Following more than a year of wrangling over the terms and other issues relating to the testing, JBoss and Sun Microsystems Inc., which administers the Java platform along with the Java Community Process, came to terms and JBoss has since passed the test suite.

JBoss refers to itself as a "professional open source" company and Marc Fleury, president and CEO of Atlanta-based JBoss, said J2EE compatibility "strengthens JBoss' vision of professional open source." Fleury called the passing of the test suite "an important milestone in the effort to bring J2EE and open source together."

The version of the application server to pass the tests is JBoss 4.0, which is the first JBoss version to do so.

In a statement, Rob Wilkinson, director of the Java/J2EE program in the systems and technology division at Unisys Corp., of Blue Bell, Pa., said, "An enterprise can now deploy the JBoss app server with the certain knowledge that it is completely compatible with the J2EE standard and that specifications written to the standard will remain completely portable, a critical need for our customers."

This article was first published on eweek.com.