Red Hat Ships Updated JBoss Middleware Stack

Published: July 17, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is also a major middleware player, right up there with IBM, Oracle, and BEA Systems--particularly if you count influence and installations instead of money when it comes to the JBoss stack Red Hat acquired last year.

This week, keeping the pressure on the established players in the middleware space, Red Hat announced its enterprise-class implementation of JBoss, which is called the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2. This stack includes various JBoss modules, including Application Server 4.2, Hibernate 3.2.4, Seam 1.2, and Transactions 4.2.3. The application server has a microkernel-based, pluggable architecture, which means Java Enterprise Edition features such as Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, JavaServer Faces, and the JBoss Web Services stack (which is new) can be deployed on the new app server. J2EE 1.4 services can also run on the software, which includes Apache Tomcat 6, as well as improved caching, clustering, and transaction processing capabilities.

Enterprise Application Server 4.2 is certified to run on Red Hat's new Enterprise Linux 5 operating system as well as on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix variants and Microsoft's Windows; JVMs from BEA, HP, and Sun can also run within the software, and Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases are also supported with the JBoss suite. IBM's AIX Unix and DB2 databases are conspicuous in their absence on this list. And, of course, so is Novell's SUSE Linux.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 is sold in blocks of up to four CPUs. A standard subscription to the code stack comes with one year of 12x5 telephone support, one year of Web support, an unlimited number of incidents and a four hour response time for tech issues; it costs $4,500. Ugrading to a premium subscription boosts telephone support to 24x7 with one hour response time; it costs $6,750. Red Hat is also offering subscriptions to the new JBoss stack in 32 CPU increments, which includes a subscription to the JBoss Operations Network and two Red Hat Developer Professional subscriptions thrown into the bundle; pricing for this 32 CPU bundle was not available.

One last thing: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is not the same thing as the Red Hat Application Stack. The latter is an integrated stack of Red Hat Linux and a bunch of JBoss middleware all woven together.

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