JBoss to join key Web services standards groups

Seeking standards compliance, open source middleware vendor JBoss on Monday will announce its participation in OASIS, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Services Interoperability Organizaton (WS-I).

The company also is upgrading its portal framework, adding support for the WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) specification.

By joining the standards organizations, JBoss seeks greater visibility, the opportunity to contribute to the specification process and to ensure that its JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite) conforms to emerging standards relative to Web services and SOA, the company said.

“Much like JBoss is on the executive committee of the JCP (Java Community Process), we felt it was important at this stage to begin to join and assert ourselves in OASIS and the other standards organizations,” said Shaun Connolly, JBoss vice president of product management.

Mark Little, director of standards at JBoss, will be the company’s primary representative at the organizations.

Red Hat’s recent acquisition of JBoss had no bearing on the decision to participate in the organizations, but a Microsoft-JBoss interoperability agreement announced last September was a factor, Connolly said, adding that Web services interoperability is part of that agreement.

In OASIS, JBoss will be participating on committees pertaining to several Web services specifications, including WSRP, WS-RX (Reliable Exchange), WS-SX (Secure Exchange) and WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). JBoss also will participate in SOA Reference Model and SOA Adoption Blueprints activities.

In W3C, JBoss will participate in the Web Services Addressing and Web Services Choreography Working Groups. In WS-I, JBoss joins as an advocate of the organization’s interoperability efforts, JBoss said.

An analyst concurred that standards are important for JBoss. “As they continue to evolve JEMS to become an SOA platform, standards support is absolutely critical. From a customer’s perspective, they need to be able to integrate,” with heterogeneous systems, said Michael Goulde, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

The addition of WSRP in JBoss Portal 2.4, meanwhile, allows users to deploy portlets remotely and let the portal consume portlets as needed, JBoss said. Portlets provide windows for presentation of specific applications and run within a portal.

WRSP “defines a WSDL interface for Web services invocation,” said Pierre Fricke, director of product management at JBoss.

“What WSRP does is it enables portals to invoke and present remote portlets through standards-based invocations,” Fricke said.

The company also is announcing version 1.2 of its JBoss Operations Network management software for monitoring and administering JEMS. Version 1.2 adds features to the inventory function of the product, such as a multi-platform auto-discovery capability that gauges the network setup.

Users also can create conditional alerts that trigger specific actions, such as automatically allocating additional resources such as more message cues. Also added is the capability of monitoring Apache Tomcat, the Apache Web server and JEMS-based applications.

New administration enhancements include a single location for key control functions such as starting, stopping, and restarting JEMS products. The management portal in version 1.2 has been updated to support more customization of the dashboard.

JBoss also is extending its JBoss Solution Certification Program, which features a toolkit for certifying that applications will run with JBoss deployments, to users of its products. Previously, it was geared to ISVs.

JBoss Portal 2.4 will be released in June whereas JBoss Operations Network 1.2 is available now.

JBoss sells subscriptions to its products, with prices determined by the products a customer is using.