I'm very pleased to announce that the long awaited final (GA) release of the JBoss Application Server 4.0.4 is now available for download!!!

This is really a gargantuan release considering the number of bug fixes (290) and minor new features (70) that were incorporated, as well as other tasks (180) that were dealt with. Just have a look at the length of the Release Notes.

The .zip distro is the good and old canonical jboss server distribution with the three configurations that everyone is familiar with: minimal, default and all. Just unzip and you are all set. The installer version (which can now run headless, too) can be used to produce customized configurations and previews to latest technologies, like an EJB3 RC7+ preview that matches the current EJB3 draft standard.

A lot of interesting features come through updates to the various independent JBoss projects integrated under the JBossAS umbrella, the most prominent being the replacement of the axis-based jboss-ws4ee stack with the first official release of the all-new JBoss Web Services stack. This is developed using jdk5 and retrofitted for jdk1.4 JVMs using JBossRetro.

Tomcat is updated to version 5.5.17 and JBossCache now supports AOP-based, http field-level session replication. There are also updates to JBossAOP, Hibernate, JBossRemoting, JBossSerialization and more. (Even my pet project got a very interesting contribution). As usual, we expect your online feedback in the JBoss User Forums.

If you can make it, JBossWorld in Vegas will be an excellent opportunity to meet with the development team, discuss what you like or not, share experiences and learn about innovative uses of JBoss, while getting insights into current and future JBoss technologies and roadmaps (the conference agenda is loaded, take a look here).

A really big thank you to everyone that worked on this release and to the JBoss community as a whole for providing valuable feedback during the two CR stages we went through.

Enjoy & hope to see you soon!
dimitris@jboss