If you've watched the video of my JBossWorld keynote or followed other presentations I've given around the future of JBoss or middleware in general, then you may have heard me talk about JBoss technologies evolving into a fabric, or ubiquitous middleware that is always there, in the background, no matter what device you may be deploying your application on. The name "fabric" springs to mind, though it is used by many others to mean different things. I suppose another word to use might be "ether", given the historical use of the word in the physics community. (OK we would need to ignore the fact that the belief in the ether ended when Michelson-Morley's experiment proved it did not exist.)

Let's stick with Fabric for now though. Well at the Red Hat Partner Summit I was giving a presentation on The Future of JBoss and was talking about JBoss as a Fabric. I've used a number of analogies to try to illustrate what I mean by this, including the distributed operating system one I've used before. Another one I used was that of TCP or UDP: capabilities that we all just take for granted these days, no matter where you're deploying your application these days. Now of course not all of the JBoss capabilities (projects) will be available in all environments. So in the grand tradition of cloud (to which we are most certainly not tying Fabric), I suppose we are talking about Just enough Middleware (JeM), Just enough JBoss (JeJ), or Just enough Application Server (JeAS) - though I've used that one before.

So what next? Well I'm fairly sure I want to create a new project for Fabric so that the wider community can get involved, though I may wait until after AS7 goes final. That means a project name of course, which is a problem as I'm not so good with names. Maybe Aether?