Since March 15th of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) is available in the Version 6 Beta. The EAP is based on the Java EE 6 certified JBoss AS 7.1 community release, which impresses not only by the fast start-up time and low memory consumption but also by its new clean architecture.

At the moment, the EAP 6 Beta is pretty close to the community version. It includes a few critical bug fixes and some brandings. The differences will be larger with the on going quality assurance and maintenance phase.

A magnificent enhancement to the previous version is, that the EAP 6 ships with a Maven repository, which includes all EAP-related Maven artifacts. The missing maven repository was a big disadvantage of previous EAP versions. The required Maven artifacts had to be manually deployed from the EAP distribution into your own local Maven repository or into your enterprise Maven repository like Nexus or Artifactory.

In contrast to the public JBoss community Maven repository, the EAP 6 Maven repository is available as complete zip file download at the Redhat Customer Portal. Thus, the repository can be easily integrated into your own enterprise Maven repository or, to get started quickly, as local file system repository.

If you are not using an own enterprise Maven repository, you need to configure your local maven configuration to make the repository available. The maven settings.xml configuration file is usually located in your home directory in the folder .m2.

<settings>
   ...
   <profiles>
      ...
      <profile>
         <id>jboss-eap-repository</id>
         <repositories>
            <repository>
               <id>jboss-eap-repository</id>
               <name>JBoss EAP Maven Repository</name>
               <url>file:///path/to/repo/jboss-eap-6.0-maven-repository</url>
               <layout>default</layout>
               <releases>
                  <enabled>true</enabled>
                  <updatePolicy>never</updatePolicy>
               </releases>
               <snapshots>
                  <enabled>false</enabled>
                  <updatePolicy>never</updatePolicy>
               </snapshots>
            </repository>
         </repositories>
           
        <pluginRepositories>
           <pluginRepository>
              <id>jboss-eap-repository-group</id>
              <name>JBoss EAP Maven Repository</name>
              <url>file:///path/to/repo/jboss-eap-6.0-maven-repository</url>
              <layout>default</layout>
              <releases>
                 <enabled>true</enabled>
                 <updatePolicy>never</updatePolicy>
              </releases>
              <snapshots>
                 <enabled>false</enabled>
                 <updatePolicy>never</updatePolicy>
              </snapshots>
           </pluginRepository>
        </pluginRepositories>
     </profile>
  </profiles>

  <activeProfiles>
     <activeProfile>jboss-eap-repository</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>
   ...
</settings>

Using this configuration the EAP-releated Maven artifacts are available as local file-based Maven repository.

If your project follows the best practices concerning the usage of the Maven dependency management, you can now easily migrate from JBoss AS 7 to EAP 6: This is done by adding the Version numbers suffix –redhat-1 to the EAP-related maven dependencies. Below an example for the Hibernate core library and the JBoss webservice native stack libraries:

<dependencyManagement>
   <dependencies>
      ...
      <dependency>
         <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
         <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
         <version>4.0.2.Final-redhat-1</version>
      </dependency>

      <dependency>
         <groupId>org.jboss.ws.native</groupId>
         <artifactId>jbossws-native</artifactId>
         <version>4.0.1.GA-redhat-1</version>
      </dependency>
      ...
   </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

The provided EAP enterprise Maven repository makes it not only much easier to migrate from the community version to the EAP, it make is also easier to upgrade to new EAP versions.

We are looking forward to the final release of the EAP 6. But, it will probable take some time for the QA to polish the distribution.