With the 6.0.0.M5 release behind us and the 6.0.0.CR1 code freeze three weeks from now, I've been looking at the outstanding work needed to get AS 6 to Final.   Looking forward, forward-thinking - quite consistent with the views of the "best and brighest" that I'm surrounded by daily at work and who are always looking toward future development.   Before I summarize where we are today, let's take a look at what's been accomplished over the past few months.

 

In December 2009, Jason Greene gave a DZone interview titled "What's new in JBoss AS 6 Milestone 1".   This interview summarized the release highlights of Milestone 1 but also gave an overview of the Java EE 6 Web Profile and Red Hat's participation in the JCP which included, but not not limited to, leading the Contexts and Dependency Injection and Bean Validation specifications.   Since then, our committment to Java EE 6 standards has continued and delivered in the JBoss AS Milestone releases that have occurred since.  MileStone 2 included Servlet 3.0 capabilities via JBoss Web 3.0.0, JPA 2.0 starting with the integration of Hibernate 3.5.0-CR-1, JAX-RS 1.0 and an update to JSF 2.0.  Support for EJB 3.1 Singleton Beans was available in MileStone 3.  EJB 3.1 Asynchronous Invocations and Advanced Timers were available in MileStone 4 as well as a compliant implementation of the Jax-RS 1.1 specification with the integration of RESTEasy 2.0.  JBossWS-CXF, also available since Milestone 4, offers a new web services implementation that is built on top of the Apache CXF web services stack. This gives existing JBossWS users better performance and more WS-* features.  MileStone 5 offered upgrades to JBossWS-CXF and WELD (implementation of Contexts and Dependency Injection specification) plus many bug fixes as in all milestone releases.

 

Aside from work involved in implementing the Java EE 6 specifications, several feature enhancements have been delivered:

 

 

More details on specific projects and additional features can be found in the JBoss Community sites.

 

I've also seen a recent blog on a good user experience with AS 6.0.0.M5. There were subtle references made regarding its' ease-of-installation, quick boot performance (consistent with my 15s avg), and the JBoss AS 6 Administration Console readily available to assist with configuring and managing resources for your JBoss AS instance.  A quick reminder of why there are so many downloads of our release distributions.   Speaking of distributions . . .  Did you know you can always grab a SNAPSHOT zip distribution from our public Hudson instance (NOTE: Only the smoke-tests are run before they are archived for download.)

 

Getting back to where we are today.  This week preparation is under way for the Infinispan integration as mentioned in my recent email.   As soon as that is completed, integration of components for jboss-injection will begin.   These integrations have been planned for 6.0.0.CR1 which is expected to be released in time for the Devoxx Conference.  (I plan to be in attendance and hope to meet some of you there.)  The 6.0.0.Final release is scheduled to follow soon after that with a target code freeze date of December 17.

 

As always, visit the JBoss forums if you have questions, comments, or contributions.