The JBoss EAP 6 is said to provide developers with “a high-performance, low-footprint, easy-to-manage solution designed to help enterprises build applications and ease into the cloud.” Representatives from JBoss and Red Hat touted the new platform’s cloud centric nature, lightweight pluggable architecture, malleability, multicore and virtual systems optimization, upgraded middleware components and the fact that it supports Java EE 6 as well as JVM languages such as Spring, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit.

On the data side, JBoss Data Grid 6 is Red Hat’s offering for dealing with big data issues. “The massive proliferation of data places new demands upon enterprise applications… Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 brings a new approach to solving this issue, enabling enterprises to move with agility and with more flexibility than other proprietary approaches.” Explains Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware at Red Hat.

He and other spokespeople put a number of features of the new system on parade, including its NoSQL approach, real-time application support for big data, flexibility of application integration, high scalability, high availability and fault tolerance. This is said to allow enterprise customers to build an open cloud that can integrate resources from various vendors and maintain a shield against lock-in to any one vendor.

Looking at the third new product in their trifecta, Red Hat claims that CloudForms provides enterprise IT organizations with the tools to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure that will deliver self-service computing resources to end-users, but without giving up control.

The event kicked off on Tuesday afternoon with General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Red Hat board of directors, who kept his speech short and sweet. Shelton assured listeners that although “We’re not there yet, and we won’t be there until we eliminate our fiercest competitors […] the open source army will continue to march on because it is the right thing to do.” He finished his speech by extolling virtues such as openness, sharing, and evolutionary thinking.

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO at Red Hat, picked up where General Shelton left off, connecting advances in information technology with advances in social reform. He cited recent revolutions of oppressed peoples whose greatest tool was the ability to exchange information. Whitehurst asserted that the principals that drive these revolutions—collaboration, openness, and most of all freedom of choice—are the same principles that drive cloud evolution. According to Whitehurst, we are coming to a fork in the road in the development of new cloud technologies where we, as the IT industry, must ask ourselves “Are we just choosing the next Microsoft?” In other words, will the cloud be dominated by one massive platform provider with whom everyone else will have to deal?  

Last up in the opening keynote was Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect at Accenture, who kept the revolution/evolution ball running by saying “If you look at where the innovation is happening, it’s around open source.” According to Daugherty the open source players are inundating the IT world with disruptive innovation. Daugherty sited social networking as an area where the biggest challenge can be dealing with the sheer volume of data and it’s ever increasing rate of increase.

I’m writing about the opening keynote speeches because I think they set a really good tone for the whole show. It got me fired up and excited about learning what the open source folks are doing to build a better tomorrow. The company announced OpenShift, Cloud Form, the early access release JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and more. I picked up a bushel of useful tips about database management, HTML 5, Java stuff, cloud application integration, RESTful programming, and more. I’m looking forward to a long stretch of writing stories for SearchSOA.com and for our sister site TheServerSide.com. Stay tuned.

When they first arrived, Java application servers were seen as highly modular. Times have changed, and modularity today means something a bit different. Red’s rev of the JBoss server allows for services to be separated from the core runtime engine for a boost in configurability. It also allows for a wider variety of programming and component models, including: Spring Framework, OSGi, Java EE, Google Web Toolkit and POJOs.

JBoss says it aims to enable EAP 5.0 for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This will likely give enterprises a pretty strong open-source option for Java EE servers running in the cloud. More to come.