Red Hat announced that its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) by means of its JBoss Application Server 7 on Wednesday. OpenShift's support of Java EE 6 makes it the first PaaS development environment to support Java EE 6, differentiating it from competitors such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud Foundry. OpenShift's support of Java EE 6 provides developers with access to the latest enhancements in Java technology and facilitates the migration of Java based applications to the cloud. Java EE 6 includes "Context and Dependency Injection (CDI), a standards-based, modern programming framework that makes it easier for developers to build dynamic applications and picks up where some proprietary frameworks left off."
JBoss Application Server 7 enables OpenShift's support of Java EE 6 and additionally marks the foundation of Red Hat's forthcoming JBoss Enterprise Application 6. Released with limited access in May 2011, JBoss Enterprise Application 6 constitutes Red Hat's vision of "the future of Java application platforms for both traditional and cloud-based environments." JBoss Enterprise Application 6 is expected to be released for general access early in 2012.
Red Hat's press release about OpenShift's support of Java EE 6 noted that "the combination of OpenShift with JBoss application server now allows Java EE to be more easily scaled, managed and monitored in the cloud." Moreover, "developers looking for a faster on-ramp to the cloud with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities can use OpenShift so they can focus on coding mobile, social and enterprise applications while leaving stack setup, maintenance and operational concerns to a trusted hosted service." Scarcely three months old, OpenShift is an open source PaaS that supports Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java EE, Spring, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, MemBase and Memcache.