JBoss Inc. is hosting its first JBoss World conference in Atlanta this week and is announcing new programs and projects aimed at broadening the scope of its open-source offerings and overall ecosystem.

Marc Fleury, CEO of JBoss, said the company will announce the JBoss Network, a community environment for JBoss developers, akin to the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) and other developer networks, such as BEA Systems Inc.'s dev2dev, Oracle Corp's Oracle Technology Network, IBM Corp.'s developerWorks and Borland Software Corp.'s Borland Developer Network.

Through the network JBoss developers can access technical knowledge, receive software patches and upgrades and manage their applications, the company said.

In addition, at the JBoss World 2005 conference in Atlanta this week, JBoss will announce the JBoss Open Source Federation, which is essentially a hosting site for projects other than JBoss projects that would like to benefit from the JBoss model, Fleury said.

Click here to read more about Sun adding more support for its community development environment and offering new tools for Java developers.

The new federation provides access to value-added services, technology infrastructure and marketing support for open-source projects that integrate with the (JEMS) JBoss Enterprise Middleware System and share the professional open-source vision of JBoss, the company said.

Initial projects to be included in the JBoss Open Source Federation include Funambol, an open-source effort to create a mobile application platform implementing the SyncML protocol; JasperReports, an open-source reporting solution; the JBoss Administration Console, to which Unisys Corp. is contributing; and XWiki, an open-source wiki engine written in Java, the company said.

"We have grown to understand our open-source model as something applicable to many other things than open source," Fleury said.

"JBoss Federation is a hosting site so that other projects, not just JBoss projects, but other projects that want to open source can come in. We don't want to be a SourceForge or anything, and have only five that are viable, and we don't want to be Apache."

JBoss Open Source Federation projects will have to prove to be integratable with JEMS, and the projects will share the same JBoss Forge infrastructure.

JBoss Forge, currently in beta test, will deliver free hosting; project Web pages; task management, project management and bug tracking; forums, wikis and blogs; documentation download; e-mail notification lists; and integration with SourceForge for CVS (concurrent versions system) support, the company said.

Moreover, sources said a possible candidate for the JBoss Open Source Federation could be an open-source ESB (enterprise service bus) project that JBoss and Iona Technologies are jointly working on.

However, neither JBoss nor Iona would confirm the project or that it might fall under the JBoss Federation.

JBoss announced Hibernate 3.0, the first release of the Hibernate object/relational mapping technology since it became part of the JBoss professional open-source model.

Next Page: The model proves itself.