The recent announcement that Red Hat will acquire JBoss will have some interesting effects in the open-source application server domain.

Several years ago when Red Hat started to charge for its Linux distribution by-way-of the Red Hat Network, the justification was that the for-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution was guaranteed to be fully integrated, tested and stable for longer periods of time than the spin-off open-source (free) Fedora distribution. See the official Red Hat comparison below:

https://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora/

If open-source products are to ever challenge well-established commercial offerings, the documentation provided by them must improve greatly.

During the past few weeks, I have been evaluating two open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) projects: Mule and ServiceMix, for use in an application I am currently working on. My initial glance of their respective websites led me to believe that both of these projects had a vast amount of documentation that would allow me to quickly learn how to use their products and be productive with them in a short period of time.

In today’s business world, time is an invaluable commodity. Recently, while doing research for an on-going project, I came across an open-source product that will save you a great deal of time and effort if you are responsible for installing and configuring a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) environment in your organization.

The product is called XAMPP and it is available for Linux, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X environments. XAMPP is an Apache distribution that includes fully integrated and configured versions of the following components (in the Windows 1.5.1 version):

* Apache HTTPD 2.2.0