Red Hat, Inc. 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 this 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 organizations such as Apache, ObjectWeb and Eclipse driving the innovation. The application server was a natural next step for open source.”

Red Hat will test its Red Hat Application Server to ensure interoperability with other J2EE application platforms from BEA, IBM and Oracle. In addition, these vendors’ contributions to the open source community are being integrated into Red Hat Application Server to help enable seamless interoperability. 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.

“BEA has been working with Red Hat to integrate Beehive, the industry’s first easy-to-use open-source foundation for building enterprise JAVA and service oriented architecture applications, into future versions of Red Hat Application Server,” said Cornelius Willis, vice president, developer marketing, BEA Systems. “Based on BEA WebLogic Workshop, Beehive is designed to help foster new innovations through industry-wide collaboration to ensure investment protection for developer skills and applications while helping to expand the community of developers.”

“Oracle’s long-time support for open standards has contributed to our position as the leading provider of clustered Linux solutions for the database and application server,” said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle Corp. “We welcome Red Hat to the multiplatform application community and will support development and deployment of J2EE applications and Web services to Red Hat Application Server using Oracle JDeveloper 10g.”

Red Hat Application Server includes most commonly used features/functionality found in commercial J2EE application servers, including :

*Enterprise Application Server (JOnAS): EJBs

*Web Application Server (Tomcat): JSPs and Servlets

*Web Services: through AXIS from Apache

*JakartaServer Management: using JMX (JonAS/Tomcat)

*Scalability features: pooling, caching and storage optimization

*Messaging and transaction support

*Clustering for failover and load balancing

*Support for commodity architectures: IA-32, Itanium, PPC

“Through the Red Hat Application Server, customers can now benefit from the open source components ObjectWeb delivers such as JOnAS, JORAM, and JOTM to build enterprise-class offerings,” said Jean-Pierre Laisné, Chairman, ObjectWeb Consortium. “Together, Red Hat and ObjectWeb show the unique strength that pure-play open source solutions can provide to the enterprise.”

“At BroadVision, we are adopting support for open source at the platform layers because it provides our customers with unprecedented TCO reductions and flexibility,” said Keith Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Business Development at BroadVision. “We are excited to be working with Red Hat to provide our customers with unparalleled choice in deploying their solutions on open source software. BroadVision is committed to supporting open source software including the middleware layer across its entire suite of products for building self-service web applications.”

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. For more information, please visit http://www.redhat.com or call 866-2-REDHAT.