Red Hat announces JBoss and Java EE 6 updates for developers

Red Hat has opened its Red Hat Summit 2011 and JBossWorld 2011 conferences in Boston with new announcements aimed at the developer and cloud markets.

On the developer side Red Hat offered early registration for access to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, due out next year.

The announcement is designed to spur developers to use Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 technologies, which the company says are vital for the development of the platform-as-a-service computing model.

"JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 reflects our vision of the future of Java application platforms for traditional and cloud-based environments," said Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's vice president and general manager of middleware business.

"Our next-generation platform is a major leap forward for application servers in terms of the advances in Java EE specification - including specifications that were heavily influenced and defined by Red Hat - and in the way application servers can be deployed, managed and administered."

The company also introduced a JBoss Certified Developer programme which will require developers to show real-world experience of coding within the platform. The first qualification announced is the JBoss Certified Developer in Persistence, for Java Persistence API developers.

"Offering a certification based on a real-word, hands-on exam does more than just provide developers with a validation of their experience in a given field of middleware technology," said Randy Russell, director of certification at Red Hat.

"It also allows IT managers to better gauge developer readiness for projects, and provides consulting and IT companies with a clear way of showing technical expertise to potential customers."

Red Hat will shortly release JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, a cloud data cache designed to improve the response times and resilience of database applications. The software is designed to complement platform-as-a-service offerings and will offer considerable cost savings, the company said.

"Data grids are an inherently scalable solution for increasing throughput and resilience, and lowering response times of the data tier," said Muzilla.

"From clustering to vertical scaling and positioning, data grids present an opportunity for significant cost advantages over other data-scaling approaches."