Since its non-acquisition of Exadel’s RichFaces Ajax tooling last March, Red Hat’s JBoss has been promising us a full technology platform that reaches all the way from Web 2.0 front end back to the middle tier and, since this is Red Hat, the Linux OS as well. JBoss has also promised us that the tooling would be fully Eclipse-compliant, but only through its own developer portal rather than Eclipse.org.

JBoss has now issued the 1.0 release after months of previews. Of course, this being the world of open source, there are few surprises as to what’s in the released 1.0 stack. It includes Exadel’s front end development tools that include Studio Pro, a web application development toolset which supports JSF, Struts, Hibernate, and Spring; RichFaces which provides visual components; and Ajax4jsf, which provides a way for using JSF components to generate Ajax-style rich clients.

Like many other enterprise Ajax tools, JBoss Developer Studio helps minimize raw coding of JavaScript; in this case, it does so by relying on JSF, which provides a way of generating web pages from Java components.

The JBoss technology stack walks the fine line between open source and what might otherwise be considered proprietary technology. The entire stack is all open source, meaning you can play with the guts of the technology and do anything with it, and only pay for support. But it’s hardly vendor neutral. In this case, JBoss Developer Studio is optimized for supporting other JBoss technologies, such as SEAM, which the company claims is more than just another model-view-controller (MVC) pattern because of its JSF support. And there is native integration with JBoss’s BPM and Rules Management tooling.

It’s an excellent example of what we call captive open source – the guts of the technology are fully open, but the open source project is controlled by the vendor. The approach is similar with Eclipse: JBoss is a member of the board, its development stack is available as Eclipse plug-ins, but JBoss, not Eclipse, hosts the JBoss tool projects. JBoss reasons that it’s because its licensing is different: the “purer” GPL, vs. the more vendor-friendly Apache license endorsed by the Eclipse foundation. In other words, it doesn't want vendors who license their offerings under conventional proprietary terms to make money by embedding JBoss.

With the studio piece, JBoss has pretty much rounded out the technology stack that it first announced earlier this year. More importantly, it helps JBoss/Red Hat bulk up for a middle tier market which has broken out into an all-out arms race. If you look at JBoss’s prime rivals (BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and through cooptition, Microsoft), they each have pieces that go well beyond the appserver. The middle tier is effectively a platform or an extension of a platform whose mandatory ingredients include BPM, portal, and ESB. From there, you “season” it with whatever is your strategic stake in the sand: the database, ERP system, and/or the OS itself.

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