best way to keep jboss up2date?

[acurvers]

what is the best way to keep jboss up2date i see a lot of downloads available for newer components but no mention for which jboss version they are..we use 4.2.3.GA i recently update jbossts but updating all components to the latest stable version wouldt that not be almost the same as installing the latest jboss stable release?

[adinn]

Alexander Curvers wrote:

what is the best way to keep jboss up2date i see a lot of downloads available for newer components but no mention for which jboss version they are..we use 4.2.3.GA i recently update jbossts but updating all components to the latest stable version wouldt that not be almost the same as installing the latest jboss stable release?

Where you use the bare word jboss I assume you means JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS).

The ArjunaJTA and ArjunaJTS directories in each source release of JBossTS contain a file called INSTALL which explains which version of JBoss AS you can safely install each corresponding flavour of the transaction manager into. It also provides the same infor for the XTS product (that's Web Services Transactions).

In general JBossTS releases are tied to a specific AS version. They are not normally updated. Instead they are superseded by a release with an higher minor (or major) version number which contains both bug fixes and new functionality. A few  releases are taken from a branch which has a series of tags ending in CP which stands for cumulative patch (used to be SP for service pack). These branches continue to be updated because they are for the product release of JBoss AS known as EAP. Later CP tags are normally backwards compatible with the original AS version they were developed for and only contain bug fixes. They rarely have new functionality added to them.

4.2.3 is one of these latter updated branches since it was used for the later EAP 4 releases. 4.6.1 is the branch used for EAP 5.0.1 and EAP 5.1.0. The latest release, 4.13, is the one currently used by the most recent version of AS 6.0. 4.15 is currently slated to be the branch for the next EAP 6 release.

Conversely, if you have a (5.x or 6.x) JBoss AS instance and want to know which version of JBossTS it contains then you need to obtain the corresponding source release and look at file component-matrix/pom.xml. This fle defines the dependency on all the components used to build the JBoss AS instance. Search for JBossTS and you will find the relevant version for the TS component.