Red Hat delivers open source application server

Red Hat, Inc(Nasdaq: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced the availability of Red Hat application server. Red Hat is delivering this new solution in response to customer demand for a commercially supported, lightweight and lower cost application server.

With the announcement, Red Hat is reinforcing its strategy to work with partners and open source developers to create quality enterprise options for customers building open source architectures.

"Customers have been asking for an open source application server that is fully interoperable with existing J2EE vendors, so that they can leverage open source where possible while protecting legacy investments," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat. "The open source web and Java communities are flourishing and expanding with organisations such as Apache, ObjectWeb and Eclipse driving the innovation. The application server was a natural next step for open source."

Red Hat Application Server is tested and supported on all major commercial JVMs, including Sun SDK, BEA WebLogic JRockit and IBM JDK and will also be tested and certified with leading DBMS platforms, including the Oracle® Database, IBM DB2 and Sybase. Protecting existing Java investments while deploying open source is a key benefit to customers.

Javed Tapia, Director Red Hat India, said "Created as part of Red Hat's open source architecture, Red Hat application server runs seamlessly on Red Hat enterprise linux." Red Hat application includes most commonly used features and functionalites found in commercial application servers.

It includes enterprise application server (JOnAS): EJBs, web application server (Tomcat): JSPs and Servlets, web services through AXIS from Apache, and JakartaServer management using JMX. It also has scalability features of pooling, caching and storage optimisation, clustering for failover and load balancing and support for commodity architectures — IA-32, Itanium, PPC

Red Hat Application Server is fully compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of solutions and is sold as an annual subscription that includes technologies, maintenance and various levels of support.