Migrating to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

From a small application server to an Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss touched new heights in providing solutions to Business, SOA, portals and Data service after accepting their challenges. In today's world where service providers like Oracle owned BEA Weblogic server and IBM Webshere licenses costs nearly half of your IT Budget, JBoss offers a Open Source solution which is better in performance and more flexible. Also Jboss provides support at a very lower cost to any IT organization.

JBoss Features and Components

Jboss Enterprise Middleware platform comes along with many components and various features. A few of them are briefly described below:

Component	Description
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform	Platform that provides Java Enterprise Edition container having capabilities to host large scale Java application deployment, including Clustering, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Cache. Web application framework like Seam and ORM tool Hibernate are also integrated in a single distribution with the application server
JBoss Developer Studio	It is a rich application Eclipse-based Web 2.0 tool with preconfigured Jboss Enterprise Application platform.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform	An ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)-based platform that enables message delivery, transformation, and content based routing, orchestration and service registration. It is also integrated with the JBoss jBPM and Rules Frameworks in a single distribution.
JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform	Provides resource management and simple application integration.
JBoss Seam Framework	Seam is a powerful web application framework for building Web 2.0 applications. Seam integrated many technologies into a single framework like Java Server Faces (JSF), Java Portlets, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - AJAX, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3) and Business Process Management.
JBoss Hibernate Framework	One of the leading ORM tool used by many IT organization for development, used to interact with database.
JBoss jBPM Framework	Designed to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services by automating a wide set of business problems.

Migration Planning

Planning is the first step to a successful migration. Before you start migration first take a complete inventory of the current running systems to understand the application environment, its dependencies and all baseline requirements that must be replicated to the new environment. Doing this homework will provide a help in migrating components into the new platform and also in selecting appropriate hardware to support the application with optimal performance. In order to create a solid foundation for understanding the full scope of the migration effort, you have to plan steps. These steps promote proper transparency and allow proper expectations to be set with the business and IT stakeholders. Migration steps are as follows:

 1. Hardware Configuration

• Currently running Operating system and version along with updates applied.
• Number and type of processors
• Memory capacity
• Size and type of physical disks/storage

 2. Software specifications:

• JVM and JRE versions with applied patches info.
• Application server and version with applied patch information.
• Additional application server components like portal, ESB, or business process mapping tools.
• Any Third party, vendor-specific and open source components or libraries used.
• Clustering configurations used.
• Integrated applications

3. Review complete application to identify any code or configuration incompatibilities that will be  required to be changed code during the migration.

4. Review all build and deployment processes to identify any that have direct coupling with the current server environment.

5. Review all monitoring and administration procedures and tools in place to identify any that will be required to modified or replaced to work with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.