Thursday, November 24, 2011

JBoss AS 7.1.0.Beta1 "Tesla" released

Two months after we released 7.0.2 "Arc", we now have JBoss AS 7.1.0.Beta1 "Tesla" available for use. It's available for download at the usual location here.

Apart from the regular bug fixes, 7.1.0 Beta1 has a whole lot of new features. This includes increased support for Java EE technologies. Here's the main set of features that have been included in this release:
  •  A significant portion of EE full profile capabilities
    • Remote EJB over Remoting
    • Remote EJB over IIOP
    • CMP & BMP
    • EJB 2.x support
    • App Client
    • JSR-88
  •  A number of management improvements
  •  Management is now secure by default
    • Although with local user transparent auth for CLI and Java API tools
    • Console will "guide" you through creating a user
  •  Numerous component updates
 The entire list of bug fixes and improvements is available here

Let's briefly see some of the main features:

Standalone server configurations
7.1.0.Beta1 ships with a standalone.xml and a standalone-full.xml configurations. The standalone.xml supports web-profile technologies plus some additional technologies like javamail and full EJB3 support including remote EJB invocations. It however doesn't contain the messaging (i.e. HornetQ), Jacorb and CMP subsystem. The standalone-full.xml configuration, on the other hand contains support for all the technologies that have been implemented in AS7 so far.

By default, the standalone server starts up using the standalone.xml. If you want to use the other configuration then just use the following command:
 ./standalone.sh -server-config=standalone-full.xml  
or if you are on Windows OS
 ./standalone.bat -server-config=standalone-full.xml  
EJB 2.x support
Ever since AS 7.0.0 (which had web profile support) was released community users have been asking for EJB2.x support and support for invocations on EJB from remote clients. The plan was to have that support available in our early 7.1 Alpha/Beta releases. That has worked out as per the plan and users can now start deploying their EJB2.x applications on AS7.
Remote client invocations on EJB
For those of you who are interested in knowing about or trying out EJB invocations from a remote client, we have updated our AS7 documentation to have a chapter on EJB invocations from a remote client using JNDI. We already have some users who have started trying out and providing feedback in the user forum.
7.1.0 Beta1 is secured by default
Starting this version, the server is configured to be secured by default. What this means is that users wont have access to management operations (either via CLI or admin console) without authentication first. This wiki article is a must read to understand the finer (and well explained) details about this.

As you can see we have made some very good progress in the last couple of months since 7.0.2 was released. We hope to continue with the same speed for the upcoming 7.1.0.CR1. Try out this new version and let us know how it goes. Feedback is always welcome in our forums.