The Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo project team has released the much-anticipated Geronimo 1.0 Java application server.

Geronimo has undergone two years of development effort, including testing on Linux, Windows, Mac OS and zLinux, as well as many hardware platforms.

In addition, Geronimo 1.0 has been J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) 1.4 certified and features support for JBI (Java Business Integration), Jetty or Tomcat Web containers, a Web-enabled management console based on Java portlets, integration with the Eclipse Web Tools Project and integration of Apache Derby and the Apache Directory Server.

Meanwhile, in addition to the release of Geronimo 1.0, some Apache-based sister projects are being incubated as Geronimo subprojects, including ActiveMQ, ServiceMix and WADI (Web Application Distribution Infrastructure), Apache officials said. Apache released version 1.0 of Geronimo last week.

Geronimo was the heart of Gluecode Software Inc.'s open-source middleware stack known as Joe. When IBM bought Gluecode last May, the systems giant acquired the expertise and components Gluecode put into the Joe stack, which included Apache Geronimo, Apache Derby and ActiveMQ. Moreover, many of the Gluecode developers worked as core developers of Geronimo.

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IBM has renamed the Gluecode technology base the IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, Version 1.0, and is marketing it as its low-end application server offering.

As an open-source Java application server, Geronimo is viewed as competition for the JBoss and JOnAS open-source application servers.

When asked his reaction to the 1.0 release of Geronimo, Marc Fleury, chief executive of Atlanta-based JBoss Inc., said, "Snore."

Meanwhile, to the same question, Pierre Fricke, director of product management at JBoss, said: "JBoss continues to experience triple digit growth into 2006. Not only are we bringing middleware to the mass market, expanding business opportunity for our large ecosystem of partners, we see significant growth in migrations from proprietary application servers to JEMS [JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite] and our Professional Open Source model.

"Additionally, we are seeing dramatic increase in enterprise use of JEMS products such as jBPM (business process management and BPEL orchestration) and Portal," said Fricke.

"2006 will see JBoss rounding out its JEMS application and integration platforms with JBoss Transactions, JBoss Seam, JBoss Messaging, JBoss Rules and JBoss ESB."

Industry observers said Geronimo could have an impact on the application landscape over time.

"Initially, I don't think Geronimo will have a noticeable impact," said Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst with the Burton Group.

"The code is untried, so I suspect that most organizations will be somewhat hesitant to adopt it for production use until version 2.0 comes out. But the long-term impact might be very profound."

Manes continued: "Geronimo is the first open-source J2EE server that is licensed under the Apache license, which has almost no restrictions on its use—unlike JBoss or JOnAS, which are licensed under LGPL [Lesser General Public License]. The difference in licensing probably won't impact end-user adoption, but it will impact vendor adoption.

"Given the unrestricted nature of the Apache license, I suspect that a lot of vendors that today have adopted JBoss as their target open-source J2EE platform will migrate to Geronimo, because they can now redistribute Geronimo with no risk of GPL [General Public License] contamination," said Manes.

Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with RedMonk LLC, said: "I think it's actually an important release for the app server landscape. With the combined heft of Apache and IBM behind it, and close ties to Tomcat, Geronimo is a project on the upswing. Between it and JBoss, the pressure to innovate is firmly on the closed source app server suppliers."

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Added Manes: "It will take a while, but in a few years, it wouldn't surprise me to see a number of J2EE vendors start to adopt the Geronimo code base as the foundation for their products.

"The basic J2EE containers are commodities, and it isn't worth the investment to maintain proprietary code when perfectly adequate Apache-based code is available."

In addition, Manes said she thinks Geronimo "will also make Glassfish totally redundant. The community at large will view Geronimo as the J2EE reference implementation."

GlassFish is an open-source project sponsored by Sun Microsystems Inc. to build an open-source Java EE 5 (Java Enterprise Edition 5) application server.

Among the issues listed in the release notes for Geronimo 1.0 for inclusion or addressing in the next version, are: continuing to enhance the performance and usability of the server, improving cross-platform compatibility, and improving integration with third-party development tools and server products.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.