JBoss 7

Yesterday I tried the brand new JBoss AS 7, deploying an application that uses many JavaEE resources: session beans, JPA, security, JMS, JSF.

At first sight, it looked impressive. A lot simpler than previous versions (JBoss had turned almost unmanageable). Much simpler configuration (it is now possible to change ports without having to edit 345 cryptic configuration files). More modular, quickier. Great

However, 4 problems convinced me that JBoss has released too quickly an immature product:
- Documentation is still incomplete. This is pretty annoying since JBoss 7 configuration is radically different from previous versions
- XML configuration file is re-written by the server as it runs. With its own format, removing the comments, and so on.
- Management console offers interesting capabilities but it has bugs (as "field is not writeable" error when trying to edit a datasource JNDI name).

- Worst of all, i ran into a bug (AS7-1602) ("Missing annotation index to scan entity classes") that prevented from sucessfully deploying my app. Bug that happens in a basical use case.

Conclusion: very interesting, i'll keep trying new versions. But i'll also keep my apps on JBoss 6 for a while.