On the eve of this week's annual LinuxWorld Conference
and Expo, Red Hat announced the availability of its open-source
application server, a lower-end server that will work with other
Java Enterprise Edition 2.0 (J2EE) application servers from IBM,
BEA Systems and Oracle.
The Red Hat Application Server, which has already been tested
and certified with all major Java Virtual Machines (JVMs),
including BEA's WebLogic JRockit and IBM's Java Development Kit,
will also be tested with many popular selling Database Management
Systems (DBMSes) such as IBM's DB2 and Oracle's flagship
database.
In the spirit of the open-source project, IBM, BEA and Oracle
will make contributions to the open-source community that will be
integrated into the Red Hat Application Server.
With open-source organisations and their projects such as
Eclipse, Apache, and OpenWeb doing well, Red Hat officials believed
an open-source application server would be a logical and natural
next step.
"Users we talk to have been asking for an open-source
application server that smoothly works with other popular J2EE
application servers, and what makes it nice is those suppliers
[IBM, BEA, and Oracle] will work to make that happen," said Paul
Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice-president of engineering.
BEA officials said they have been working with Red Hat to
integrate its Beehive, what BEA officials have contended is the
industry's first open source foundation for building
enterprise-class and service oriented architecture (SOAs) capable
applications.
Likewise Oracle officials welcomed Red Hat's entry into the
open-source application server market, promising to support the
development and deployment of J2EE applications and web services
through its Oracle JDeveloper 10g offering, according to Thomas
Kurian, Oracle's senior vice-president of server technologies.
The Red Hat Enterprise App Server includes the Java Open
Application Server (JOnAS); the Tomcat web application server; web
services through Axis from Apache; and JakartaServer Management via
JMX, which is a combination of JOnAS and Tomcat.
Ed Scannell writes for Infoworld