JBoss AS 7 was released yesterday, Mark Little announced. It is both EE6 Web Profile certified, and OSGi 4.2 compliant. It also supports a number of other EE6 APIs but is not yet certified against the EE6 full profile. The AS7.1 release later this year will be fully certified for EE6, and will form part of the JBoss EAP commercially supported platform.
The AS 7 stack has been modularised for the release, which enables selective startup of modules; those that aren't used are not loaded into the runtime, which allows it to be one of the fastest starting containers today. Although the runtime contains an OSGi container, JBoss itself has its own custom module system underneath which it uses for its implementation. Jason Greene, lead of the JBoss Application Server project, told us
This was done primarily for optimal performance, but also greater flexibility in supporting and/or interoperating with other alternative modular runtimes, such as the up and coming Java8 modules.
JBoss AS7 also contains CDI support which enables services to be injected into an instance without saying where they came from; this allows for transactional wrappers or other dynamic services to be discovered and used at run-time.
The management layer, which provides multi JVM and multi host managementm supports a number of interfaces. These include a native Java interface, a web interface, a CLI, and an HTTP/JSON interface.
JBoss AS 7 is the third product certifed against the web profile, joining Caucho Resin 4.0, and GlassFish Open Source Edition 3.x Web Profile. There are also three prodcuts currently certified against the full profile - IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) V8, Oracle's GlassFish Open Source Edition 3.x and upwards, and JEUS 7 from TmaxSoft.
JBoss AS7 is available for immediate download from the JBoss AS7 homepage.
Updated 14th July for clarity and to include additional quote from Jason Greene