Red Hat debuts open source app server

August 9, 2004—Red Hat has announced the availability of its open source application server, a lower-end server that reportedly will work with other J2EE 2.0 application servers from IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle.

The Red Hat Application Server, which has already been tested and certified with all major JVMs, including BEA’s WebLogic JRockit and IBM’s Java Development Kit, will also be tested with many popular selling database management systems such as IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s flagship database, according to company officials.

“We have decided to take a collaborative approach to software development and not to take an antagonistic stance,” said Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s CEO. “What will our competitors say about that? I hope they will say ‘Congratulations.'”

In the spirit of the open source project, IBM, BEA, and Oracle will make contributions to the open source community that will be integrated into the Red Hat Application Server, Red Hat officials said.

With open source organizations and their projects such as Eclipse, Apache, and OpenWeb doing well, Red Hat officials believed an open source application server would be a logical and natural next step.

“Users we talk to have been asking for an open source application server that smoothly works with other popular J2EE application servers, and what makes it nice is those vendors (IBM, BEA, and Oracle) will work to make that happen,” said Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering.

In a prepared statement, BEA officials said they have been actively working with Red Hat to integrate its Beehive, what BEA officials have contended is the industry’s first open source foundation for building enterprise-class and SOA-capable (service-oriented architecture) applications.

Likewise, Oracle officials welcomed Red Hat’s entry into the open source application server market, promising to support the development and deployment of J2EE applications and Web services through its Oracle JDeveloper 10g offering, according to Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s senior vice president of server technologies.

The Red Hat Enterprise App Server includes the Java Open Application Server (JOnAS); the Tomcat Web application server; Web services through Axis from Apache; and JakartaServer Management via JMX (Java Management Extensions), which is a combination of JOnAS and Tomcat.