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JBoss unveils Web 2.0 framework

13.06.2006
At its third annual user conference, open-source middleware vendor JBoss Tuesday unveiled its first-ever Seam 1.0 application framework for Web 2.0 and announced the broadening of its vendor certification program to "software as a service" providers as it continues to build a support base for its enterprise open-source offerings.

The company also said at JBoss World 2006 that it will open-source the core systems-management agent in its JBoss Operations Network to encourage adoption of its open management platform by independent software developers.

Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss, said the three announcements are aimed at helping the company continue its push into business computing by making its software easier to administer, modify, configure and use with Red Hat software and other products.

JBoss hopes that by releasing the source code for the JBoss Operations Network, it can build an open-source community around the code to spark development of software agents that link the JBoss environment to a wide range of other management applications and appliances. "By really opening it up and encouraging people to develop agents ... for databases and other parts of the stack, it will help extend it out" into wider use, Connolly said. "It will enable an open-source community to extend all the agents so you're able to plug things in."

The changes follow requests from users who want new ways of tying systems and software together, he said. "Customers asked for this to help them with the end-to-end manageability. This is going to help them as a major first step," Connolly said.

By expanding the code into open-source, JBoss expects to gain better manageability of applications that run on its flagship JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) and the Operations Network software. JBoss already uses its agent technology to manage a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows and some versions of Unix, as well as JBoss middleware and Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat. The vendor will look to the open-source developer community to create management agents for other middleware products and for database software, Connolly said. JBoss intends to release blueprints, certification toolkits and methodologies that third-party developers can use to validate their extensions and plug into the Operations Network for JEMS.