Whether or not you live in the US, it's hard not to know that the 4th of July is American Independence Day. This is the time when they celebrate winning the War of Independence from the British Empire, though really I think we let them win ;-) But either way, it's an important day, which has also been used to a few times to mark other events, such as the thinly disguised remake of H G Well's War of the Worlds. Well as fate would have it, we're about to release JBossAS 7 Final and it just so happens that it'll be so close to Independence Day we simply couldn't pass up this opportunity!

I've already discussed 10 reasons why you should be interested in JBossAS 7, as well as how this really represents a significant move away from the past. Hopefully you also registered for one of the sneak peek webinars we've been giving, and maybe you were at JAXConf recently to get some hands on demonstrations of what AS7 can do. But think of this too: with JBossAS 7 we're giving our communities the chance to declare independence from their previous overlords (aka closed source application servers)! Learn a lesson from the people of 1776 and stand up for your rights: no longer should you have to suffer the indignities of slow boot times and bloated containers taking up all of your available memory and processing power; cast off the shackles of 20th century architectural application server oppression.

Yes, yes, I know this sounds a lot like a sales pitch, but I'm a developer. I've been developing application servers since the 1990's and I've been using JBoss since the 3.x series. And putting my objective hat on for a minute, I can say that I have never come across a Java application server (or container) that performs as well as JBossAS 7 does or has the modularity and capabilities it has. So if you're using an application server, or just using some components, such as JMS or transactions through some other "lightweight" framework, then you really should check out JBossAS 7 Final!