Red Hat, together with its JBoss Solution Partners, has announced the formation of a new open source community project focused on enterprise-class middleware migrations. The JBoss MASS (migration assistance) community will focus on the creation of migration tools and a migration resource center to accelerate the adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Numerous JBoss solution providers make up the founding Red Hat partners, including: Amentra, a Red Hat company; CityTech, Consilium1, Exadel, Freedom OSS, RivetLogic, Unisys, and Vizuri.

The community's end goal is to make it easier for customers to switch from proprietary middleware deployments to JBoss Enterprise Middleware. To do so, the project will provide Enterprise IT and JBoss Solution Providers with the tools and information necessary to help their customers make the transition to JBoss. JBoss MASS will initially focus on application server migration, but will eventually broaden to include middleware technologies like portals, SOA and web services.

The JBoss MASS community will aim to provide:

- Migration utilities for JBoss Enterprise Middleware technologies, starting with tools to move from proprietary application servers to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

- A community to connect new JBoss customers with existing customers and partners who have extensive migration experience

- Best practices and a knowledge-sharing resource center for migrating to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

The project is now live on the JBoss.org Community.