Covalent Technologies announced today that it will offer full commercial support for Apache Geronimo 1.0, the open source J2EE application server developed and recently made available by the Apache Software Foundation and distributed under the Apache license. Support for Apache Geronimo complements Covalent’s support offerings for the Apache Axis Web Services Framework, the Apache HTTP Web Server, and the Apache Tomcat Application Server, among the most popular open source components in the world today.

Designed to help accelerate development and deployment efforts by leveraging current innovations from the open source community, Apache Geronimo provides a readily accessible and flexible foundation for building Java applications. Apache Geronimo unites best-of-breed technologies across the broader open source community to support J2EE specifications.

J2EE 1.4 certified, Geronimo 1.0 offers one of the most flexible architectures in the application server market, allowing an unmatched ease of integration via its kernel and GBean architecture. The release includes support for ActiveMQ, OpenEJB, and Tomcat Web container deployment options, a complete Web-enabled management console based on Java Portlets, full integration with the Eclipse Web Tools Project, and integration of Apache Derby and the Apache Directory Server.

“Apache Geronimo, now a fully certified J2EE platform, is competitive with other J2EE application servers and should be considered by customers when choosing a J2EE solution,” said Richard Monson-Haefel (pictured), senior analyst with The Burton Group and co-founder of the Apache Geronimo project. “However, we’ve been concerned about support services available for Geronimo. IBM Gluecode aside, there has not been a lot of commercial services offered around the project. This move by Covalent is comforting and promising. Expert commercial support is extremely important to the future of the Geronimo platform,” he added.