JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Features

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) is the market-leading, open source enterprise Java platform for developing and deploying innovative and scalable Java applications. Combining a robust, yet flexible, architecture with an open source software license, JBoss EAP has become the most popular middleware system for developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and enterprises alike.

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Highlights and Key Features

Complete Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment

JBoss Developer Studio integrates and certifies both tooling and runtime components by combining Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This ensures that all the various Eclipse plugins and their dependencies work together and all the runtime components and libraries work together. Furthermore, each plugin is matched to its corresponding runtime component. For example, JBoss Developer Studio ensures that the versions of JBoss Seam tooling, JBoss Seam, and all their various dependencies work together. And, JBoss Developer Studio ensures that all the JBoss Seam tooling and components work with other technologies, like Hibernate, and JBoss jBPM.

Built for Standards and Interoperability

JBoss EAP supports a wide range of Java EE and Web Services standards.
Click here for a detailed listing of supported standards.

Enterprise Java Beans and Java Persistence

JBoss EAP provides an innovative and standards-based way of applying enterprise-class behavior, such as persistence, security, and distributed transactional caching, to any plain old Java object (POJO). JBoss EAP includes the following EJB features that are required to satisfy the needs of today's scalable, distributed, transactional, and fault tolerant applications.

Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 is a deep overhaul and simplification of the EJB specification. Its aim is to simplify development by enabling developers to focus on writing plain old java objects (POJOs) rather than on learning complex EJB APIs. EJB 3.0 features include:

• Simplified EJB API for Session Beans, Message Driven Beans, and Entity Beans
• Java Annotations
• Dependency Injection
• Optional Callbacks
• Entity Manager API
• Simplified Persistence and Improved Queries

JBoss EAP bundles and integrates Hibernate, the de-facto leader in Object/Relational mapping and persistence.
Hibernate features include:

• EJB 3.0 Entity Manager and Java Persistence API
• Virtualized filtering for temporal, historical, regional, and permissioned data
• Flexible object / relational mappings
• Single object to multi-table mapping
• Ability to override generated SQL with hand-written SQL
• Transparent persistence without bytecode processing
• Human-readable Object/Relational mapping definitions that can be generated via XDoclet
• XML binding that represents data as XML and Java objects interchangeably
• Event driven design that enables custom event objects to be created and registered to handle auditing scenarios or cascaded behavior semantics
• Powerful Object-oriented query language expressed in a SQL-like language
• Bulk update and delete by query
• Ultra-high performance

EJB 2.1 support includes:

• Stateful and stateless Session Beans
• BMP (Bean Managed Persistence) Entity Beans
• CMP (Container Managed Persistence) Entity Beans
• Message driven beans (MDBs)
• Interoperability using RMI-IIOP or JAX-RPC
• Ability to expose stateless session beans and MDBs as Web Services
• Support for sending and receiving messages via Web Services
• Easy provisioning and hot deployment of EJB and JMX-based Web Services
• Access to EJBs from external CORBA objects

Bundled ORB (JacORB) that supports:

• Interoperability between EJB 2.1 and CORBA objects
• Full support for CORBA 2.3
• Portable Object Adaptor (POA)
• Asynchronous Method Invocations (AMI)
• Portable interceptors
• Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII), Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI), and Dynamic Management of Anys (DynAny)

Built-in Java naming and directory interface (JNDI) support
Built-in JTA for two-phase commit transaction support

JBoss Seam Framework and Web Application Services

JBoss EAP integrates the powerful JBoss Seam Framework which offers a wide set of Java Annotations that enable developers to enhance their existing POJOs with the Web application and middleware services they need. The use of Java Annotations focuses developers on business logic rather than enterprise Java boilerplate code, greatly improving productivity and streamlining the development, compilation, and deployment cycles altogether. JBoss Seam is an application framework that complements and extends the EJB3, JSF, and RichFaces component models by providing declarative application state management for all Java components. JBoss Seam components are stateful and contextual, with a well-defined container-managed lifecycle. This approach helps solve an entire class of bugs and performance problems that plague web applications that manage state manually. JBoss Seam fully integrates JBoss jBPM into this state management architecture, making it easier than ever to write applications with complex workflows and user interactions.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a Web application framework for developing feature-rich user interfaces. Part of the Java EE 5 specification, JSF provides a standard for building dynamic, server side user interfaces. By clearly defining a separation between application logic and presentation, JSF makes it easy for developers to connect the presentation layer to the application code.

JBoss EAP provides full support for JSF and includes RichFaces, a rich component library for JSF and advanced framework for easily integrating AJAX capabilities into business applications. RichFaces components come ready to use out-of-the-box, so developers can immediately save time creating Web applications that provide greatly improved user experience. RichFaces also includes strong support for the skinnability of JSF applications. RichFaces also takes full advantage of the benefits of the JSF framework including lifecycle, validation, and conversion facilities, along with the management of static and dynamic resources.

Other Web Application services include:

• Embedded Apache Tomcat 6 container provides industry-leading JSP 2.1/Servlet 2.5 specification support
• Integration between Tomcat and other JBoss EAP services provides increased manageability, reliability, scalability, and availability

Caching, Clustering, and High Availability

JBoss EAP provides a proven foundation for mission-critical applications that require superior performance and scalability. Its high-availability services provide the clustering, caching, fail-over, load balancing, and distributed deployment features expected in a best-of-breed platform. JBoss EAP provides the following distinctive high-availability services:

• Clustering, fail-over, load balancing, and distributed deployment features provide the means to deploy large scalable robust applications. Features include:
  • Automatic discovery of nodes
  • Cluster-wide replicated JNDI context
  • Failover and load balancing for JNDI, RMI, and all EJB types
  • Stateful session bean state replication
  • HTTP session replication
  • High availability JMS
  • Farming/distributed deployment of JBoss EAP components; deploying on one node deploys on all nodes
• Embedded JBoss Cache provides a replicated, transactional, tree-structured cache which enables easy clustering of data on a JBoss AS grid. JBoss Cache:
  • Significantly increases performance via local access to data
  • Enables session data to be replicated thereby providing an always-on, high availability cache of data on your grid
  • Provides fine-grained replication for POJOs - an industry first!

Security Services

JBoss EAP implements the standard J2EE Authentication and Authorization (JAAS) security model, but also supports extended security models to provide support for context-sensitive authorization. Moreover, support for pluggable authentication modules (PAMs) enables integration with existing authentication frameworks in your enterprise.

Web Services and Interoperability

One of the major advances of Java EE 5 was the addition of JAX-WS which provides a greatly simplified programming model designed to take the place of previous JAX-RPC Web Service implementations. JBoss EAP supports a wide range of Web Services standards enabling applications built on JBoss EAP to dynamically interact with Web Services and benefit from the reliable, scalable, and production-ready infrastructure provided by JBoss EAP. Web Services features include:

• Full J2EE 1.4 and Java EE5 Web Services functionality including JAX-RPC and JAX-WS
• EJB 2.1, EJB3 and Java SE endpoints
• Support for many WS-* standards including WS-I, Attachments Profile, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-Eventing, and WS-Policy
• Support for MTOM/XOP
• Click here for details on JBoss EAP's supported standards

Integration and Messaging Services

JBoss EAP supports the latest connector and messaging specifications in order to provide the base infrastructure needed to support the most demanding integration requirements.

• J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 3.0 support provides connection pooling, transaction, and security context propagation for any JCA compliant resource adapters, including databases, legacy systems, and JMS servers
• JMS 1.1 support that allows asynchronous delivery of messages in distributed systems with optional quality of services parameters such as persistence, guaranteed delivery, and transactions. Supports both queue and topic messaging styles and offers high-availability features that allow JMS applications to be deployed in a clustered environment

Embeddable, Service-Oriented Architecture

At the core of JBoss EAP is a SOA microkernel that is extremely small in footprint. By utilizing JMX, the microkernel delivers a lightweight component model that clearly defines the lifecycle, configuration, and management of services and supplies a standard mechanism for assembling service components which ensures that all services are accessed, managed, and integrated in a unified and consistent manner. Services deployed in JBoss EAP can range anywhere from transaction and messaging services to connection pooling and security services. Services can easily be added or removed from the system - thus tuning the overall footprint to suit specific needs. Furthermore, developers can easily extend JBoss EAP by creating custom services and packaging them as SARs (Service Archives) that are then individually, hot-deployable to JBoss EAP.

Consistent Manageability

With its elegant Java Management Extensions (JMX) based microkernel architecture, JBoss EAP not only offers a consistent behavior of modules, but also offers the ability to manage and configure services through any management console that supports JMX. Moreover, JBoss EAP customers can leverage the extensive administration and monitoring functionality in the JBoss Operations Network for centrally managing their JBoss environments.