Announcements at JBoss World

I'm having a great time this week at JBoss World, and not just because Florida=warm while St. Louis=cold. The event is the largest to date - some 750 attendees. It's a very professional show with great sessions and sponsors. I don't know any real statistics, but I've met and heard questions from many corporate architect or CIO types looking for insight on migrating to JBoss products or eager for the next release. The week has really exceeded my expectations.

There have been several announcements by Red Hat co-incident with JBoss World, one of which will be particularly interesting to fans of MetaMatrix. This afternoon, Red Hat announced a series of open source projects around SOA Governance. And the first project is something named DNA.

JBoss DNA is an open source repository whose foundation is the Java Content Repository spec. DNA is also the next version of the MetaMatrix metadata repository, designed in close cooperation with other JBoss projects that use or need a repository to store artifacts like files or messages.

DNA is not a port of the existing MetaMatrix metadata repository, but a similar design built around the JCR API. Lots of projects already use a JCR, and DNA will too. The uniqueness of the DNA project will be to build out from the basic JCR storage/retrieval/versioning functionality into a pluggable framework with components for artifact shredding, entity relationship analysis, federation, and reporting.

I won't go into any more detail on the project, as there is lots to read on the project page and wiki. Randall Hauch, the DNA project lead, will be adding even more design details on JBoss.org soon (maybe when he finishes his margarita at the pool-side bar), probably blogging about it too.

Another thing about this week's announcements - they've broken down all the "strategic" barriers, and I can get back to writing about what this blog was supposed to be about: taking our code from proprietary to open source. More on that tomorrow.

Steve