EJBCA 4 basic roadmap

On request I will try to outline a better view of the roadmap for EJBCA 4 than is visible in Jira.

- EJBCA 4 is primarily a technology upgrade, move from J2EE (EJB2.1) to JEE5 (EJB3 and JPA).

What will this give us you ask?

- Leaner, meaner, faster and better code. Smaller code base and less bundled 3rd party libraries.
- Easier, thus faster, development of new features, while keeping the code cleaner.
- Better support for different application servers, JEE5 is much better standardized.
- Better support for different databases, using hibernate makes configuration easy.
- Integration of CESeCore, the Common Criteria certified security core under development. This will pave the road for having EJBCA 4.x Common Criteria certified.

All this brings us better support for, for example, Glassfish. On the other hand we must drop support for OC4J, since it will never get JEE5 capabilities. EJBCA 4 will require Java 6, since even that is getting old and Oracle does not support Java 5 anymore.

So as you see this is mostly a technical/developer friendly release, ensuring that EJBCA will continue to be a front runner of PKI for the coming years.

This is also one conscious decision, significant effort is put into migrating EJBCA to use the latest technologies. This should however not affect users, who will be able to seamlessly upgrade from EJBCA 3.11 to EJBCA 4.

There will be a few new features not available in 3.x though, mostly minor gems.

For the full roadmap visit, Jira, but be aware that especially for minor features and fixes, many of the issues targeted for EJBCA 4 might shift priorities (thus postponed), and new ones will be brought in. You can still see what has been already fixed.

What is the status of EJBCA 4?
- Subversion trunk, up and running, stable and passing most tests.
- Further improvements, structural work and upgrade testing going on.

You can follow the quality progress at our Hudson server.

So you can check out EJBCA 4 from subversion already today and give it a spin. Only for the brave technical persons.

What is the time schedule?
- EJBCA 4.0 should go beta before the end of 2010. And be released sometime Q1 2011.

What happens after that?

Once EJBCA 4.0 is out we will start focusing more on the new admin web console, and getting EJBCA common criteria certified. Naturally new features will continue to be developed, currently new features arrive at a rather aggressive pace. 2011 is destined to be an exciting year.

Regards,
PrimeKey EJBCA Team