JBoss releases JBoss AS 6.0 GA

Posted by Tim Cull on Jan 04, 2011

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Just before the new year, JBoss finalized its JBoss AS 6 application server with a GA release. The release includes enhancements for Java EE 6, improved handing of JSF and upgrades or changes to many of the included libraries like Hibernate and caching.

Previous releases of JBoss AS had a single implementation of JSF pre-bundled. AS 4 bundled MyFaces 1.1 while AS 5 switched to Mojarra 1.2. As a result, developers wishing to use an alternate implementation often had to deal with some configuration headaches and incompatibilities. JBoss AS 6, however, allows developers to specify which JSF implementation to use with a single entry in a configuration file. By default, AS 6 ships with Mojarra 2.0, but a developer who wants to use Mojarra 1.2 instead, for example, can add an entry like this to web.xml:

<context-param>
   <param-name>org.jboss.jbossfaces.JSF_CONFIG_NAME</param-name>
   <param-value>Mojarra-1.2</param-value>
</context-param>

This removes the need to bundle alternate implementations in the application WAR itself.

Just before release, AS 6 also passed Java EE 6 Web Profile compliance. This means developers looking for a compliant container can use JBoss to develop the new, slimmer type of Java EE application introduced in Java EE 6 that doesn't include the entire, heavyweight Java EE stack. This includes support for Servlet development through annotations and support for asynchronous Servlet processing. Other than JBoss, only GlassFish has yet achieved official EE 6 compliance, but other application servers have included bespoke support for parts of Java EE 6.

JBoss also took the opportunity to swap out their JBoss Cache implementation with Infinispan. Infinispan is an "extremely scalable, highly available data grid platform" that isn't just a cache but also serves as a distributed compute platform.

The version of Hibernate supported by JBoss has been upgraded to 3.6.0, a compliant implementation of JPA 2.0. Improvements in JPA 2.0 include pessimistic locking, the new Criteria API, and other improvements.

Other improvements in JBoss 6 include swapping google-collections for Google Guava and inclusion of RESTEasy, an implementation of JAX-RS for writing RESTful web services.

While documentation for JSF has all been upgraded to AS 6.0, documentation for other components still refer to the 5.0 version of JBoss (as of this writing on January 4). So developers should take extra care to note what version of JBoss the documentation they are reading describes.

Lastly, developers can rest easy knowing that if we really do run out of IPv4 addresses, JBoss now fixed all known issues with IPv6.

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1. Back to top

   really?

   by Vic _

   More J2EE? really?

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Re: really?

   by Gavin King

   More J2EE? really?

   
   
   What part of the number "6" don't you understand?

   Reply

3. Back to top

   Re: really?

   by Mark N

   No. It is Java EE. And honestly, it is more than just Java EE. So yes. REALLY. I am glad the Java community continues to innovate while [most] of the rest of the works waits for "Bill" to tell them what to do and what to use. Sure you or I might not like everything that everyone does, but you pretty much have a choice with everything.

   Reply

4. Back to top

   Congrats!

   by Arbi Sookazian

   Looking forward to JBoss 6/7 and Seam 3. Also looking forward to the super hush-hush new project that GKing is currently working on...

   Reply

5. Back to top

   ...yawn

   by Mario Ramaglia

   alternate JSF implementation again ?
   oh, btw, who's using jsf and those super hush-hush useless frameworks
   nowadays ?
   Java is a bunch of self-referential tech-demos which is slowing collapsing on itself.
   ...yawn.

   Reply

6. Back to top

   Developers profile and/or maven integration?

   by Geert Pante

   We're still using jetty at development time since it's got better Maven integration and launches in less than 10 seconds. For integration tests and production, we use JBoss indeed.
   
   The 'slim' web profile still takes 30-40 seconds to startup on the same hardware.
   
   Do you have any plans for a 'Developer' profile that is targeted at faster development cycles? Or do you want to lure everybody to use the JBossTools platform?

   Reply

7. Back to top

   Re: Developers profile and/or maven integration?

   by Emmanuel Bernard

   We're still using jetty at development time since it's got better Maven integration and launches in less than 10 seconds. For integration tests and production, we use JBoss indeed.
   
   The 'slim' web profile still takes 30-40 seconds to startup on the same hardware.
   
   Do you have any plans for a 'Developer' profile that is targeted at faster development cycles? Or do you want to lure everybody to use the JBossTools platform?

   
   
   We indeed have various discussion on a developer profile but the main work we are doing in the speed/lean startup area is towards JBoss AS 7 community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossAS7UserGuide . So far we have *very* fast boot time on 7.
   
   That being said, JBoss Developer Studio (thanks in part to Eclipse and the JVM) does nice code hot replacement not requiring to even restart your application.

   Reply

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   Re: Developers profile and/or maven integration?

   by James Richardson

   well to be honest if you use stand alonejetty and configure your application using new and stuff like that, then it starts in a few ms. then you don't need to worry about ask these dependency injection frameworks in jee, because you are using the built in java one. This is more than suitable for production, and rather usefully works identically in dev, so you actually test what you deploy.

   Reply

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   Re: Developers profile and/or maven integration?

   by Geert Pante

   That's what I said: you want to lure everybody to use the JBoss Developer Studio :-)

   Reply