Optaros published their Open Source Catalog 2007 U.S. Version 1.1 rating over 260 open source projects and products. It is an interesting and enlightening report, well worth my time to peruse. Of course, Red Hat's JBoss products and projects were included, and, as one familiar with the open source landscape would expect, did very well.

Optaros presents a good introduction with information open source history, community and business models, and open source in the enterprise. On pages 9 through 11, Optaros describes their rating system which positions the open source projects and products in terms of functionality, community, maturity, enterprise readiness and the trends for the project or product.

Application Servers are presented on page 20, and JBoss AS leads the pack with a notable lead in enterprise readiness. This makes sense as JBoss has been developing its community and enterprise support model for a long time now gaining a great deal of experience supporting JBoss AS across a wide range of deployment scopes and sizes including large scale, high performance transaction processing scenarios.

JBoss Portal leads in enterprise readiness on page 21 for many of the same reasons JBoss AS leads. JBoss's professional open source model along with years of experience supporting open source in enterprise deployments yields a better customer satisfaction and deployment experience than what may be found with less enterprise experienced open source Portal projects. The trend certainly is positive for JBoss Portal with significant enhancements coming in JBoss Portal 2.6 driven by our community and customers. Other JBoss Portal solutions are in the works with key partners as well.

Two key and popular JBoss developer frameworks are featured on page 23 – Hibernate and JBoss Seam. Hibernate dominates its category of object/relational mapping frameworks and it shows in the high ratings across the board. Unlike some of the other mature open source products shown, Hibernate remains on an uptrend. JBoss Seam positions very strongly for a new application development framework which is a result of the great work done by the community leading the simplification of web application, enterprise Java and Web 2.0 development. The reaction from developers at conferences, seminars, webinars, etc... is truly incredible. This due to JBoss Seam solving a lot of the difficulty that Java developers have been wrestling with and dramatically making developers more productive and helping enterprise application development projects beat quality and deadline goals.

On page 27, JBoss jBPM rates as the strongest open source business process and workflow management open source product. JBoss jBPM continues to have large numbers of monthly downloads for a product in the BPM category, exceeding yearly unit license sales of all the top BPM vendors combined.

JBoss Rules (! :-) ) dominates the rules engine category on page 29 with top ratings, especially with its community and maturity ratings. Interestingly, it is the only open source rules product that shows an uptrend. Can we say JBoss Rules is the “Hibernate” of rules engines? Looks that way!

Thank you Optaros for producing and delivering an educational and excellent report to the community and industry at large!