JBoss Inc. Monday announced that its new JBoss Application Server 4.0 is available.

The Atlanta company, which calls itself a "professional open source" company, said JBoss AS 4.0 has achieved certification for J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) version 1.4 for which it had to pass more than 23,000 tests of the Test Compatibility Kit.

In addition, JBoss officials said the company's new release includes aspect-oriented programming features, which make for enhanced performance, productivity and management of the middleware platform. The company claims JBoss AS 4.0 is the first open-source application server to feature both J2EE 1.4 compliance and aspect orientation.

JBoss AS 4.0 supports service-oriented architectures and enterprise-class services and clustering for any Java object, including POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). The system also includes Tomcat 5, a leading open-source Web container; JBossCache, the company's open-source transactional, distributed cache for fine-grained Java objects; Hibernate 2.1, an object-relational mapping engine; and the JBossIDE, which features tools such as server life-cycle control, development and debugging, as well as aspect-oriented programming support.

In a statement, Marc Fleury, chairman and CEO of JBoss, said: "Open source is rapidly moving beyond Linux and the operating system into middleware. As a company at the forefront of this second generation of open source, JBoss is focused on building an entire open source middleware stack with JBoss AS as the foundation. JBoss AS 4.0, the culmination of nearly three years of research in aspect orientation, showcases JBoss' ability to innovate ahead of the market ..."

JBoss AS 4.0 is available for licensing under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) open-source license, company officials said.

This article was first published on eweek.com.