ht/xpaas.

If you are interested in learning more details, DevNation has some great sessions that provide all the details. Here are particular ones that would be interesting:

  • Integration PaaS: Continuous Integration with Fabric8 and OpenShift by Rob Davies and James Strachan (Sunday, 4/13, 1pm)
  • Intro to Fabric8 by Ioannis Canellos and James Strachan (Sunday, 4/13, 1:50pm)

Sign up for devnation.org today!

 

Webinar Replay and Q&A Transcript: WildFly/JBoss EAP instead of GlassFish/WebLogic

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Replay of the webinar “WildFly for Innovation and Red Hat JBoss EAP for commercial support” is now available.

If you already registered then click on “Already Registered” in the left navigation bar of registration page otherwise register and watch the replay instantly.

The webinar was very well attended with hundreds of viewers and there were lot of questions asked. I’ve captured some of those here:

  • Is it safe (or very bad idea) to develop on WildFly and run in production on EAP?

    The recommended model is to use JBoss EAP for development, testing, and production for an application. There are always differences between WildFly and EAP with former offering bleeding-edge technologies and latter providing a lot more stability with bugfixes and patches. WildFly would be appropriate only for development/evaluation/contribution of new innovative features such as Java EE 7 in the upstream project.

  • If you develop on Wildfly and deploy on EAP  is there a risk Wildfly will move ahead too quickly and EAP will fall behind in capabilities supported?

    WildFly is focused on innovation and moves at a rapid pace. This allows WildFly to easily implement new technologies and provide a platform for enterprise developers to try them out. New features can be added or older features may be removed to provide a better experience for that particular release. There is no requirement to provide a patch release and any support is only through community.

    JBoss EAP is derived from a particular WildFly release and is focused on long term stability and predictability. It is battle tested on a variety of operating systems, JDK, and databases. It goes through rigorous performance testing, regression testing, scalability testing, and other means to ensure that a military-grade product is delivered. API level compatibility is guaranteed across different versions of EAP, this is not a requirement for WildFly. Enterprises that want stability and predictability should look at JBoss EAP. Developers that want bleeding edge technology should look at WildFly.

  • Isn’t JBoss EAP an open source product as well ?

    Yes, JBoss EAP binaries and source code are made available under open source licenses.

  • When will JBoss EAP provide support for Java EE 7 full platform ?

    We’re currently in the planning stages for EAP 7. More details and the roadmap will be presented at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, April 14-17.

  • EAP 6 would be supporting JEE7?

    EAP 6 will not be fully certified for Java EE 7. Although some selective features, such as WebSocket, may be backported. We’ll have more detail on that at Red Hat Summit in April.

  • Is EAP an alternative to WebSphere?  Why or why not?

    Absolutely. JBoss EAP is a compelling alternative to WebSphere. https://engage.redhat.com/forms/jboss-v-websphere provides all the details. And don’t just take Red Hat’s word for it – JBoss EAP has been a leader (along with WebLogic and WebSphere) in Gartner’s Enterprise Application Server Magic Quadrant for the last five years and many customers have made the migration to JBoss from more expensive proprietary alternatives like WebSphere and WebLogic. You could also reference Get Unstuck with JBoss if appropriate. It contains quite a few resources on this topic.

  • How do you compare Wildfly with alternative open source servers such as  VMWare VFabric  and wso2 app server ?

    Red Hat EWS (Red Hat | JBoss Web Server) is vanilla Tomcat and fully supported by Red Hat. This offering is very comparable to tcServer. VMWare vFabric is optimized for running Spring applications. Spring is one of the technologies supported by WildFly, in addition to many others. WSO 2 supports many Java EE technologies but not a Java EE compliant app sever. WildFly provides full Java EE 7 compliance and EAP 7 will provide commercial support for that in future.

  • So if I recompile the EAP sources I can do whatever I want with the compiled binary ?

    No – you can’t do “whatever”. The open source licenses governing JBoss EAP source code, principally the LGPL, grant you certain permissions subject to conditions that you must comply with. In addition, you may not brand your recompiled EAP sources as “JBoss” or any other Red Hat-owned trademark. This means, for example, that if you distribute or publicly deploy your recompiled binary you must first remove all JBoss and other Red Hat branding, such as logo files. Any recompilation of EAP sources is not JBoss EAP and must not be presented as being a Red Hat or JBoss product.

  • We are using JBoss 5 EAP. Is there any guide for migrating to WildFly or EAP version?

    EAP 5 is based on Java EE 5. WildFly is a Java EE 7 compliant container. Application would need to be manually ported by learning the new Java EE 7 programming capabilities. Migration Guide provides complete details on how to migrate your applications from EAP 5.x to 6.x. JBoss Migration Center offer additional tools that provide configuration migration across different versions of EAP. We strongly encourage you to locate a Red Hat partner and work with them on this.

  • Do Red Hat Engineers commit new features into WildFly before committing into EAP  e.g. WebSockets?

    WildFly is the upstream project which JBoss EAP is based on. All features are committed into WildFly first and allow developers to try the cutting-edge technologies in their development cycles. A version of WildFly is the basis for JBoss EAP, where all the features are battle tested for production deployments.

  • Are no extra ports (random) used for EJB communication and what about hornetQ ports?

    Only two ports are exposed: 8080 for application and 9990 for management in the default profile. All other technologies will handshake over these two ports.

  • Will it support Scala?

    WildFly and JBoss are polyglot application server. Scala (just as many other languages Ruby, Clojure, etc.) can easily be incorporated with Java applications, and even standalone Scala applications are possible on JBoss. There is a number of frameworks that could be useful for developers using JBoss and having a need for building applications using Scala. For example, Escalante is a Scala application server based on JBoss AS 7. Spray provides a REST/HTTP-based integration layer over Scala and Akka and supports any Servlet 3.0 compliant container.

  • Does undertow allow session management using Infinispan ?

    Yes, it does.

  • Where can we see approximate price-list for EAP production deployments in numbers?

    Contact Red Hat sales at http://www.redhat.com/contact/sales for a price list of JBoss EAP.

  • Why has JBoss performance metrics never been published to SpecJ?

    We do performance benchmark testing in our regular test suite and really care about it. We are planning to submit SPECjEnterprise 2010 benchmark numbers on a fully open source stack in future.

  • How CentOS relates to JBoss EAP?

    CentOS is not related to JBoss EAP. CentOS is a community project providing a distribution of Linux, while JBoss EAP is an enterprise-class application server product provided by Red Hat. Red Hat is involved in and contributes to a wide range of open source communities including CentOS and JBoss.org. Complete list of JBoss supported configurations can be found here.

  • When EAP will support websockets as WildFly does

    We are investigating back porting WebSocket support to EAP 6.x. EAP 7 is planned to be Java EE 7 compatible and will support WebSocket. Stay tuned for more details at Red Hat Summit.

  • Is it possible to have a customized JBoss EAP version  that addresses a specific need?

    You can customize the JBoss EAP by manipulating subsystems in configuration files. But we recommend talking to sales so that they can understand your needs better and offer a comprehensive solution.

  • Which version of JBoss EAP 6.x.x will be based on Wildfly 8 ?

    JBoss EAP 6.x will continue to be derived from JBoss AS 7.x.x. We are considering backporting some features of WildFly to EAP 6.x. JBoss EAP 7 will be derived from a future version of WildFly.

  • What will be approximate cost for 8 processor single instance deployment? for EAP 6.2?

    Contact sales for an exact quote.

  • We are moving some of application servers from WL to JBoss. But i find it hard to do it  is there is seamless process which can help in migration ?

    Red Hat has recognized the importance of supporting a first-class program around migration that kicked off in 2013. One of the key enablers in our migration story is Windup, which we are working with several customers and partners to enhance in order to have a more effective and streamlined migration process. More details about migration tools is available here.

  • Does EAP use standard JPA artifacts??

    Yes, JBoss EAP is Java EE 6 compliant and so provides support for JPA 2.

  • Is some presentation comparing WildFly and liberty profile?

    We have competitive content for JBoss EAP and Liberty. Slides are available at https://engineering.redhat.com/pnt/p-347807/Comparing_JBo…eo_slides.pdf and a video is also available at http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/videos/focus-on-not-apples-to-apples-comparing-jboss-enterprise-application-platform-and-ibm-websphere-liberty-profile

    The above video and slides are for an older version of WebSphere Liberty profile. Both are being updated with new versions expected to be released in March 2014.

  • Will Tomcat still be supported in WildFly 8?  If not  does Undertow support the AJP Connector interface? Or will it have a different connector interface?

    Undertow is the new web server for WildFly 8 and Tomcat will not be supported in WildFly 8. AJP Connector is already supported.

  • Is it easy to migrate from JBoss AS 7.1.1 to JBoss eap 6.2?

    As a general rule, we provide seamless migration from upstream projects to corresponding products. Migrating from AS 7.1.x to JBoss EAP 6.2 should be very straight forward. Guides are provided across major versions, for example Migration Guide from EAP 5.x to EAP 6.2 is here. You should also look at JBoss Migration Center for additional tools in this area.

  • Are Wildfly and EAP different installations?  i.e. How to go from Dev evaluation to Production with support?

    Yes, you can’t automagically update a WildFly installation to become EAP – they are separate installations. You need to redeploy your applications and recreate your resources from community projects like WildFly to products like JBoss EAP.

  • Can we pay less for licensing  if we don’t want any support  only right to deploy and documentation?

    Red Hat only charges for subscriptions, there is no licensing cost.

  • OEM licensing? Can we deploy wildfly & EAP depending on customer paying or not paying for EAP?

    Contact sales for an exact quote.

  • Please elaborate: Red Hat JBoss BRMS

    Red Hat JBoss BRMS is a comprehensive platform for business rules management and complex event processing. More details here.

  • Is there a good quickstart for migrating glassfish to EAP from a JMS perspective??  like setting up JMS ConnectionFactory

    Stay tuned, a white paper is coming soon on this topic.

  • How about WildFly with eclipse?

    http://blog.arungupta.me/2013/12/getting-started-jboss-tools-wildfly-techtip-5 shows WildFly and Eclipse integration.

  • paper on JBOSS Clustering vs. Weblogic Clustering. Some module to use on Apache for three tier implementation  like we have mod_weblogic similar for jboss ?

    mod_cluster is a cluster-aware plugin for Apache HTTPD that can be used to provide software-based load balancing for clustered JBoss EAP deployments.

  • What is next for WildFly?

    WildFly 9 feature set and scope is still being discussed. If there are any particular features that you need then please file issues in JIRA. You can also follow the community at @WildFlyAS. We’ll provide more details at JUDCon and Red Hat Summit.

  • Can JBoss EAP be used for evaluation and development without buying a license
    ?

    JBoss EAP is licensed royalty-free. In particular, JBoss EAP can be downloaded from jboss.org and used for evaluation and development without payment of a license fee. If you download JBoss EAP from jboss.org and use it in production you are obligated to purchase a subscription — otherwise you are in breach of the agreement covering the download.

  • What major companies are using EAP currently?

    Mitsubishi, E*Trade, Sprint, GEICO and many others listed here.

  • Are all the features in JBoss 7.1.2 in wildfly 8?

    This is generally true. However the specifications pruned by Java EE (JAX-RPC (JSR 101), JAXR (JSR 93), EJB Entity Beans (part of JSR 153), and Java EE Application Deployment (JSR 88)) are removed from WildFly. Also, JBoss Web is now replaced by Undertow as the web server.

  • If you use WildFly for dev and EAP for production  how do you make sure that the JEE versions are compatible?

    First of all, there is no such thing as “JEE” :-)

    JBoss EAP 5.x is downstream from JBoss AS 5.x and both are Java EE 5 compliant. JBoss EAP 6.x is downstream of JBoss AS 7.x and both are java EE 6 compliant. JBoss EAP 7 will be based on a future version of WildFly and both will be Java EE 7 compliant. Java EE N+1 compliant application server will support Java EE N applications as well. So make sure to choose your development and deployment environments accordingly.

  • Can you please provide some Java EE 7 code samples tested on WildFly ?

    github.com/javaee-samples/javaee7-samples provide a comprehensive source of Java EE 7 samples that runs on WildFly.

  • Does a subscription for JBoss EAP 6 include the ‘JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform’ or similar SOA Platform?

    A subscription for any individual JBoss Enterprise Middleware product includes development use for all of the products in the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. Please refer to the Red Hat JBoss Subscription Guide for details.

 

New Webinar on Jan 8: WildFly for Innovation, Red Hat JBoss EAP for Commercial Support

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On November 4, 2013, Oracle announced that its GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java™ EE 7 support won’t be released. If you’re a production user of GlassFish, your options are to take a risk by continuing on an unsupported platform or to migrate your applications elsewhere.

It has always been a good time to consider Red Hat, but now all the more so. WildFly and Red Hat® JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform is an excellent, compelling, and feature-rich alternative to GlassFish and Oracle WebLogic.

In this webinar, I will:

  • Introduce Wildfly and JBoss EAP.
  • Compare and contrast Wildfly and JBoss EAP with Oracle GlassFish and WebLogic.
  • Look at cost considerations.

Date: Jan 8, 2014
Time: 16:00 UTC | 11:00 am (New York) | 5:00 pm (Paris) | 9:30 pm (Mumbai)

Register Now!

Make sure to invite a friend or a colleague!

JBoss EAP 6.2 is Now Available: RBAC, Patching, Administrative Audit Logging

Red Hat JBoss EAP 6.x is a fast, secure, powerful middleware platform built upon standards, and compliant with Java EE 6 specification. It integrates JBoss Application Server 7 with high-availability clustering, powerful messaging, distributed caching, and other technologies to create a stable and scalable platform. It boasts of innovative modular and cloudy-ready architecture, powerful management and automation, and world class developer productivity.

JBoss EAP 6.2 is now available – download now!

New features in this release are listed here. The main highlights are:

  • Role Based Access Control (RBAC):  Provides an administrator with the ability to assign users or groups to roles with defined permissions to EAP management interfaces. By providing “separation of duties” for management users, JBoss EAP 6.2 makes it easy for an organization to spread responsibility between individuals or groups without granting unnecessary privileges. More details here.
  • Patching: Management operations to install patches, roll-back patches, and report patch state have been implemented. These operations enable users to install CVE, single, and cumulative patches in JBoss EAP 6.2 releases and beyond. The operations are exposed in the CLI, Native, and HTTP management interfaces. The operations will be exposed in the console in a later release.
  • Administrative Audit Logging: New configuration options for logging of administrative actions such as logging of all connection and authentication events, logging of all admin operations through any of the administrative interfaces, collection of time, user, interface, originating ip and more. Management access to the audit log configuration can be scoped to Auditor role defined in RBAC configuration.

A comprehensive documentation for all EAP releases is available here.

Here are some useful references for JBoss EAP 6.2 to get started:

  • Installation Guide
  • Release Notes
  • Development Guide
  • Administration and Configuration Guide
  • Migration Guide (from JBoss EAP 5.x)
  • Security Guide

You can also download a development-only binary from jboss.org/products/eap.

Unlock yourself from from the shackles of closed source proprietary application servers. JBoss EAP Comparison Calculator shows how JBoss EAP saves 90+% costs over WebLogic and WebSphere.

Download JBoss EAP 6.2 and try it today! #OnlyJBoss

Red Hat at JavaLand : Java EE 7, Enterprise Testing using Arquillian, JBoss Way

Java conference in a theme park ? How will I explain that to family and friends ? But I’ve spoken at many such venues which are difficult to explain. This one is definitely first of its kind :-)

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JavaLand (Mar 25/26, 2014) is the event created by the Java community for the Java community. This is definitely going stir the interest of German Java developers. I was fortunate to be selected amongst 100 submissions from 18 countries. After speaking in 37 countries, this will be my first speaking engagement in Germany.

The conference venue is Phantasialand, a theme park in Brühl, Germany, and is exclusively reserved for the attendees for two days of the conference.

Here are the announced sessions to be presented by Red Hat speakers:

  • 50 new features of Java EE 7 in 50 minutes: Arun Gupta
  • Testing the Enterprise Layers: The ABCs of Integration Testing: Andrew L Rubinger
  • Building Modern Applications using JBoss and OpenShift: Pete Muir

There is lots of good content at the conference. But attendees will have to strike a balance between them and Black Mamba, Colorado Adventure, Talocan, JUMP!, River Quest, Mystery Castle, and Fantissima – this is going to be a tough call ;-)

I’ll be staying at Hotel Matamba in Africa. Where will you be – Fantasy, Berlin, Mexico, China town or Mystery ?

Hotels within the theme park are selling out fast, make sure to register rather promptly. You can also consider coming with your family and there are deals available.

JBoss EAP 6 Clustering Reference Architecture

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 (EAP 6) is a fast, secure and powerful middleware platform built upon open standards and compliant with the Java
Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE) specification. It allows horizontal scaling by distributing the load between multiple physical and virtual machines and eliminating a single point of failure.

Want to learn how to stands up two EAP 6 Clusters, each set up as a separate domain, one active and another passive, to eliminate any downtime due to maintenance and upgrades ?

jboss-eap6-clustering-reference-architecture

Red Hat Reference Architecture Series (@RedHatRefArch) announced the availability of a new reference architecture for you!

Download JBoss EAP 6 Clustering reference architecture.

This reference architecture demonstrates EAP 6 Cluster capabilities, including replication of various session types, configuration and setup. Several technologies are covered, including:

  • Red Hat’s JBoss EAP 6.1
  • Apache Web Server
  • HTTP / Stateful session replication
  • JPA 2nd level cache
  • HornetQ cluster and CLI

Automated Java/CLI scripts are used to automatically build out two clusters of three nodes, each as a managed domain. Each node includes one live and two backup HornetQ servers using message replication to provide redundancy. Cache invalidation enables second-level caching of JPA entities, while session replication is used for HTTP and stateful session beans.

In the meanwhile, WildFly 8 is coming along well and will provide full Java EE 7 compliance. It will be released in the next few weeks. Now is a good time to download WildFly and try your applications on it. A subsequent version of WildFly will be the basis for JBoss EAP 7.

Tech Tip #1 shows you how to get started with WildFly. github.com/arun-gupta/javaee7-samples provide a comprehensive set of Java EE 7 samples that run on WildFly. And if you are interested in creating tests for these samples, follow the steps in Devoxx 2013 Hackergarten and send a pull request.

JBoss EAP enables you to consume open source software with comfort. Use open source today with the reliance that a commercial support will be available when you need it!

GlassFish Commercial is Dead, WildFly and JBoss EAP to the Rescue

I, along with several others, spent 6+ years at Oracle creating and nurturing the GlassFish community. ~852 blog entries on blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/tags/glassfish vouch for that. I still remember when our team got a presidential award at Sun Microsystems for growing the downloads from 0 to 5 million in 3 years. I was also popularly known as “GlassFish Guy” all around the world. Lots of fond memories …

left Oracle and joined Red Hat a little over 4 weeks ago. Even though we have a competing (better ;) project in WildFly and product in JBoss EAP but will always have high respect for GlassFish. It is the Reference Implementation as required by JCP and so by design will be always at the leading edge of technology. One of common myths I had to unravel all the time was that GlassFish can be used as a production application server because Sun/Oracle offered commercial support for it.

This was changed by Oracle’s announcement to abandon commercial support for GlassFish. Specifically …

Oracle will no longer release future major releases of Oracle GlassFish Server with commercial support – specifically Oracle GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support will not be released.
Commercial Java EE 7 support will be provided from WebLogic Server.

This means GlassFish will continue to be at the leading edge of technology (hopefully) but is now merely reduced to a toy. You can use GlassFish as a reference to ensure your code is using pure Java EE 7 APIs but any production deployments should seriously think twice before considering it as a choice of application server. This is also expressed by Antonio Goncalves:

GlassFish will stay open source. Yes, but with no commercial support it will not be used in organizations

Earlier today GlassFish plugin for Eclipse was removed from java.net. I suspect we’ll continue to see more news items like this making GlassFish truly for reference only.

This also means that today there are no vendors offering commercial support for Java EE 7 applications. Johan Vos from Lodgon jumped on the opportunity and offered commercial support for GlassFish. Johan (disclaimer: a great friend) is extremely knowledgeable about the internals and the codebase so he would be your good bet in case you want production support.

This decision from Oracle makes business sense as having two application server from one company is always confusing. This is the reason Sun (unfortunately) could not survive and Oracle will. David Blevins explained wonderfully in his post that open source isn’t free. In addition to WildFly, TomEE is the only open source application server that is now commercially supported by Tomitribe.

The announcement also said:

Oracle recommends that existing commercial Oracle GlassFish Server customers begin planning to move to Oracle WebLogic Server, which is a natural technical and license migration path forward

This would again make sense from Oracle’s perspective, at least for license, but not so much from customers or community perspective. Forester research analyst John Rhymer was quoted on that:

Folks that prefer GlassFish as their Oracle-supported production Java server now are looking at a big rise in costs

Agreed that Java EE is the common binding thread between the two application servers and there is some support for deployment descriptors across the two application servers. But that’s where the connection stops. Migrating an application from GlassFish to WebLogic is like migrating from one application server to another application server, and InfoQ agrees with that. They even said:

This needs more planning and effort, compared to moving to GlassFish with commercial support, or switching from WildFly to JBoss EAP. 

Deployment descriptor interoperability is good to get started with but Markus Eisele explained in his blog entry R.I.P. GlassFish – Thanks for all the fish.:

Even that both WLS and GF understand at least a bit of each others deployment descriptors there is a high risk buried in here that such a setting is the road to trouble.

Even if there is a knowledge of deployment descriptors but is that how the application will go into production as well ? What if support for GlassFish deployment descriptors is dropped from WebLogic ? Migrate again ?

Oracle also talks about shared code between GlassFish and WebLogic. If applications are built using standard Java EE APIs then the underlying implementations does not really matter much. Anyway most migration effort is associated with monitoring, management, clustering, and administration which is completely different between the GlassFish and WebLoigic servers. Customers estimating the level of effort to migrate away from GlassFish have the same analysis to perform for WebLogic or JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Antonio also highlighted this aspect:

WildFly and JBoss have the same code base, GlassFish and Weblogic don’t (and that makes a huge difference between RedHat and Oracle app servers)

Commercial GlassFish customers who want to explore a migration to WebLogic will need to evaluate the cost of both code and license migration. Oracle has not announced any license credit or reduced upgrade pricing for commercial GlassFish customers considering migration to WebLogic. The latest Oracle price list dated October 17, 2013 lists the per processor price of GlassFish at $5,000 and WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition at $25,000, you do the Math!

JBoss EAP calculator helps you compare ongoing subscription cost of JBoss EAP and upfront license and ongoing support/maintenance costs of WebLogic and WebSphere. As shown in the EAP calculator there is 92% savings using JBoss EAP over WebLogic over 3 years.

6 Facts blog talk about WebLogic is not always more expensive than Oracle GlassFish Server. The blog seems correct on the cost analysis but it does not mention that WebLogic Standard Edition does not offer any clustering and failover capabilities. That also makes the Standard Edition that much less attractive an offering. You get what you pay for!

WildFly is the bleeding edge innovation engine for Red Hat and JBoss EAP allows customers to consume open source with ease. If you are looking for an open source application platform with commercial support from a large vendor, then your only choice is Red Hat.

We are open and this is also stated in a very objective opinion from Sharat Chander (a great friend and my ex-colleague):

 

Here is one tweet that I saw after the announcement and we’ll continue to see more of these …

What can you do ?

  • WildFly 8 is getting ready to be released and is passing ~99% TCK for Java EE 7 compliance. Make sure to try your applications on WildFly and report any bugs. Tech Tip #1 shows how to get started.
  • Watch a Deep Dive into WildFly 8 and Java EE 7 webinar to learn more about WildFly 8.
  • Download JBoss EAP and try your applications on it. You can always reach out to Red Hat Consulting if you need help with migration efforts.
  • Try your Java EE 6 applications on OpenShift (deployed on JBoss EAP 6) or Java EE 7 applications using WildFly cartridge.

Red Hat and I are here to help!

Getting Started with WildFly (TechTip #1)

Wildfly_logo

JBoss Community hosts ~100 projects focused on integration, business rules, processes, NoSQL, cloud, mobile, polyglot, messaging, tooling, alternative development frameworks and more. WildFly (nee JBoss Application Server or JBoss AS) is undoubtedly the most popular project in this community.

This Tech Tip will show how to get started with WildFly.

  • JDK7: WildFly requires JDK 7. So if you do not have it already installed on your machine then download your platform-specific package for JDK 7 U45 and install.
  • Binary or Source Bundle: Download WildFly 8.0 Beta1 binary.You can also download associated source code and build it yourself too!
  • Operation Mode: WildFly has two modes of operation: Standalone and Domain. In Standalone mode, a single instance of WildFly server is started. WildFly Domain mode allows you to control and configure multiple instances.Standalone WildFly instance can be started as:./bin/standalone.shIt displays a message like:

    And now you can watch the following page at localhost:8080:

    tt1-wildfly-welcome

And that’s it!

Now you are running WildFly on your machine. Lets see what are the key features of WildFly 8:

  • Java EE 7 support – At this point all user facing APIs have been implemented, more on this in a subsequent blog.
  • Fast Startup: Server started in about 5 seconds.
  • Small Footprint by minimizing GC pauses and starting/stopping service on demand.
  • Modular Design by loading classes on demand using JBoss Modules. OSGi 4.2 support is available out-of-the-box.
  • Unified Configuration and Management available from polished user-friendly web console, Java and HTTP APIs, and CLI. Only three ports are exposed in beta 1 (8080 for applications and 9990 for management, and the third port 9999 will be deprecated) by multiplexing protocols.

Here are some handy useful resources to take your WildFly experience to the next level:

  • Release Notes
  • Documentation
  • Glossary
  • WildFly project page
  • WildFly issue tracker
  • WildFly user forum
  • WildFly wiki
  • WildFly source

Want to learn more about WildFly ? Watch Introduction to WildFly webinar by Jason Greene and Stuart Douglas.

I built the source code on my machine (with no .m2 directory) and saw the following message:

How long it takes on your machine ?