Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 26. (J)Bossing SOA

In This Chapter

• JBoss Who?

• Open SOA with JBoss

• R. L. Polk bosses SOA around

In telling you that JBoss is an open source platform for SOA, we're opening up a field of inquiry — the open source field — that we could conceivably plow for another 1,000 pages. That's our way of saying that the whole topic of open source deserves more space than we can give it in a book that's supposed to be about service oriented architecture. If pushed into a corner, though, we can radically oversimplify things and tell you that the open source movement leverages the work of an extended community to create (and better) the development of technologies for common use by the community. Open source software is commonly thought of as free, but under the cosmic law of "there's no such thing as a free lunch," distributing and maintaining open source software inevitably costs something. Open source, even when you pay for support, tends to cost less than similar products from proprietary vendors, and if you know enough to know what you're doing, you should certainly consider investing in open source software. That said, we'll return now to our previously scheduled program.

Who's da Boss?

JBoss is a division of Red Hat software, a company that offers a version of the Linux open source operating system. Like its parent company, JBoss's offerings are based on an open source model, which means that they add capabilities to the basic functions of their software and work with a community of developers ...