I probably only have a brief few comments to make as I don’t believe the implication in the title of this blog entry, but JBoss is certainly facing an evolving competitive front, and basically has not responded to it, unless u count the diatribes of Bill Burke, which essentially leave me wanting to defend, and failing to come up with the motivation. The competitive fronts are two-fold, and will be recognizable by even the most passing of observers in the middleware market:1. Seam is losing month-by-month to Spring.2. JBoss is losing month-by-month to Glassfish. Ok, ok, I know for anyone who has had to listen to my own diatribes on TSS, on blogs.sun.com, on Maison Fleury, or any other forum that Dave Rosenberg does not control (and sometimes even there), this two point formula is well established to the point of ad nauseum banter from me. It also fails to mention the competitive front from Oracle’s acquisition of BEA, which is a seismic development, but ultimately fails to seriously threaten the long-term viability of JBoss: Spring and Glassfish, however, do…Take a look at the corresponding proof-points, first the JCP page for Web Beans, the standardization process of Seam:https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299 It is stagnant, while Spring rolls out S2AP and a myriad other complimentary technologies to seize the developer’s attention. Seam is dying on the vine, and its own complexity does not bode well for a major roll-out of improvements any time soon. This is coupled with data point #2, which is JBoss’ embarrassing inability to finalize and release JBoss 5:https://www.jboss.org/jbossas/What on Planet Earth is going on at JBoss, is it true, according to Marcf, that the middleware division at Red Hat, as represented by all of the various JBoss products and projects is under-resourced? Or are we to believe that Exadel, the SOA product-line, and that silly Tuxedo-replacement project is as important as the core Java run-time? I have been wrong before, but i am not buying it… I am starting to question the ability of new management to take over JBoss’ model, even if Red Hat is OSS, it is starting to remind me of the slow but undeniable slide under Alfred after Bill Coleman. Not that Alfred was to blame, there was (as apparently with JBoss) mission-creep in the form of Portal, Integration, and the proprietary Java web services technology that locked developers in to Workshop…But just look at jboss.org, it is a mind-numbing array of ongoing and outstanding projects, with SSO, ESB, and Rules among others seemingly having no delivery date in sight, that translates to project stability…Please, all u JBossers, come on here and tell me how i’m wrong, i am a well established fan of the history, and hopeful proponent of the future, but things look awry…the Java community needs JBoss, even if Spring is answering some of the development model requirements that were once the sole domain of JBoss, and Glassfish is just going from one impressive enhancement/announcement to the next, but JEE5 and 6 need a representative JBoss app server, otherwise customers will have to look to migrate, its that simple…I am on the record stating a vision of portability for developers that leads to inter-operability of components across the business environment, that does not come from WebLogic, WebSphere, or even Spring, necessarily…it comes from JBoss, the continued market leader, that seems to be weakened, and if momentum were a gauge of leadership, to have lost the mantle that it so perfectly executed to acquire…what is going to come next that translates in to a reversal of the current state of things in Java-land… I honestly don’t know, but a few recommendations come to mind:– skip JBoss 5 in favor of 6 (scary thought)– pare down Seam to a JSF model and leave EJBs for a future rev. (probably too far along to do this) – outsource some functionality that has been supposedly brought in-house, such as the SSO, ESB, and Rules mentioned above (requires a major policy shift on the JBoss management plan)– go Linux only (this seems to be the most viable); sure u can have a Windows development environment, but honestly is it strategic to have a deployment environment when 90% of Microsoft shops are going to be doing .Net, anyways…Its time to start answering the hard questions, and new management is no excuse, perhaps going the tried-and-true route of brining in some airline exec. instead of Marcf was a mistake that too heavily favored the OS business over the ever-more lucrative middleware market…i am just thinking out loud here, and have pissed off too many people in the industry to care whether this hits the JBoss crew as inflammatory: i want to see JBoss succeed, right now, it is definitively not… Java