Enhydra Server

Enhydra Server

Developer(s)	Lutris, Enhydra.org
Initial release	1999
Stable release	5.1.9 / March 23, 2005 (2005-03-23)
Written in	Java

Enhydra Server is a Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) application server developed by Lutris Technologies. It was used on most Lutris-developed sites (including the flagship Customatix project). In January 1999, Lutris open-sourced Enhydra Server and created a community of related projects. In October 1999, Lutris announced their intention to develop Enhydra Server v4 as an open-source enterprise-grade Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server (later to be known as Enhydra Enterprise). There was considerable press interest in whether this was compatible with Sun’s licensing model for Java EE, which was distributed under the Sun Community Source License (SCSL). In March 2000, Lutris launched a commercial, boxed Enhydra Server product including support. In April 2000, Lutris purchased InstantDB (a Java database management system distributed on a free-for-non-commercial-use basis) and announced their intent to open-source it. Enhydra Enterprise made its first beta release in April 2001. Shortly after that (June 2001) the InstantDB project was removed from enhydra.org, and Lutris announced that the InstantDB code would not after all be open-sourced. The Enhydra Enterprise open source repository was shut down in September 2001, with Lutris management citing the Java EE SCSL conditions as the reason, which gave rise to a lot of bad feeling in the open source community.^[1] Many community participants migrated to the fledgling JBoss project.

Enhydra server was a standalone server, but later it was an application framework and utilities built on top of JOnAS server. The latest incarnation of Enhydra Server consisted of Enhydra Application Framework, Enhydra IDE (Eclipse plugins), Enhydra Director (load balancer), Enhydra Conductor (clustering), Enhydra Console (JMX based monitoring), and more. It is likely that some of these features were merged into later versions of JOnAS. The current links to Enhydra seem to point to a company doing unrelated products. The last press release for Enhydra seems to be a 2006 press release on TheServerSide. Some work seems to be maintained in the Together GPL Downloads.^[2]

References