As the leading commercial open source Java EE application server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) is one of a small group of technologies that paved the way for open source in the enterprise.

JBoss EAP has been a category leader for years and has established itself as the de-facto open source, open standard platform for enterprise Java applications for many global organizations. Today we recognize a new milestone by publicly announcing the availability of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) 7 beta.

Organizations are moving towards new application approaches that include containers, microservices architectures, and cloud environments. JBoss EAP 7 brings enterprise Java squarely into that new world and also provides a bridge to give customers what they need to build and deploy applications of the future and refresh traditional Java EE environments.

This release integrates WildFly Application Server 10 with high-availability clustering, messaging and more. It is the culmination of years of hard work by the WildFly community and JBoss EAP teams, and sets us on a course to announce general availability of the product in the coming months.

The public beta is an important stage in our product lifecycle, giving our enterprise customers the opportunity to test the product, provide valuable feedback, and jumpstart their projects. We'd like your help and invite you to download JBoss EAP 7 beta, try it out, and tell us what you think.

Here are some highlights of the JBoss EAP 7 beta release:

Support for Java EE 7 and Java SE 8
JBoss EAP 7 is a certified Java EE 7 application server and supports Java SE 8. Java EE 7 includes four new specifications and a focus on developer productivity and web-scale applications. In addition to specification support, JBoss EAP 7 also includes enhancements designed to maximize productivity and performance. One example is batch tooling, which enables developers to more easily monitor, create, manage, and configure batch jobs.

Optimized for container and cloud deployments
Built for containers and resource-conscious virtualized or cloud environments such as OpenShift by Red Hat, JBoss EAP 7 features a low-memory footprint for higher density deployments, faster startup, and optimized network port utilization.

JBoss EAP 7 also offers a newly designed web subsystem, Undertow, which uses the latest non-blocking I/O features of Java to provide improved scalability and performance. It supports the latest web standards such as HTTP/2, HTTP Upgrade, and WebSockets.

Upgrade support featuring interoperability
For JBoss EAP 7, we've prioritized straightforward upgrade processes so customers can quickly upgrade from older versions of JBoss EAP or Wildfly.  We've focused on improved protocol version support and tooling, with a focus on interoperability with existing JBoss EAP 5 and 6 environments. For example, the new messaging subsystem is based on the unified messaging technology for Red Hat products, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis. Active MQ Artemis enables customers to pass messages between JBoss EAP 6 and JBoss EAP 7, and preserves the performance, scalability, and reliability of HornetQ from JBoss EAP 6.  

Enhanced administration and management
JBoss EAP is known for enabling impressive developer productivity, and integrates with DevOps practices, continuous integration and delivery processes. JBoss EAP 7 helps extend productivity benefits with several significant administration and management updates. The enhanced management console makes it faster, simpler, and more intuitive for both new and experienced administrators to discover information and execute tasks quickly. JBoss EAP 7 also enhances management command line interface (CLI) functionality by giving administrators the ability to see configuration and logging information, configure subsystems, and manage JBoss EAP servers offline. And, now, administrators can perform minimally disruptive maintenance on JBoss EAP 7 servers by using the new server suspend mode to gracefully shut down servers only after completing in-flight transactions.

The full list of new features is available here and you can also follow the Red Hat JBoss Middleware blog to keep up-to-date and learn more as JBoss EAP 7 moves towards general availability.

Today's beta announcement is an exciting step in our journey toward enabling DevOps agility for Java EE applications. Download the beta today and let us know what you think!