Chapter 2. Overview of JBoss EAP

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.0 (JBoss EAP 7) is a certified implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) Full and Web profile specifications.

Major versions of JBoss EAP are forked from the Wildfly community project at certain points where the community project has reached the desired feature completeness level. After that point, an extended period of testing and productization takes place, in which JBoss EAP is stabilized, certified, and enhanced for production use. During the lifetime of a JBoss EAP major version, selected features may be cherry-picked and back-ported from the community project into a series of feature enhancing minor releases within the same major version family. For example, JBoss EAP 7.0 is forked from WildFly 10.

JBoss EAP provides preconfigured options for features such as high-availability clustering, messaging, and distributed caching. It also enables users to write, deploy, and run applications using the various APIs and services that JBoss EAP provides.

JBoss EAP includes a modular structure that allows service enabling only when required, improving startup speed. The web-based management console and management command line interface (CLI) make editing XML configuration files unnecessary and add the ability to script and automate tasks. In addition, JBoss EAP includes APIs and development frameworks for quickly developing secure and scalable Java EE applications.

Many of the APIs and capabilities that are exposed to applications deployed to JBoss EAP are organized into subsystems. These subsystems can be configured by administrators to provide different behavior, depending on the goal of the application. For instance, if an application requires a database, a datasource can be configured in the datasources subsystem and accessed by that application after it is deployed to that JBoss EAP server or domain.

High availability (HA) in JBoss EAP refers to multiple JBoss EAP instances working together to provide applications that are more resistant to fluctuations in traffic, server load, and server failure. HA incorporates concepts such as scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance.

In addition to providing functionality and APIs to its applications, JBoss EAP has powerful management capabilities. These management capabilities differ depending on which operating mode is used to start JBoss EAP. JBoss EAP offers a standalone server operating mode for managing discrete instances and a managed domain operating mode for managing groups of instances from a single control point.