The JBoss project was initially developed in 1999 as a middleware research product. At that time, the application server provided barely an EJB container but, thanks to the interest of a growing community, the project quickly expanded to incorporate a complete portfolio of products.
One of the most important milestones of the project was release 4.x which is still the most used in production environments: this release, built on top of the highly successful 3.x line, was the first production-ready Java EE 1.4 application server in the industry.
Some of the key features of this innovative release are: full support for Java Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), full integration with the Hibernate persistence framework, and improved clustering and caching support.
At the end of 2008, a new major release of the application server hit the industry. The long awaited 5.0 release was finally born: based on the new Microcontainer kernel which replaced...