Author: kevin

Contrary to his opinons on J2EE in his (excellent) books on J2EE development without EJBs, Rod Johnson give his backing behind development using J2EE technologies at The Server Side Symposium last week.

Johnson recommended to keep an eye on ORM mapping solution’s (Hibernate) influence on the upcoming EJB3.0 spec, and also on the emerging technology of AOP – he favors these as being ‘technologies to watch’ in the coming months. He believe that these pressures on J2EE will help it develop and become stronger in the long run.

Oracle announced and released an EJB3.0 preview implementation last week at TheServerSide Symposium conference, the first of the ‘big 3’ application server vendors to do so, so far.

Rumour has it that IBM have not even started looking at EJB3.0, apparently saying that it is not a priority for them right now. I find that hard to believe, but with the amount of effort and money invested in their EJB2.x implementations (similarly for BEA), maybe this is understandable. However at some point they will have to board the train – with the vastly simplified programming model I believe EJB3.0 will be adopted very quickly by developers.

Ok, so I have to admit I had no idea what the ‘Numa Numa’ dance was about, so when the JBossWorld 2005 conference opened with a video of Marc Fleury sitting at his desk waving his arms around to some cheesey Euro-pop song it was pretty funny, even though I had no clue what it was about.

Then I found a link to this site showing a video of the original guy who did this and found his webcast of him performing some embarassing lipsync and chair-based, demented arm-waving dance all over the internet and in the news (how did I miss this?!), and now its hilariously funny… 🙂

For someone he gives the laid back impression that he doesn’t really care what’s going on with JBoss, he certainly speaks with passion and conviction about his company, the products and the company’s visions and goals.

I’m sure this has a lot to do with his success – he doesn’t seem to be as emotionally involved as other IT executives, and his lack of seriousness I think brings him down to a level where everyone else, the developers using the products, can equate with him – he’s just a regular guy, but who has great ideas. And he has put this ideas into motion.

What a success story too – from leaving Sun, working from home and taking those first steps to grow JBoss as a product and as a company, he has definite made a huge difference in the IT industry with the ‘Professional Open Source’ approach – open source software, but backed by support contracts, and also interestingly, indemnity insurance against patent infringements and other lawsuits, for example from recent attempts like SCO.

The current direction of JBoss seems to be to change their image – they are not just JBoss ‘the application server’, but are a company providing professional backup and support to users of open source software, also including now Apache Tomcat (and possible sometime soon Apache HTTPD, the web server itself). Marc introduced the concept of JEMS – JBoss Enterprise Middleware Software – which currently includes JBoss AS, jBPM (a workflow engine), Hibernate, JGroups, JBoss Cache, JBoss Portal, JBoss Eclipse IDE. The company not only has one of the leading J2EE application servers, but are steadily building a whole stack of supporting middleware software to give a complete solution.

The enthusiasm is definitely there, and from the general feeling of the people attending the conference there is a lot of dedicated support to JBoss. Time will tell what will happen with the other main J2EE App Server vendors (IBM, BEA, Oracle), as JBoss is definely become a force to reckon with, and the other big 3 must be aware of this. IBM, BEA and Oracle have such a financial investment in their ‘monolithic’ app servers that I’d be surprised if they attempt anything drastic to compete with JBoss (or maybe they don’t feel they have to), but I wonder if they’ll attempt to open source lightweight versions of their servers to get products out there to compete with JBoss. On a purely financial comparision, how can you compete with a product that is free? And regarding the previous concerns that large corporations have had with adopting open source, like where do they turn to get support, JBoss with their support contracts really have this wrapped up. I don’t believe anymore that this is product by developers for developers – the product is already in use by large commercial companies, and its picking up momentuum.