Java PaaS start-up CloudBees have announced full support for developing and deploying applications using the Java EE 6 Web Profile (EE 6 WP) specification on their RUN@Cloud product, beating Red Hat's rival OpenShift offering, and making them the first company to have a production-ready Java EE compliant PaaS product.
From the press release:
If you are interested in deploying real EE 6 Web Profile applications in the cloud, CloudBees is presently the only option. There are no other EE 6 Web Profile environments generally available and production ready – that is, out of beta testing -- that provide both runtime features and development capabilities. Both of these must be present to fulfill the needs of serious Java developers, and are also necessary for enterprise computing environments.
Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees.
EE6 WP is a subset of APIs from the Java EE 6 full profile intended to be used for developing web applications. It includes support for many technologies in the web tier, such as JSF 2, Facelets, JSP, and Servlets 3.0. It also includes bean validation, JPA 2 for persistence, JTA for transaction management, EJB 3.1 Lite for business-tier services, and CDI - which describes a general component model based around dependency injection. EJB 3.1 Lite, as a specification, is a trimmed implementation of the EJB 3.1 specification. It is geared towards web application stacks, and so lacks support for features like JAX-RS (REST endpoints), SOAP, RMI/CORBA, backwards compatibility with EJB 2.x, asynchronous services and message driven beans.
CloudBees' EE 6 WP solution is based on a modified version of JBoss AS 7, Sacha Labourey told InfoQ. Amongst other things, these modifications allow CloudBees to deploy EE 6 WP applications in real time, with no interruption to service so that, for example, active customer records are preserved. In addition, the product is fully clustered, with automatic failover capabilities, and supports automatic scaling based on a number of criteria such as response time, concurrent requests, sessions, etc.
Labourey also confirmed that the firm has no plans to support the full Java EE 6 profile at this time, since they are predominantly focused on web applications, although they do expect to add some features from the full profile into their product over time.
As we previously reported, initial pricing will be around 50% more than the firm's Tomcat based offering.