"Today, JBoss has achieved mass adoption at the middleware layer with market-leading technologies like JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and Apache Tomcat," said newly-named director of product management Pierre Fricke (pictured), as JBoss  today released JBoss Portal 2.0, a significant upgrade of its open source, standards-based portal offering.

With JBoss Portal, JBoss continues to push open source up the stack.

"Now, JBoss is moving up the stack and bringing Professional Open Source with mass-market economics to a critical enterprise technology. With JBoss Portal, JBoss has delivered an enterprise quality product that reflects our longstanding commitment to open source, open standards and simplified development and deployment of J2EE applications," Fricke added.

Fricke comes to JBoss from IDEAS International (formerly D.H. Brown Associates), where he was research vice president focused on application and integration infrastructure. Prior to IDEAS International, Fricke was a leading strategist at IBM in the areas of interoperability, integration, WebSphere, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux and open source. At IBM, he was also an AIX developer, product manager and development manager.

A core piece of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS), JBoss Portal 2.0 embraces the Java portlet API specification (JSR-168) and provides an extensible portal framework that integrates dynamic Web pages and applications within standardized and reusable portlets. By supporting open standards, JBoss Portal can incorporate Web Services and J2EE-based components into the portal as portlets. 

JBoss Portal enables the user to combine applications and content into a unified presentation, simplifying access to these applications. Portals developed with JBoss Portal can be customized based on users, roles, security needs and administrative settings. By providing an integrated and secure user interface across applications, JBoss Portal makes it easier for users to leverage existing applications.

"Delivering strategic information technology solutions to address the complex business needs of clients is paramount to AEM Corp's business," said Joe Dickman, managing director, AEM Corporation. "JBoss Portal 2.0's robust portal framework enables us to offer our clients access to a proven, cost-effective interoperable platform that is standards-based and will improve their productivity. Furthermore, using the single sign-on feature enables our customers to use one portal interface which increases productivity, reduces errors and decreases response time." 

Dave Litwack, Novell senior vice president and general manager for Identity Driven Products, commented, "Novell is demonstrating its commitment by donating its Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard-based portlet container and portlet library and by participating in the evolution and architecture of JBoss Portal 2.0. We will continue to contribute and help build out JEMS as the leading open source middleware platform."

JBoss will showcase demonstrations of JBoss Portal as well as new releases of JBoss Application Server 4, Hibernate 3 and JBoss Eclipse IDE with EJB 3.0 (see today's press release, "JBoss Simplifies J2EE Development with EJB 3.0") during the JavaOne Conference, booth #405, June 27-30, 2005 in San Francisco, Calif.