Red Hat updates JBoss EAP and adds NoSQL database

As it focuses more on cloud and scaled-up applications, Red Hat has released the final versions of JBoss Data Grid 6 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. JBoss Data Grid 6 is Red Hat's entry into the NoSQL database arena with a Java-based, in-memory, key/value store which offers REST, memcache or Red Hat's own HotRod API, to access the data. The selection of APIs make the database easily accessible from not just Java but PHP, Python, Ruby, C and other languages.

Based on the Infinispan JBoss community project, Data Grid 6 adds components from JBoss's Operations Network and the newly updated Enterprise Application Platform. Red Hat is positioning Data Grid as a caching layer for relational databases and other data stores, as a way of alleviating the issues with scaling up relational databases.

The updated JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, which entered beta in March, is the latest version of JBoss's runtime engine and is based on JBoss 7. The highlight of the new release is an updated architecture which Red Hat believes will make it easy to deploy in the cloud, especially with Java workloads in the company's OpenShift. To that end the system is built around a set of dynamically allocated, modular services and a programmatic management layer to allow deployment and configuration to be deeply integrated with the platform.

Other enhancements include a range of optimisations for multi-core and virtualised systems which have resulted in a smaller memory footprint and quicker startup; again, these changes are focused on simplifying deployment to the cloud where both multi-core and virtualisation are very prevalent.

In terms of Java development tooling, JBoss EAP 6 now supports Java EE 6 and other JVM-based frameworks, including Spring, Struts and Google Web Toolkit. Internally, there are updated components such as JBoss Hibernate, and new components including Arquillian for easier integration testing, and better support for tools such as Hudson and Maven.

Red Hat's JBoss middleware is available as subscription supported software. It is built from a number of open source projects. The community supported versions of the projects used are available through JBoss.org.

(djwm)