JBoss Group Developers Walk Out 313
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Inquirer, 'seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network.'"
What is Core Developers Network? (Score:3, Informative)
We are pleased to announce the founding of Core Developers Networkâ, a new services company supporting enterprise open source Java software. Core Developers Network is a partnership of peers with the guiding principles of integrity, openness, and fairness. Its charter is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects.
Many of our partners are core developers with cvs commit privileges on the JBoss project, and this enables us to offer a wide range of services geared towards the JBoss server, including professional documentation, training and expert support.
The focus of Core Developers Network, however, is wider than just JBossâ, and we have partners with cvs commit privileges on other projects including Jetty, Apache Jakarta, and XDoclet. Direct support is available today for these projects, as well as 3rd party support for several other Core Technologies.
We are committed to having the same level of involvement in our current projects that we have had in the past. This means that we will continue to work on the JBoss project itself. In addition, we will continue to support the JBoss project via the jboss-development and jboss-users mailing lists maintained by SourceForge.net, as well as any other open public forum. Unfortunately, the forums on jboss.org are a commercial venue for the JBoss Group LLC, and therefore we will not be participating in them.
A few of our partners have offered support through the JBoss Group LLC in the past, but for various reasons have concluded that their professional aspirations would be better served outside of the JBoss Group LLC. In order to ensure that customers previously supported by our partners continue to receive the same level of high quality support, Core Developers Network is offering these customers a limited amount of free support during this transition period.
We want to emphasize that our partners will continue to provide the same responsive, high-quality technical support as we have always done. The founding of Core Developers Network simply signals the natural emergence of competition in the marketplace. We hope that broadening the range of service options for open source projects will raise the level of support available and lead to even greater adoption of these Core Technologies.
Please look for us at JavaOneâ booth 1705!
Core Developers Network
ahem they did not walk out (Score:5, Informative)
There servered their consulting contracts JBoss group only..
People really should master the skil of reading sometime soon..
Re:motivations for new company? (Score:5, Informative)
then think of it as forking step 2.
Remainder of my
no big deal (Score:1, Informative)
Re:These guys like Java... (Score:3, Informative)
"tripod", also known as "wheelie", also known as "that thing with the little wheels you strap you luggage to".
Re:motivations for new company? (Score:4, Informative)
Documentation [coredevelopers.net] - Subscriptions
I'd say attending training delivered from the core developers is not something that is offered very often.Training [coredevelopers.net] - From core developers
Support [coredevelopers.net] - Including remote development
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Seems they just want to earn some money doing their own support, probably because they don't like the Jboss group model, or were not getting ahead with them.
I doubt this is a big deal. Probably just here on slashdot because
a) People like to wind up Marc Fluery
b) See above
Re:Who? (Score:3, Informative)
" Dain Sundstrom
Dain is the author of CMP/JBoss, an implementation of the CMP 2.0 specification for JBoss 3, and is the leading the JBoss 4 persistence team. Dain has 7 years of experience in enterprise computing working with companies such as United Health Care, McKesson, Corporate Express, MCI and McDonalds.
David Jencks
David is the author of the distributed transaction manager and the JCA subsystem for JBoss, as well the author of the JMX tags for XDoclet. David has written JCA adapters for the Firebird database and for clients such as FMG, and has worked with webMethods on the integration of JBoss into the webMethods Integration Platform.
Greg Wilkins
Greg developed the Jetty http server and servlet container, which is the default web container in the JBoss server. Greg has 18 years of experience in enterprise computing working with companies such as Cisco, Telstra and the London Clearing House and he sits on the experts panel for the java servlets specifcation.
James Strachan
James is a co-founder of the Jelly, dom4j, jaxen and saxpath projects. He is also a member of the Apache Jakarta Project Management Committee, and sits on several Java Specification committees. James has over 15 years of enterprise computing experience working with companies such as SpiritSoft, PaceMetrics, Rabobank, CSFB, NEON, Nomura Research Institute and JP Morgan.
Jeremy Boynes
Jeremy is a member of the JBoss 4 Persistence Team, and maintainer of CMP/JBoss. Jeremy has over 20 years of enterprise computing experience working with companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to Silicon Valley startups including BT, Sequent Computer Systems, Cisco and Bravanta.
Jules Gosnell
Jules spearheaded the integration of Jetty into JBoss in November of 2000 and has since been deeply involved in both projects. Jules has 12 years of experience in enterprise computing ranging from Toshiba's Research and Developement Center in Tokyo to the London Financial sector, including clients such as Nomura, Credit Suisse, UBS Warburg, and major eCommerce players such as LastMinute.com.
Remigio Chirino
Remigio is the principle developer of JMS/JBoss, and developed the first iteration of the Aspect based infrastructure for JBoss 4.0. Remigio has expertise in designing, building and deploying enterprise messaging systems."
They look pretty significant in my view, but maybe its just me. CMP, Dist. XA , JMS, Jetty all seem kinda important, especially in the corporate environment.
Re:I've got a more basic question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I've got a more basic question (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sure why the first post got a +4 informative as it was just a cut and paste of the CDN Web page.
JBoss (project page project page [sourceforge.net] is a Java Application Server for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB's). They are working on a free implementation of J2EE [sun.com]. It includes JBossServer which is the application server, JBossCX for JCA, JBossCMP for persistence, JBossMQ for JMS, JBossMail (obvious), JBossSX for JAAS, JBossTX for JTA/JTS, and more that you can see on the project page.
There is always the Google cache [216.239.51.100] too.
Re:Who? what? when? why? how? (Score:5, Informative)
JBoss [jboss.org] is a very popular, open-source application server for the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) [sun.com]. And although the JBoss software is free, there is a commercial consulting firm, the JBoss Group LLC, which provides support, etc. for JBoss users. The Marc Fleury referred to in the Inquirer article is the founder and CEO of the JBoss Group.
Dain Sundstrom (the "Dain" from the Inquirer article) is one of the core JBoss developers. He was also working as a consultant for the JBoss Group. He and several other consultants for the JBoss Group have jumped ship to start their own consulting firm [coredevelopers.net], providing support for JBoss as well as other enterprise open source Java software.
The story is a big deal to JBoss users for a number of reasons. For one, a lot of commercial companies are use the commercial support provided by the JBoss Group as justification for going with an open source software solution (as opposed to one of the much more expensive commercial application servers). This was a relatively large loss of personnel for the JBoss Group and it thus raises questions about the reliability or stability of commercial JBoss support. Another important question is how this defection will affect these core developers' standing in the JBoss development group. Obviously, it won't be pretty, but will be they be kicked out altogether?
As for the background (the why), I don't have an answer for you. I don't know if grievances have been publically aired leading up to this, and I wouldn't have been paying attention if they had been. So I'm interested to see what details, if any, emerge over the next few days.
JBoss 4.0 DR1 available! (Score:2, Informative)
Check it out!:
Aspect-Oriented Programming and JBoss [onjava.com]
JBoss 4.0 Developer Release JBoss [jboss.org]
JBoss Aspect Oriented Programming [jboss.org]
Download it now! [sourceforge.net]
Re:Which one will be the slimmer J2EE?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
* Have instantiation of one object bring half the database into memory
* Write code that intelligently loads and unloads references seamlessly from the database on demand (_lots_ of work)
* Get someone else's code to do it for you
Option 3 is the application server. Remember also that if you have your application spread across 13 servers, and all of them need access to the same object, where is the object going to live? If you have 13 copies of it, what happens if an instance gets modified - how do the other 12 instances know to reload their data? If you keep it on one server, how are you going to handle load balancing intelligently?
The purpose of application servers is to have a canned infrastructure capable of handling these problems well. There are many other plumbing considerations that application servers keep track of, such as nested transactions, being able to remap data items onto different tables/attributes, being able to set the environment of an application through a simple text-based descriptor, etc.
Usually I've found that for smaller-scale projects, application servers are overkill. However, for large-scale projects, they keep your project from becoming the ultimate hack-job. The trade-off probably hits when you have about 3 front-end webservers. For some items it hits as soon as you need 2 servers, for the load-balancing/synchronization problems.
Re:What the... ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:some faces to those names (Score:3, Informative)
Check again -- as of 6/5 2:00 AM EDT, it looks like the JBoss Group declared these guys to be non-persons. No pictures, no names, no mention whatsoever.
Re:Which one will be the slimmer J2EE?? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
you missed the point by a mile, the main purpose of the application server is to hold your business logic tier in a multi tier application, so you have a database-vendor neutral application, and the option to use multiple clients like web, standalone desktop applictions, mobile devices etc..etc.., scalability and mangeability are just bonuses...
Re:Commercial Support for OpenSource (Score:1, Informative)
Re:forgive my ignorance... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't be silly.
Even if one isn't ever going to change your database, and even if you will have only one type of client, using an application server can be helpful, because of the (hopefully) solid infrastructure they can provide.
And even if one isn't using an application server, it's good design practice to design things in a tiered fashion. You can, and should, keep the business logic pretty separate from the interface code. The same goes for the persistence layer. There's no reason to drop $100k on an app server just to keep your code separate.
That said, I have so far never actually seen a use of EJBs that wasn't a giant clusterfuck. I'm in the middle of rewriting a web app that was built with EJBs, and it's pathetic; using their expensive app server and their expensive Sun hardware, they can serve maybe 60 pageviews a minute.
I'm tearing most of that cruft out and just using Hibernate [bluemars.net], a great open-source object/relational persistence layer. One need notdto anything weird to one's objects (no special interfaces, no common base classes, no weird methods). It's swell.
But had I my druthers, I'd have used Prevayler [prevayler.org]. Their whole dataset is maybe 1 GB. For that, you don't even need a database; you can just keep it all in RAM.