Red Hat has released a new version of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (version 4.3) and a new version of JBoss Operations Network (2.1). The new SOA Platform allows for the remote monitoring and management of open source SOA deployments while the new integrated management platform aims to improve cooperative support.
The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform delivers a standards-based platform to integrate applications, SOA services, business events and automate business processes. The SOA Platform integrates specific versions of JBoss ESB, jBPM, Drools and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that are certified to work together in a single supported enterprise distribution. Annual subscriptions to the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform include full production support, security fixes, update releases, and access to new versions released during the subscription lifetime.
New features in JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform include:
- New ESB Features – New gateway listeners, a declarative security model, improved web services integration and additional scripting languages will accelerate enterprise adoption of open source SOA by enabling simpler web services integration and deployment.
- New Rules Features – Stateful Rules services, decision tables and Rule agent support will further enable business event processing with an event-driven architecture (EDA), as well as allow non-developers to construct business rules and enable rapid deployment.
The JBoss Enterprise SA Platform bundles several popular components like:
- JBoss ESB
- JBoss jBPM jPDL
- JBoss Rules (Drools)
- JBoss Application Server
- Hibernate
- Hibernate Entity Manager
- Hibernate Annotations
- JBoss Seam
- JBoss Web (embedded Tomcat 6.0)
- JBoss Cache
- JGroups
- JBoss Messaging
- JBoss Transactions
- JBoss Web Services (JBossWS)
- JBossXB
- JBoss AOP
- JBoss Remoting
- JBoss Serialization
- JacORB
In the past, Red Hat’s SOA Team has emphasized on the differences between their offering and all of the other open source efforts:
The fact that we have all of these components within the JBoss brand clearly differentiates us from all of the other open source efforts, but also from some of our closed-source competitors. Not only does this mean it’s easier to get support, but the integration between the projects is much closer and seamless! Some observers have been pointing out that SOA and Open Source seem a very natural fit. Well the JBoss SOA Platform only helps to strengthen that argument.
Savio Rodrigues has contacted JBoss’ Sacha Labourey asking if the platform is just a bundle of pieces or if there are some pre-integration or performance improvements. Sacha replied:
At the core, it could be argued that a platform is just a set of project aggregated together. But that would be a very naive view on the quality engineering and release engineering processes we are going through. We take extensive care to make sure these components are compatible together, that they can leverage the same backend integration (databases, JVM, etc.). Obviously, we go through platform-specific testing which cover more than just one feature (or project) but which cover the full spectrum of features (ESB, Drools integration, jBPM integration, Smooks transformation, etc.) We want to make sure that we will be able to support those bits for the next 5 years at the minimum, while providing backward compatible cumulative patches.
Also, this release of the SOA Platform will be the first one integrating with our JBoss ON management product - that’s also something we don’t do for individual components. Also, remember that the SOA Platform can either run standalone or on top of the EAP (Enterprise Application Platform). For the latter, we also need to make sure that the components we pick up for the SOA Platform do not conflict with the ones from the EAP.
Bottom line: it is the latter :)
The JBoss Operations Network (ON) management platform delivers centralized systems management for the JBoss Middleware product suite. It helps users to coordinate the many stages of application lifecycle and expose a cohesive view of your middleware components through complex environments. It also provides visibility into production availability and performance and effectively helps manage configuration and rollout of new applications across complex environments with a single, integrated tool.
JBoss Operations Network 2.1 brings enhanced management for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, that aims to help reduce the cost of ongoing operations of enterprise SOA deployments. The SOA support features try to assist enterprises accelerate their use of open source SOA. New capabilities in the JBoss Operations Network 2.1 include:
- Scalable and centralized management for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
- Remote platform configuration and deployment
- Automatic ESB service inventory discovery
- Monitoring metrics
- Patch management
- JBoss ESB service monitoring
RedHat offers a free 30-day Evaluation Subscription for the JBoss SOA Platform and provides the JBoss SOA Assessment Tool for its potential customers to determine their SOA readiness and “determine the best path for SOA success”.
For more information on SOA be sure to check out: http://www.infoq.com/soa
