IBM and Covalent Technologies announced on Thursday that they have contributed technology to the Apache Geronomo community to help enterprises migrate from the rival open source JBoss application server to the open source Apache Geronimo application server.The migration tool converts applications form JBoss to Geronimo by generating configuration files. “The contribution of this tool to the Apache Community is a direct result of feedback we are hearing from our customers,” said Paul Buck, director of IBM WebSphere Open Source, in a statement released by IBM and Covalent. “The recent momentum behind products based on Apache Geronimo is indicative of customers’ desire to use collaboratively built open source technology backed by commercial support to meet business goals.” Apache Geronimo was described by IBM and Covalent as a lightweight J2EE-compatiable open source application server. It features components to help Java developers, small and mid-sized businesses and departmental users reduce application development complexity by pre-integrating common services for building Java applications. The IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition is based on Apache Geronimo.The free tool will be available for download soon under the Apache license here. The IBM-Covalent initiative was called “uninteresting” by Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management in the JBoss division of Red Hat. “How I view it is it validates at least from the JBoss standpoint that we’re really more of the mass market middleware leader out there,” Connolly said. Software Development