Earlier this month Red Hat said that it plans to “own” 50% of the server market by 2015. It appears from looking at almost two years of IDC data on the overall server market (the latest set of which was released November 29, 2007--view the pop-up image) that the Unix/Linux share of the market is stabilizing in the 40-45% range, so Red Hat can only reach its 50% goal by getting a piece of Windows' piece or a big piece of "other" while simultaneously getting almost all of the Unix baseline. Talk about setting a high bar for yourself.

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Red Hat's ambitious goal makes moot the perennial question of how quickly Linux systems will displace Unix. It will have to happen by 2015, which is actually a pretty good estimate given the the mothballing of a lot of Digital UNIX, AIX and HP-UX systems. In fact that likely migration makes Red Hat's objective doable but it will require perfect execution because--of course--Novell SUSE, Oracle Unbreakable Linux (a Red Hat clone) and others also want a piece of the action. Much of the work that Red Hat is doing around virtualization, high performance and high availability is all intended to get it towards this goal.

As the data shows Windows also continues toward the 50% of sales mark; they crossed the 40% threshold for the first time in the quarter illustrated (ending September 30, 2007).

Could the market boil down to two choices--Red Hat and Microsoft--by 2015? It will likely not be that clean cut (and virtualization confuses the issue more) but the IDC data says user decision making is getting easier and easier.

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In a recent podcast, I talk about some of the formative thinking underlying the modern-era open source software (OSS) culture. I mentioned the “Cathedral and the Bazaar” writings and my analogy that software development in the OSS era would either become the “Software Factory of the Future” or be like a cottage industry. I mean that in a nice way; I literally work from a cottage.

Some one that gives cosmic thinking to those sorts of OSS analogies is Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Inititiave (OSI). In this podcast we spend 5 minutes with Michael and his vision for OSI. The OSI is best known as the keeper of the flame when it comes to studying and approving licenses as compliant with the most well accepted definition of OSS. The OSI has other roles in the movement as well.

Also if you want to follow the recent process by which the OSI approved certain Microsoft licenses as OSI compliant, see here, here, and here.

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Groundwork Open Source is all over the news this month but when I look for a trend line in the press releases it comes back to their strategy of offerring large-enterprise functionality with small/medium enterprise (SME) terms and conditions. That should be an appealing value proposition. GroundWork is one of the few open source software (OSS) providers I have talked to that has an SME and channel-partner (as opposed to technology partner) approach to the market.

For example, GroundWork has recently hooked up with Nagios Enterprises to form a joint partnership focused around IT monitoring and management OSS. Nagios does the monitoring; Groundwork the management. According to Nagios creator and lead developer Ethan Galstad: “Over the past 18 months, GroundWork has done some great things with Nagios (through an OSS community effort) in developing a comprehensive IT management solution, and Nagios Enterprises can now extend the joint value further with the new formalized working relationship.”

GroundWork also announced this month the general availability of GroundWork monitoring solution for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions based on the Debian installation system. Ubuntu is the widely used version of Linux that is freely downloadable from the Internet and available on Dell Inspiron PCs in European countries including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. (Sorry but I tend to spend too much time talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux but there are other options out there.)

Both Nagios and Ubuntu are great solutions for midsize companies but such companies tend not to have the IT management staff to take advantage of them; GroundWork helps close that loop. Recently Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork Open Source, told me about the channel strategy that gets such large enterprise functionality to SMEs: “Partnering the way we are doing it allows each party to focus on their core competencies.” Groundwork has signed with leading HP systems integrators, Fujitsu in Japan (even though it has its own systems management offering); and Unisys. Groundwork is an integral part of Unisys 0asis;

Ranga targets mid market enterprises up to $2 billion but mostly companies with less than $200 million. He's as agnostic about OSS as I am; many of the companies targeted are Microsoft-centric shops. Groundwork supports open choice and is not just about monitoring and managing OSS stacks. Of course in addition to Windows, Groundwork runs on Linux and it also has a VMware appliance.

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This is just a time out to say Happy Thanksgiving to U.S. readers.

The U.S. version of this worldwide tradition is based on events that occured almost 400 years ago here on Cape Cod. Some interesting sidelights to the story are highlighted over at my personal web site, IT Investment Research.

To many, the most interesting sidelight is that the story does not begin with Plymouth Rock but at many points further "down" the Cape.

To others sadly, the story is not all about the Europeans that wandered all around Cape Cod that fall like a bunch of tourists today. Just as there are two sides to the open source software (OSS) story--which is why I am agnostic about OSS--there is another side to the Pilgrim's story. It is the saga of the Wampanoag that met the Pilgrims.

That story might have become less sad this year with the tribe's "recognition" by the U.S. federal government.

And the Wampanoag's story has an IT connection as well. One of the leaders of the movement by the Wampanoag to gain U.S federal government recognition was Russ Peters, a marketing manager at Honeywell Information Systems (HIS) in the 1970s. HIS is a predecessor of the French information technology systems supplier, Bull SA. There is more on Russ at my web site as well.

Don't eat too much turkey.

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The list of former closed-source software companies “going open source” gets longer and longer and I’m beginning see a couple of trends.
• First, as I said in writing about Volantis recently, OSS is no longer just a marketing strategy or an attempt to fix a strategic business issue. OSS is a legitimate software development model and a business strategy in and of itself for successful, established software suppliers.
• Second, I am starting to see some industry centricity, a sure sign that a technology is being accepted in the heart of enterprises where the needs for information technology meet up with the need for profits (keeping track of the payroll is one thing; making payrolls is what it’s really all about)

I saw the industry centricity more recently in talking to XAware of Colorado Springs which recently created an OSS project and the availability of its XAware 5 data integration software as OSS. XAware 5 is available under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) at www.xaware.org.

Bill Miller, XAware CTO and founder, said the company was founded in 2002 with some technical expertise out of the MCI research lab, also based in Colorado Springs (of 1990s “friends and family” fame, an earlier generation successful effort at data integration in the telecomm industry). XAware built up a healthy customer base in traditional fashion but was seeing OSS in customer sites more and more, and realized it could use OSS to build out extensions to its engine more quickly. (See my blog entry/podcast on whether OSS will be the salvation of SOA, which needs thousands of services to make it viable, a quantity that will never appear in a timely fashion from the vendor community.)

Bill noted that “it took a while to get there” because of cultural changes needed inside his company. He believes software today needs to be delivered in a fashion that people can be using 20 minutes after it is downloaded, which meant XAware had to make some technical changes to its earlier version. As a result, the XAware Engine is now built on the Spring Framework and ships with JBoss and MySQL (but runs with any other compatible application server and data source, or on its own if desired). It has also been changed to be an Eclipse plug in.

As for the industry centricity, data integration can be most easily tied to industries through XML vocabularies with which the XAware engine works. XAware supports industry accelerators for ACORD (insurance), EDI (manufacturing), HL7 (healthcare), and SWIFT and IFX (finance). Also long before OSS, the company had success in state and local government, an industry where OSS excels per conventional wisdom. The products can be used as well in more cross industry data migration projects and Bill says they have seen an uptake in providing a services orientation to enable loosely coupled data mashups in a Web 2.0 environment.

I think the industry centricity issue is so important that I am going to do a special report on the subject early in 2008. We’ll come around and visit with XAware again at that time.

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I read recently that Volantis Systems, a half-decade-old supplier of content management software specific to mobile devices, was releasing some of its most important software under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). That seemed interesting because my research has found that often when a company moves from more commercial terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) to open source software (OSS) Ts&Cs, it’s because the company is having some marketing or development issues. But that did not appear to be the case for Volantis which has built up its customer base pretty consistently since 2002 and includes AAA, AT&T, BEA, CBS, FT, IBM, MTN (South Africa) and even the WWE—to drop a few letters—among its client/partner roster.

I wanted to hear about its OSS motivation so this morning I caught up with Mark Watson, CEO of the UK-heritage Volantis, as he was passing through Waterloo Station. As a result I got some interesting OSS content about the mobile market from the mobile content guy while he was mobile.

Prior to co-founding Volantis, Mark spent 15 years at IBM in a variety of positions, including research and development, sales, and management. Mark was Volantis' CTO from the company's inception in 2000 until his move to CEO this June. Volantis Systems products include framework middleware for delivering mobile content to more than 250 million mobile phone users worldwide, and a set of related applications that sit on the framework performing such functions as content acquisition, feed management, rich media support and real-time wireless application protocol (WAP) conversion.

It is the framework middleware that is being re-introduced under the GNU v3 in January 2008. So why? "Our view is that the development of the mobile Internet is being held back by lack of access, for enterprises and developers, to the right (development) software – software… which can scale to support sites and applications as they become successful, across the market and across the world,” said Mark. OSS it turns out is a great way to move fast if content providers and purveyors have the right base to work from. None of them want to re-invent the underlying infrastructure because it is the content and/or the network that is their differentiation. As I have written elsewhere (see the third point at this link), that is exactly the phenomenon I expect to kick in if the thousands of services needed to make services oriented architecture (SOA) a success are going to materialize.

In its OSS version, the framework is called the Volantis Mobility Server. Volantis might squander any goodwill with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) gained from choosing GPL v3 when the FSF sees the list of patents accompanying Volantis' press release. But as Mark pointed out, Volantis probably “spent more” on legal issues than engineering issues in making this strategic change in direction to OSS. That's an OSS culture issue that needs some work if OSS Ts&Cs are going to become as prevalent as I believe they will be over the next decade. Traditional Ts&Cs will still be used for Volantis’ established customer base, which includes leading telecommunications providers and software partners such as IBM (Volantis is the WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enabler). And Mark has already found some prospects that would like OSS but not some of the “free as in air” restrictions of the GPL. Mark is willing to be flexible and find another Open Source Initiative approved OSS license structure.

Volantis is a long-time user of Linux, Tomcat, MySQL, PostGRES and other OSS technology and primarily gives back to the community via participation in standards bodies. The company primarily hopes its community will build the applications needed to spark more use of mobile Internet capability; it gets pretty heavy quality control already from its telecom users. In addition to releasing the code, Volantis will also host its own forge starting in January.

A major trend that Mark sees accelerating such development by the community is the ease of combining web applications with desktop features in the emerging AJAX-based markup paradigm that is replacing traditional Java programming in the mobile content space. He notes the buzz around the recent Google Android announcement as well.

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Recently, I did a feature article about the OSS movement’s effect on the business intelligence (BI) market. I came across this analysis of a May/June survey (free but registration required) fielded by Actuate, a BI vendor, on the adoption of open source software (OSS). I think it’s interesting but it might send users considering their commitment to the world of OSS terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) the wrong signals.

Before you go further, consider my biases right up front. You’ll have to read my many past blog posts on these pages or read the next two paragraphs in parenthesis. If you already know my biases relative to being an “OSS agnostic,” skip past the parenthesis.

(I believe OSS is a software development model, not a market or a business model. The development model involves code sharing across legal entities with wide-spread peer-based quality control/improvement/extension of the code. It is typically software that many people need but that does not provide anyone any particular competitive or other advantage. OSS has existed since the 1950s but the modern era of OSS dates to formal license Ts&Cs that began to appear in the 1980s and that reflect the development model. There are dozens of such licenses. Their Ts&Cs primarily involve the right to access the source code, change it and redistribute the original and/or the changes. Those Ts&Cs are different than Ts&Cs that come with software developed by programmers not sharing code across legal entities or sharing such code under restrictive intellectual property agreements. But the Ts&Cs are just different; they are not better or worse than the others’.

(More important, software licensing Ts&Cs are not a major factor in user buying decisions or overall market dynamics. Users decide which software to acquire because of its functionality. With OSS code, functionality is usually monetized the same way as non-OSS software. That is, it is monetized as a service. Such service can be delivered in the form of device/system-bundling arrangements, as subscription maintenance, as per-transaction fees and by other more creative but less prevalent means, such as giving it away in return for hoping you will read the ads that flash by you as you search the Internet. Acquiring software functionality bundled into a service or device/system or related to a service will be the predominant means that users acquire software by 2020. OSS will play a major role in that trend because its Ts&Cs concerning source availability and redistribution are more attuned to software functionality developed to be delivered as a service than the usual restrictive perpetual right to use licenses most associated with non-OSS software delivered as an executable.

(With that boring but necessary background, let me analyze the Actuate survey analysis.)

The first thing that hit me in reading the Actuate analysis is that although it relates to a demand-side survey (gauging user community plans and perceptions), it begins with another research firm’s opinion based on a supply-side (ask the vendors) methodology. I have discussed that other firm’s research here. OSS is not a discrete software market even if its usage can be measured separately—I can develop a market measurement model for any technology characteristic—but that characteristic (OSS Ts&Cs in this case) often has no meaning in understanding market dynamics.

The net-net of it is that if the OSS community hangs its hat on a supply-side metric, it suffers. By this measurement, OSS software accounts for less than 1% of the software market. If you are thinking about acquiring some software under OSS Ts&Cs, but hesitate to do so based on its small market share, dismiss market-share data.

Next, the Actuate survey only covers four countries and three industries (financial services, telecommunications and manufacturing). My comments below are based on the 390 people surveyed in North America. I didn’t see an “n” by industry so it’s hard to figure if a statistically significant number of respondents were involved from each. If you are not in one of geographic areas or industries, that does not mean that OSS is not for you.

The respondents are identified as “senior personnel” that were “invited” to participate. If the senior personnel are more IT staff than IT management, that’s a good sample base. An important question is “Who were the invited?” I have an email in to the Actuate folks and will let you know if the answer is relevant. Hopefully it is not just Actuate customers.

Analysis I have read about the survey, including in the Actuate document, highlights the reason people are not using OSS. But that appears to be based only on the answers from about 40-50 respondents so don't base any decisions on it. Of course, by my biases, everyone is most likely already using OSS (do you have an Oracle or IBM application server in your shop?) and those that aren’t will be, probably not even realizing it. By the end of the next decade, OSS Ts&Cs will just be part of the way most software is developed and monetized.

According to Actuate, the two most widely used products are Linux and Apache, each mentioned by 43.1% of respondents. Presumably that means Apache HTTP server for the reasons described in this recent feature article on ebizQ. The next most commonly used OSS distributions adopted by this group are MySQL (32.8%), Tomcat (29.5%), Mozilla (28.7%), PHP (23.3%), Eclipse (22.2%) and JBoss (15.1%). All of these statistics seem intuitively correct to me (which gives me confidence in the rest of the findings) with the exception of the prevalence of MySQL.

Counterintuitively (if that’s a word), awareness of OSS among public sector respondents in North America was lowest of the three industries. The conventional wisdom is that OSS is very popular among government users.

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I had an interesting conversation this week with Josep Mitja, the chief operating officer of a small but growing ERP company—Openbravo—of Pamplona, Spain. That’s right, Pamplona as in Hemingway and “The Sun Also Rises.” I am not sure if the founders of this open source software (OSS)-based company ever did the run through the city in front of the bulls that made Pamplona famous but they are definitely waving a big red cape in front of another bull, European ERP supplier SAP.

(To be honest, all I know about bull fighting is what I have seen in Hollywood movies and I really have no idea if a red cape is involved. We did enjoy Madrid, Segovia and Toledo on a long weekend many years ago however. Also, I got in trouble with animal-rights activists this week over on my Research 2.0 blog by making an analogy about dog fighting and now I am running the risk of being even more politically incorrect with every matador-related wordplay that comes to mind; so back to my point.)

Openbravo seems to be exhibiting a characteristic I am finding increasingly in successful OSS-based companies. For the ultimate success of the movement, OSS needs dozens if not hundreds of successful OSS application companies. In the OSS culture, these companies may be creating services as much as whole applications but the net result will be the same. The successful OSS application company I run into thinks about function first and OSS second (or even third depending on other tactics being used to execute against a business plan). I noted this first in a recent article chronicling an interview with John Newton of Alfresco. Openbravo meets that function-first criteria. That’s not to say it is not both taking from and giving back to the OSS community. Openbravo is very involved with its own forge of course, with the Open Solutions Alliance (Josep is on the board) as well as Apache and similar OSS foundations. But it understands that the OSS development model and licensing structure is a means to its end, not the end itself.

So why did SAP come to mind and not Compiere? Well there is the obvious ERP connection of course but it is also interesting that Openbravo is targeting the same small/medium enterprise (SME) market as SAP is with its new Business ByDesign (BBD) software announced in September as a service (SaaS) offering. Openbravo’s product features both a modern web-services-based design like BBD’s and Openbravo is also moving slowly towards SaaS just the way SAP is moving slowly (with full roll out of BBD not scheduled until 2008 or later). This gives Openbravo time to deliver to the SME market both the functionality and the delivery choices it wants. Openbravo already has a number of on-premise installations.

But like the good matador (sorry, I can’t help myself) I think Openbravo may have the footwork needed to more quickly react in the marketplace. That has always been the mark of the successful SME independent application software vendor from the glory days of J.D. Edwards (JDE) forward. Back in the day, JDE depended on the IBM System/38 and AS/400 to provide the infrastructure that let it be nimble. Today, OSS helps provide that quick-reaction ability to Openbravo (and all the other companies that want to get into the ring against the leading softwae suppliers). SAP and Oracle still want to build all the underlying tools themselves. Openbravo is not a shoe-string operation, having secured venture funding early in 2006 that allowed it to bring on Josep and other experienced management. It has also grown its headcount to over 60 from 9 in that time period.

I am not saying an Openbravo can knock SAP out (sorry, now I’m into prize fight analogies) but it’s good to see that as the JDE’s, Mapics, Ross’, ASK’s and similar companies become subjects for the Software History Museum, there are new players coming up to take their places. I will be doing a survey of OSS-based ERP products in December and I’ll tell you more about Openbravo after I finish that field work. But I give Josep and his company credit for spending more time thinking through the integrated data models and process engines needed for their chart of accounts and bill of materials processor and less time thinking about the OSS license wars and who said what about Microsoft.

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October's Service Oriented Architecture in Action virtual tradeshow here on ebizQ.net, at which I spoke, got me to thinking. About how SOA and open source software (OSS) fit together. One thing is critical to the thinking; SOA requires thousands of services to be successful. It will take OSS to provide those thousands of services because the vendor community cannot possibly provide them all.

It’s cosmic thinking. Because It begs the question whether OSS will develop like the long promised software factory of the future or like the cottage industry it has been since it started. If I were Carl Sagan, this would be all kind of the spinning wheel vs. the cotton gin sort of stuff. But you don’t have to go back that far—or go that far afield from software development to get the picture. The OSS movement has tended to revolve around a white paper called the Cathedral vs. the Bazzaar, by Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative group.

This four to five minute podcast goes into more detail. In addition, we will shortly have a podcast featuring Michael Tiemann, current executive director of the Open Source Initiative and you can hear about some of the key issues Michael sees for the organization. Maybe we’ll ask him the question: software factory or cottage industry?

Also if you want to skip the cosmic thinking about SOA and OSS, I will shortly complete a feature article on some of the issues IT staffs need to consider when choosing whether to use OSS in SOA. And the presentation I gave at the SOA in Action conference on ebizQ is also available for replay at the URL noted above.

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Following up on the initial Red Hat Enteprise Linux (RHEL) 5 announcement in March 2007, Red Hat filled out its stack strategy on November 7. The company extended the previously anticipated release of RHEL 5.1 to a concept called Linux Automation. Linux Automation provides for seamless application provisioning/management/monitoring across both physical and virtual servers as well as appliances and “the cloud.” The virtual server support was first made available with RHEL 5 and Red Hat says it has deployed to 18,000 servers in under six months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is immediately available to customers via Red Hat Network, Red Hat's own management automation platform. To support the broader Linux Automation concept, Red Hat will also make an Appliance Operating System available in 2008 and also said it struck a deal with Amazon making RHEL the first commerical operating environments supported on the Amazon Enterprise Cloud 2 (EC2). The latter is what the two companies are calling a “private beta” at this point. Other “clouds” can be supported also.

So whether a user or ISV is deploying to physical dedicated servers, virtual servers or the cloud, the application runs and can be managed the same way. When the appliance product is rolled out, it will integrate JBoss and other Red Hat products as well. The appliance of course will be moved to market via ISVs, who incorporate their own solution or solutions into the appliance. The cloud option is relevant to those that want to make their software available as a service (SaaS)

More interesting than this ambitious any-app/any-where/any-time strategy is an ambitious objective/goal. Red Hat predicts that this stack strategy will let it double its market share, and that it will end up driving over half the world’s servers by 2015. I'm not sure if that is an installed-based or shipped-that-year metric but the mothballing of a lot of Digital UNIX, AIX and HP-UX systems will at least support the latter. In addition Red Hat sees its products becoming a mainstay on the mainframe as well. Also contributing, there will be a lot of justifiable double counting as stacks like Red Hat's (and so far it's the only real game in town) forms the underpinning of virtualized Windows and VMware servers.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Attention all open source software (OSS) content management systems (CMS) and enterprise content management (ECM) software organizations:

I am researching the next in a series of open-source-software (OSS)-related Research Reports for ebizQ.

Previous reports have covered ESBs and business intelligence software.

My next report will focus on OSS content management system (CMS) and enterprise content management (ECM) application software and services, including software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

The ebizQ article on OSS CMS and ECM software is tentatively scheduled for release on ebizQ.net in December.

If you would like to formally participate in my data collection, please download and complete the 1-page survey form (see "Download File" below) and return to dennis@ebizq.net by Wednesday Novermber 21.

Download file

Note that as the survey indicates, content management software products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in an OSS application server product such as Geronimo) even if they are not “sold” as OSS themselves and no matter how they are monetized. Note that the survey form says ECM but I want to address the question: Is there a difference between CMS and ECM? If you have an opinion, let me know by filling out the short survey.

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The (U.S.) Federal Open Source Alliance, a joint effort of HP, Red Hat and Intel, have conducted and released survey results from what they call the “Federal Open Source Referendum” study. It’s based on 218 responses and was conducted online. That’s pretty thin, depending on how the sample was selected (“online” is a bad sign) and I am trying to get the actual report and survey instrument to better understand the methodology. All the alliance offers on its sort-of web site is a few slides. I can't even find a way to link you to the press release; it came over the Business Wire.

It would be nice to know the job responsibilities of the respondents, what software the respondents use currently, what open source software (OSS) they migrated to or are considering (is it operating infrastructure or applications?), and whether they use OSS without a subscription maintenance contract. The latter is the key marker. Those users—U.S. Federal government or not—that use OSS with a subscription maintenance contract do not really act any different than users acquiring closed-source software from a market dynamics perspective. IT staffs that embrace OSS in the community sense of the word (that is, using mailing lists and bulletin boards for their maintenance support and activiely giving back to the community) are really disruptive to the market. I’m sure that after spending a little time with the actual report, I could probably add some other demographic issues to better interpret the results.

The conclusions weren’t too earthshaking. The lead finding is that “71% of respondents note that their agency can benefit from open source.”

In general, the effort illustrates that the OSS movement needs some strong unbiased time-series market research to help it break out of the perception that it’s a niche IT movement.
-- Most quantitative data aobut OSS either measures revenue, which understates OSS market acceptance because the all-subscription-maintenance revenue model is back-end loaded, or it measures downloads, which overstates OSS market acceptance because a download does not translate into a production instance.
-- Most qualitative research I've seen to date is either sponsored by Microsoft (and not surprisingly finds that OSS has problems) or is sponsored by OSS-centric information-technology (IT) suppliers and finds the opposite.

Ironically maybe the U.S. federal government could solve the problem. It conducts weird research such as how many immigrants from Mongolia have applied for clamming licenses on Lower Cape Cod since the Red Tide scare of 1999. I am making that up so as not to offend anyone other than the very likely small demographic of Northeast U.S. Mongolian-born clam diggers (and the imaginary politician that earmarked the imaginary survey). Perhaps the U.S. Department of Commerce could really dig into the OSS movement. Write your congressperson.

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The Apache Struts group has announced that Struts 2.0.11 is a "General Availability" release, which is the highest quality grade of Apache Softwre Foundation (ASF) open source software (OSS) release. But don’t make the mistake I made and think that 2.0.11 is a next-generation replacement for various Struts 1.x.x releases. They are separate animals, like donkeys are parents of but different than mules (not sure the Struts group will like that analogy, nor will Mulesource). Both are popular Java web frameworks along with MyFaces, Tapestry and Wicket.

Struts 1.x.x is a control layer based on standard technologies like Java Servlets, JavaBeans, and other technology. It helps users create an extensible development environment based on published standards and the proven Model/View design pattern. Struts 2.x.x is more comprehensive and designed to streamline the full development cycle, from building, to deploying, to maintaining applications over time. Apache Struts 2 was originally known as WebWork 2. After working independently for several years, the WebWork and Struts communities joined forces to create Struts2. WebWork continues to deliver patch releases. There is also still a robust and vibrant community of developers using Struts 1 in production, according to its site, and it expects that thousands of teams will continue to base new projects on Struts 1, and continue to support existing projects, for "many, many years to come."

Of course, if you are starting a new project, and have your choice of frameworks, this might be a good time to consider whether you would like to continue to use Struts 1 or whether it's time to try Struts 2. The Struts group says there are "five reasons to migrate:
• "Your Struts 1 application is ready for its own version 2.
• "Your Struts 1 application is still under development or in the planning stages.
• "You inherited a Struts 1 application that needs work, and you don't understand how it works.
• "You would like to integrate a few Java Server Faces (JSF) components into your application.
• "The charming quirks of Struts 1 have become downright annoyances, and your team is ready for an elegant yet familiar solution. "

But the community also suggests five reasons not to migrate so check out the Struts home page.

At least the term Struts is now only the umbrella for two frameworks. According to one of the founders of the community, it also used to include Apache Shale, a web framework based off JSF. Although the Apache Struts project has two major versions, both are action (as opposed to component) based. Just remember, JSF is a "component" framework. If you are more into JSF, Struts 2 supports JSF components.

The 2.0.x series of the Apache Struts framework has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions: Servlet API 2.4, JSP API 2.0, Java 5, Backported Java 4 JARs are also available.

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