“It’s a Stack” - The Red Hat/JBoss Union Bears Fruit
by the editorial team
This interview was edited and republished from the original location.
A Dev Fu Interview with Sacha Labourey
Back in April, Red Hat’s announcement of its intent to acquire JBoss began a lot of speculation about what this acquisition meant to both the companies, and to the industry as a whole. Now, three months after the transaction closed, Red Hat is announcing a combined offering of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware called the Red Hat Application Stack. To find out more, we sat down with Sacha Labourey, Chief Technology Officer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat, to get his view on the Red Hat Application Stack offering and Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss. Here’s what he had to say.
Developer-fu: Sacha, what are you announcing today?
Today we are announcing the Red Hat Application Stack. It’s a pretty interesting moment because it’s the first time we’re going to offer a stack that integrates JBoss technology - the JBoss Application Server - with Red Hat. Red Hat had a different stack in the past, but this is the first child of the JBoss - Red Hat wedding, so it’s an important moment.
Developer-fu: How do developers and ISV partners in the channel benefit from this?
Red Hat’s channel partners and developers alike are looking for a solution to help reduce enterprise IT costs and leverage a low-cost on-ramp to service-oriented architectures. The new Red Hat Application Stack helps to solve this problem for them.
It’s important to note that the stack is important to some customers, but not necessarily to all customers. Enterprise Linux is not going to run only JBoss middleware. It’s fine to run WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle, or anything else out there. And JBoss on the other hand is operating system-agnostic middleware. It runs just as well on Linux as on Windows, on Solaris, and so on. This is very important.
Our integration and this announcement also means that Red Hat is now, in addition to Linux, supporting all the platforms JBoss runs on, from development and testing, to deployment and support. But for the people and companies who deploy middleware on Linux, it’s very important to have a pre-certified stack, so that they know that they don’t need to test the inter-compatibility of all the components. That’s something we’ve done for them. This stack is ideal for running standards-based LAMP or Java-based applications.
We are committed to support the stack on Enterprise Linux, which means that they’ll end up with a single throat to choke in case of problems with either the app stack or the platform. They won’t have to deal with a finger pointing session, or show where it’s somebody’s fault. We take ownership and responsibility. There’ll be a single throat.
Developer-fu: What software is included in the Red Hat Application Stack offering?
These are components that a lot of companies would typically use for traditional Web development. So, if you start from the ground up, it begins with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the number one Linux platform. On top of that, you have the Web server. That’s the well-known Apache HTTP server - the leading Web server on the Internet. Then you have a choice between two open-source databases, My SQL or PostgreSQL. Both of them are, again, well known databases used in a lot of deployments out there.
Then, on top of this stack, you have the middleware layer. So the two components that JBoss provides are a J2EE 1.4 fully-certified application server, and JBoss Hibernate. It’s a Java object-relational mapping tool. What it does is map Java objects to traditional databases. Usually you end up writing a lot of code to access your database. With Hibernate, you don’t need to do that. You simply have a component call Hibernate, and it is going to handle all of that complexity for you. What you will see as a Java developer is only a set of Java objects. You don’t have to care about which database it is, how it works, which type system it uses, how to query information, and things like that. Everything is handled transparently.
Developer-fu: If someone wants to sign up, what should they do?
It’s pretty easy. They can download this from the Red Hat Network and get a subscription that includes not only the software, but also updates and upgrades for the stack.
Developer-fu: I also wanted to ask you about the JBoss and Red Hat integration. How has that been going? As you said, the marriage has produced a child. What’s different now about what you do on a day-to-day basis?
On one hand it’s business as usual as we have to deliver on existing expectations, but on the other hand there is a lot of work and a lot of energy that is being spent to integrate the companies wherever it makes sense, and to find out what we have to learn from each other. I’m specifically focused, obviously, on the engineering side of things, and I think we can find added value on both sides.
For example, there is a team led by Paul Gampe called Engineering Services and Operations. Instead of each project doing its own QA, documentation and so on, they’ve decided to create an engineering services team to provide these services inside the company to the projects. That’s a very efficient way to work. We think we’re going to leverage his group, because it’s very well organized and they have some really great things going on there.
Developer-fu: Is there anything else that you would like to add about Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss?
I would like to mention something that struck me very early on when we joined Red Hat. The people at JBoss have been made to feel extremely welcome by Red Hat employees. I wouldn’t say that was surprising, because we all know there is huge value in the acquisition. But there is a true desire from everyone to make this work. Many people from Red Hat have asked me what they can do to help and have offered great ideas. That is really good to see. This is extremely encouraging for us, and points to great things for the future.
Developer-fu: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Copyright (C) by 2006 Red Hat Inc. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (CC BY-SA): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.