IBM and Covalent Technologies have announced they have contributed technology to the Apache Geronimo community to help enterprise customers easily migrate from the JBoss Application Server to the open source Apache Geronimo application server, which is free to download and use.

The new migration tool being contributed to the Apache Geronimo community converts applications built for JBoss to Geronimo by generating the appropriate configuration files.

The Apache Geronimo Application Server is the lightweight J2EE-compatible pure open source application server project of the Apache Software Foundation. The easy-to-configure application server is built using open source components to help Java developers, small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) and departmental users reduce the complexity of application development by pre-integrating the most common services for building mainstream Java applications.

Apache Geronimo and other application servers based on the open source software have been demonstrating tremendous growth. According to a recent report from Evans Data Corporation, in a single year, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, which is based on Apache Geronimo, gained 16 points of market share with Eclipse developers, versus only a 6.6 share gain for JBoss. Additionally, more than 600 independent software vendors and systems integrators have joined IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition partner initiative in just six months. As a direct result of that initiative, more than 200 ISVs have developed and introduced new software applications that support WAS Community Edition. Customers are using WAS Community Edition to provide departmental and small and medium-sized customers with an open source foundation for a service oriented architecture (SOA) that can scale to meet business needs.