Red Hat has announced a certified developer program for JBoss, alongside new developer tools and a cloud-ready, scalable distributed data cache.

The announcements were made at JBoss World, alongside an offer of early registration for North American and European developers. The JBoss Certified Developer (JBCD) program will be based on what Randy Russell, director of certification at Red Hat describes as “a real world, hands-on exam.” To pass the exam candidates will need to create and modify code in a timed setting, which Russell said will mean IT managers will be better able to gauge developer readiness for projects, and will give consulting and IT companies with a clear way of showing technical expertise to potential customers.

Red Hat also said it would offer early registration for access to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. This is due out next year, and according to Red Hat reflects the vision of the future of Java application platforms for both traditional and cloud-based environments. The platform is designed to make it easier to adopt Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 technologies, to enable a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)-ready platform and to simplify the management of application servers.

Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's vice president and general manager of middleware business, said:

"Our next-generation platform is a major leap forward for application servers in terms of the advances in Java EE specification - including specifications that were heavily influenced and defined by Red Hat - and in the way application servers can be deployed, managed and administered."

Another development announced at the Red Hat Summit was the launch of JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, a cloud-ready, scalable distributed data cache. This is designed to ease the load on database servers, reduce response times in applications, and provide additional failure resilience.

The Data Grid is based on the JBoss Community project, Infinispan, and makes use of some of the concepts from NoSQL, according to Red Hat. Muzilla said that data grids are an inherently scalable offering for increasing throughput, resilience, and lowering response times of the data tier:

"From clustering to vertical scaling and positioning, data grids present an opportunity for significant cost advantages over other data-scaling approaches.”

For more information about JBoss Enterprise Middleware, visit www.jboss.com.

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