Project Page
The Project page seen below acts as an overview for all of the jboss.org projects:
The content for this page should therefore explain what these projects have in common and why they are split into different categories. We should think about adding in a subcategory to Portal for the various Portlets:
Portal
JBoss Portal
Portlets
JBoss Wiki
JBoss Forums
JBoss Blogs
There should be no commentary on the history of the jboss.org site as this does not add value.
Instead the message should be forward looking and upbeat to highlight the benefits of contributing to the projects and using the products.
Licenses
The licenses that we use should be explained under a clear heading to counter any FUD that users may have heard.
In particular the business-friendly LGPL license should be emphasized. This is especially important since it was highlighted recently at the EclipseCon conference that Managers were still afraid of using open source, mainly because of the proliferation of licenses and the uncertainty around which ones could be used without opening up their own code.
Note: The main title 'How do JBoss projects work together' may not be the best title to use as the intention for the jboss.org site is that users view each project as an individual one. The integration to make them work together is done by Red Hat when creating the platforms and this is where the added value comes in.
A better title may therefore be:
How do JBoss Projects help you?
The content down the left-hand side needs to be brief and to the point.
The main reason you want to use JBoss products is because they provide you with technology that you need for your applications. Using JBoss products gives you more time to focus on developing the features that make your application unique, resulting in greater added value.
The projects are split into different categories depending on what type of application you are building.
If you encounter a bug or you need an additional feature then you can easily make the necessary changes in the source code to put things right. If you choose to submit your patch as a contribution then you can ensure that your changes make it into the next release allowing you to upgrade later on without doing the work again.
New Design
JBoss projects focus on the development of Java Enterprise Middleware. Enterprise Middleware is software that sits between your application code and the operating system to provide services such as persistence, transactions, messaging and distribution across a network. Implementing this software in Java allows it to run on many different kinds of operating system, giving you the flexibility to choose whichever meets your needs.
A few projects focus entirely on providing one type of service, e.g. JBoss Messaging, JBoss Cache and JBoss Transactions. Using these services in the development of your applications gives you a solid base to build upon and allows you more time to focus on solving your unique requirements.
Other projects provide component frameworks, e.g. JBoss AS, JBoss Web and JBoss Portal. These allow you to develop an application as a collection of components that call on services at runtime. The benefits of this approach are that the components are often reusable and the resulting application can be ported more easily to other frameworks if required.
Finally tools projects allow you to develop applications that use these services and component frameworks with ease, e.g. Red Hat Developer Studio and JBoss Profiler.
To select which projects are right for you simply look for the categories that match your requirements.
Friday 19th Oct 07
Licenses
JBoss projects are developed in open source in order to benefit from the distributed development model and extensive testing provided by the community. Each project regularly releases new compiled versions of the software, together with documentation, to create a series of products. In order to ensure that users who develop applications using these products don't have to open source their own code, we have chosen as our main license the business-friendly LGPL.
The LGPL license specifies that you are allowed to develop and distribute applications that use LGPL licensed code without having to show anybody your source code. If however you make changes to the LGPL licensed code and distribute the resulting binaries then you are obliged to show the source code for those changes. This balance of interests allows the source code for JBoss projects, using the LGPL license, to remain accessible at all times whilst protecting your source code from public view.
Note: This is different from the GPL license which requires that all source code using GPL licensed code be made public.
Some projects, due to the way they are used or the manner in which they have been developed, may use other licenses. To see all of the licenses used for a particular project click on the relevant link to go to the project's main page.
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