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"Through the Professional Open Source methodology, JBoss continues to execute on its roadmap to grow JBoss open source middleware into a comprehensive software infrastructure suite," said Shaun Connolly, JBoss's vice president of product management, as the Atlanta, GA-based company this week announced an update of recent releases of its open source projects.

"JBoss is fully committed to bringing the power of J2EE to all programmers. By dramatically simplifying J2EE development, many more developers can quickly and easily take advantage of the increasing range of services within the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System," Connolly continued.

Recent releases and updates for JBoss projects include:

Hibernate 3.0 - This so-called "landmark release" of the market-leading Hibernate object/relational mapping (ORM) technology was unveiled at JBoss World and features rich new functionality to support enterprise-level persistence. These new features include support for temporal, or historical, data; support for hand-generated SQL; reporting and monitoring capabilities using any JMX compatible console; support for the latest Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB3) draft specification; and a new Hibernate toolset based on the JBoss Eclipse IDE. A list of what's new in Hibernate 3.0 is available at http://www.hibernate.org/200.html#A3, and the download is available at http://www.hibernate.org/30.html.

EJB 3.0 Preview 4: EJB 3.0 represents a major improvement and simplification of the J2EE platform and JBoss has been an active leader in the development of the specification. The goal of EJB 3.0 is to simplify the development of Java applications and standardize the persistence API for the Java platform. JBoss has implemented most of the major features of the EJB 3.0 Early Draft 2 specification, and with a final release expected later in 2005, developers are encouraged to download and use the EJB 3.0 Preview today. More information for the EJB 3.0 Preview release is available at http://www.jboss.com/products/ejb3.

JBoss Eclipse IDE 1.5 Alpha: JBoss Eclipse IDE extends Eclipse with a series of plug-ins that enable programmers to develop, deploy, test and debug their JEMS-based applications within the Eclipse IDE. With a final release expected later in 2005, this JBoss Eclipse IDE Alpha release provides new features that simplify AOP, EJB3, Hibernate and JBoss jBPM application development. More information for this JBoss Eclipse IDE community release is available at http://www.jboss.com/products/jbosside.

JBoss jBPM 3.0 Alpha: JBoss jBPM combines easy development of workflow applications with a flexible and scalable process engine that enables coordination between applications and services. With a final release expected later in 2005, this JBoss jBPM Alpha release provides new features that simplify process-oriented application development, including a new graphical process designer. The Alpha release can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=70542 and documentation is available at http://jbpm.org/3/ and http://jbpm.org/gpd/.

JBoss Portal 2.0 Beta: JBoss Portal 2.0 will offer an integrated framework for building, deploying and maintaining flexible and scalable enterprise portals. With a final release expected later in 2005, this JBoss Portal Beta release provides an initial portal framework, content management system, forum portlet, user, role and permission administration, and single-sign on support. More information for this JBoss Portal community release is available at http://www.jboss.com/products/jbossportal.