Although it wasn't until my keynote at this year's JBoss World that we officially announced the Andiamo Project, it had been going for a while before then. But just what is Andiamo? Well in some ways it's the culmination of a few years of hard soul-searching about precisely what we need to add to the number one open source application server in order to keep it in that position and move it forward. In other ways it's a fairly logical evolution of the direction we've been heading in, albeit slowly until now.

Put succinctly, Andiamo is an effort to improve the out-of-the-box experience of JBossAS by making it easier to configure and manage, more performant than ever before, and all-round easier to use. With the release of AS 5 and EAP 5 we've covered pretty much all of the core capabilities that our community and customers are calling out for, so now they want us to concentrate efforts elsewhere. Yes, we'll continue to add new cool stuff, such as the forthcoming Seam 3 or Blacktie, but most of our efforts over the next year or two will be going on Andiamo, EE6 and That Which Comes Next.

It's worth noting that although we'll be concentrating on JBossAS and EAP initially, everything we do within Andiamo should be applicable to other projects and platforms. So I'd expect to see benefits to projects such as jBPM, Drools and platforms such as Portal and SOA-P.

At the moment most of our discussions around Andiamo have been internal, figuring out the basics and how best to start executing on the aims. However, over the next few weeks and months we'll be reaching out much more to the community and as always we value your feedback. So watch this space and we'll make new announcements about how to get involved. And so it seems appropriate to conclude this entry with: Andiamo!