JBoss opens up to Java competition

Red Hat announced a new JBoss Open Choice program today that gives developers the ability to employ and deploy more Java frameworks and applications than had previously been available.

With JBoss Open Choice, Red Hat says it "plans to provide application developers with the ability to choose the framework, language and programming technologies that best fit the application requirements they are trying to achieve without sacrificing reliability, availability, scalability or manageability across their projects."

Basically, this means that JBoss will interoperate more readily with popular programming models such as Spring, Seam, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit, all of which can be viewed as competitors to the JBoss app server.

While not earth-shaking, this announcement provides insight into the Java application server market--which is being supplanted in many situations by simple programming models. It also shows that a strategy of open-ness and integration, even with competitive products, is an inevitable path.

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[atish505]

Welcome this development. We have used Spring and REST with Fusion for a long time with BEA Weblogic.

[kit_plummer]

I think it slightly more than just simple programming models. I'm assuming you're referring to Rails/Grails/et al. These frameworks are very handy indeed. But, it is there ability to abstract the server requirement, or actually include it that makes them cheeky. We can easily arrive a micro-apps - maintainable and discrete functionally. The outcome is a step towards real modularity (and distribution as a byproduct). It's not like you couldn't get these frameworks to JBoss before - so perhaps Red Hat is just looking to "leech" off of Spring and the other innovations. :)