DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat released Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Appplication Platform (EAP) 7.2, which brings greater compliance with Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 8, JDK 11/Java SE 11, and further support for Microsoft Windows and enterprise Java microservices.

With this release, Red Hat is continuing our commitment to Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE, the new home for cloud-native Java, a community-driven specification under the Eclipse Foundation.

JBoss EAP is an open source Java EE 8-compliant application server and is used by organizations around the world to deploy and manage business-critical enterprise Java applications, whether in bare metal, virtualized, containerized, on-premises, private, public or hybrid cloud environments. JBoss EAP 7.2 is Java EE 8 certified, which means new functionality as well as updates to a variety of existing capabilities.

Java EE is a leading standard specification for community-driven enterprise software. As a Java EE-certified platform, JBoss EAP 7.2 is designed for organizations whose enterprise Java application workloads demand reliability, availability, scalability, performance, transactionality, and strong security capabilities, and that also may have compliance requirements that need to be juggled alongside a developer-friendly, more highly productive technology that offers flexible deployment. In addition, JBoss EAP 7.2 introduces support for OpenJDK 8 for Windows, OpenJDK 11 for Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oracle JDK 11/Java SE 11.

Java EE 8 certification introduces new capabilities designed to improve portability and security of applications and the manipulation of JSON documents. It also includes updates to increase the reusability of functionality across Java EE and Java SE resulting in a more coherent set of capabilities that are designed to improve the development experience, as well as enhancements related to the support of HTTP/2. JBoss EAP 7.2 also supports OpenJDK 11, Oracle JDK 11, Java SE 11, and long-term support releases of OpenJDK. Red Hat offers support for OpenJDK 8 until 2023 and OpenJDK 11 until 2024. With respect to enterprise Java microservices, JBoss EAP 7.2 includes Technology Preview support for Eclipse MicroProfile Config, REST Client, OpenTracing, and Health, four of the 12 libraries that are currently part of the community-driven open source project for enterprise Java microservices.

Other features and capabilities of JBoss EAP 7.2 include:

- certification for Red Hat Developer Studio 12

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta support

- Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 security enhancements help comply with U.S. federal security standards

- server management, console and CLI improvements can help apply and manage changes faster, which can shorten the time spent on maintenance tasks

- the ability to build once and deploy anywhere, within a single subscription

- new Maven bill-of-materials (BOMs) for JBoss EAP and Java EE 8

- tighter integration with Red Hat OpenShift for clustered applications

- support for IBM Db2 e11.1, IBM MQ 9, and PostgreSQL 10.1

As part of our efforts to respond to enhancement requests, JBoss EAP 7.2 includes the following capabilities in Technology Preview:

- a new connection pool implementation, Agroal Datasources Subsystem, that is designed to improve data source access performance

- the ability to configure components of the security subsystem from the management console

- Eclipse MicroProfile Config, a microservices library to manage application configurable parameters across environments

- Eclipse MicroProfile REST Client, a microservices library designed to more easily invoke microservices in a type-safe manner

- Eclipse MicroProfile OpenTracing, a microservices library to trace microservices-based applications

- Eclipse MicroProfile Health, a microservices library to check the state of microservices-based applications

- extension of RESTEasy to support asynchronous request processing

JBoss EAP 7.2 is a key component of Red Hat Application Runtimes, which also includes OpenJDK, Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, ActiveMQ, and Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, integrated and optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, offering a coherent hybrid cloud application platform on which they can optimize their existing Java applications, while innovating with enterprise Java and non-Java microservices, DevOps, CI/CD, and advanced deployment techniques.

Additionally, a JBoss EAP 7.2 subscription comes with the Red Hat technical and business flexibility. Red Hat subscriptions mean you can build applications and then decide how, when and where to deploy.