Andrig (Andy) Miller, JBoss's VP of Engineering, spoke today at the inaugural Real-World Java Seminar in New York City about what's new at the JBoss Division of Red Hat. He covered a variety of topics, including explaining the difference between the Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss.org projects.

Among his announcements was advance word of what he called the "SOA Platform" (officially called TBD), combining JBoss ESB, JBoiss Rules/Drools, jBPM, etc. That release is not far off, Miller said.

As vice president of engineering, Miller manages JBoss’ expanding number of open source projects and development talent. Previously, he was vice president of technical architecture at Corporate Express, where he led the company’s initiative to move its information systems to open source to drive down costs, including the strategic decision to make JBoss the platform for corporate applications such as e-commerce, logistics and accounts receivable. So, as was evident to the audience in the Grand Ballroom in New York's historic Roosevelt Hotel, he not only talks the JBoss talk, he also walks the walk.

Miller covered the acquisition of the code for the Exadel Studio Pro product and the more recent acquisition of MetaMatrix.

"People have complained that things have been a little quiet at JBoss since the Red Hat acquisition," Miller explained. "But there are somewhat different considerations when we're part of a public company that did not constrain JBoss before, relating what can be said and when by whom."

He left no one in the audience in any doubt that there is plenty going on at JBoss. both on the product side and on the JBoss.org side of things, including Drools 4.0. JBoss Seam 2.0 Beta 1 (and JSFUnit Beta 1, which is coming soon, he said).