JBoss updated its product line on Monday to include some of the latest Java technologies, aiming to simplify the developer's lot. JBoss' implementation of EJB 3.0 has been rolled out across several products including the JBoss Application Server, and there's a new version of JBoss Portal, 2.0.
The update of the product range to include EJB 3.0 is aimed at reducing the amount of time you need to spend writing plumbing code, and give you more time to concentrate on application logic. J2EE has often been accused of being difficult to develop in, and has faced competition from Microsoft's .NET and other simpler development frameworks.
Sacha Labourey, JBoss' European general manager, told ZDNet UK sister site Builder UK that "EJB and J2EE is a powerful framework, highly successful with a huge market share. The only problem is it's rather complex, meaning the learning curve for developers is quite long. There's pressure from .NET, which is maybe not as powerful, but is very simple to develop with. Given all this, it was time to give productivity back to developers."
Object persistence in particular is much easier with the new system. Before EJB 3.0, to create Entity Beans you needed to create your own persistence mechanism and code this into your beans. Now, simple annotations within a Java class are enough to make it persistent, providing your container supports this.
JBoss Application Server 4.0 also supports Java Server Faces, the J2EE technology for handling GUI components as objects.
JBoss Portal 2.0 allows you to create Portlets, small interfaces to applications that the end user can arrange within a portal to suit their own needs. Portal 2.0 implements the JSR 168 standard for Java Portlets. While some may associate portals with consumer-oriented sites such as Yahoo, Labourey believes that it's definitely an enterprise technology. "It's pretty powerful. What is a company site, or an intranet? It's something that integrates information from many sources. You might want to do that dynamically. I can't imagine a company that can say it knows how its pages will look for the next two years, what information will present and what applications it will include".
There has been some criticism of the JSR 168 standard for being a lowest common denominator, and not rich enough for real applications. Labourey feels that while there's some substance to these allegations, ignoring the standard isn't the way to go. "I prefer to say it's not the perfect spec yet, so let's implement it and extend it, rather than to say 'let's burn the spec altogether'," he said.
All of JBoss' software is open source, the majority released under the LGPL. JBoss sells support and consulting around its products, but the software itself is available for free download.
