JBoss Founder Interview

peterdaly writes "The JBoss website has an interview with Marc Fleury, the JBoss founder regarding his vision. In case you have been living under a rock, JBoss is an Open Source Java Application Server (J2EE) which has been picking up tons of steam recently, especially with the recent introduction of features like clustering. Competing products from companies like IBM (WebSphere) and BEA (WebLogic) go for tens of thousands of dollars, which is interesting since JBoss is starting to have features the big boys don't. JBoss had 72,000 downloads in October. This is a project to watch."

Comments

Tomcat

[RazzleFrog]

How does this compare with Apache's Tomcat (Jakarta) project?

To Watch?

[md17]

This is not just a project to watch... When 3.0 is release, all other Java Middleware will be worthless. It is more than a project to watch, but one to support, use, and contribute to.

Re:To Watch?

[Fnkmaster]

I'm not going to disagree on this entirely - if you are willing and able in a shop to go the pure IBM route, then you can get a lot of benefits from that approach. However, you suffer from SERIOUS vendor tie in. Compared more realistically to a product like Weblogic, however, I think JBoss stands up admirably. You can get integration with IDEs and debuggers via add-on modules to JBuilder, etc. It may not be as easy to get and as smooth as the pure IBM approach, but you can maintain some degree of portability and you can keep your costs drastically lower, and still deploy in non-IBM shops. Anyway, just my experiences as the CTO of a company making J2EE-based apps that we sell to others - we can't afford to be an IBM shop in every sense of that word.

The Apache of Java servers?

[imrdkl]

This sounds pretty nice. We've already sold our souls to BEA, but having used Resin and Tomcat for production deployment before BEA, we are not afraid to try something new. BEA is still not doing for us what we expected, especially in it's loadbalancing and proxying capabilities. The Apache integration for BEA requires a new vhost for every single cluster, and the "load balancing" is simple round-robin. It sounds like this JBoss has that beat already.

An apache integration is important for us, however, since apache is our frontline proxy. Anyone know if JBoss has an apache module yet?

Performance?

[betis70]

I have heard a number of negative things about JBoss's performance under heavy loads. Anyone with experience using it care to comment? It seems like the clustering would really help such situations, and I am excited to see it advancing as well as it is. ..

My JBoss experiences

[pHalec]

I've been using JBoss for a little over a year, and my experience has been very good. It's fast, reliable, and seems to keep quite up-to-date with developing standards.

This kind of project is exactly what the free software world needs - usable, cutting-edge, and easily comparable with competing proprietary products.

This project has cemented my opinion on Java on Linux as a server platform, and when combined with PostgreSQL, it forms a complete and surprisingly robust setup.

I wish the JBoss team the best of luck and fully intend to keep using and recommending their software.

Re:Server-side Diversity?

[Space cowboy]

Mixed platforms on the server side are the norm rather than the exception, in the market where JBoss is trying to position itself.

Consider that JBoss is (will be, in some respects) a J2EE-compliant system, in everything except name. The purpose of J2EE is to deploy in large-scale environments... where you potentially have PC/W2K, Solaris, IBM S390, and God knows what else already providing a business solution.

You will not get a contract to replace the business systems from top to bottom, so take the view that you'll integrate into them instead. Now you're talking multi-tier Facades and Interfaces in order to get these things talking to each other.

You'll want to design things so that there is as little interdependence on co-operating subsystems as possible. Read 'Design Patterns'. Have a serious *think* about XML. Look at the Java libraries and the J2EE designs. Understand.

Have you ever noticed that it "just seems easier" to do things in Java than C/C++/VB(spit!) when there's any degree of complexity ? (I'm not talking about a couple of days' hacking, I'm talking about a designed system). There's a good reason why Java works so well - it's been designed well from the bottom up.

J2EE (and hence JBoss) take that elegance to a higher level of abstraction, but what they're doing is to continue the excellent design principles of the class libraries.

A happy JBoss user.

Simon.

We're switching to JBoss

[under_score]

This isn't a big deal, but I've been very wary of J2EE app servers. I've been working with server-side Java for about 4 years now, and previously with EOF (Nextstep/Webobjects). EJB is incredibly broken compared to EOF/WebObjects. But my online educational system Oomind is running on Tomcat right now, and needs a more complete platform. So we are moving. And after some careful analysis and real world experience, we're choosing JBoss. Frankly, it being open-source is a very significant factor. Kudos to JBoss and its developers!

Question about clustering

[RelliK]

I hope somebody can answer this. I am wondering how the application-level clustering (i.e. what JBoss, Weblogic, et al have) compares to the IP-level clustering (i.e. something like the Linux virtual server, or the embedded hardware equivalent from Cisco et al). There would be less overhead at the IP level, so, it seems the load balancing would be more efficient. Also, by doing load balancing at this level you can cluster just about any application -- be it a web/ftp/file or, as in this case, application server. What's the advantage of having clustering built in to the app server? How about Apache mod_backhand?

Re:What about running in production?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see you have been reading Big Blue's and BEA's marketing literature by your use of "mission-critical", "production", and "24x7" in the same paragraph.

In my experience, all screaming at BEA is directed at the nearest brick wall they have handy. The most difficult thing about JBoss is the relative scarcity of coherent, directed documentation in a usable form. This makes one-time configuration take somewhat longer. However, with the addition of clustered persistence and failover capabilities to JBoss (3.0), it really competes nicely with the other two. The big difference is price-point. JBoss is free.

Moreover, despite what the marketroids claim, WebLogic and WebSphere are both monolithic architectures, which means that they lag the evolving standard by a ways. JBoss tends to be more current.

Re:Jakarta Plug & My AppServer Experiences

[trilucid]

"What JBoss needs is a certification (with levels) for developers to obtain. If I go to a client and say "I have a level 3 WebLogic certification, a level 2 WebSphere certification, and know JBoss", what are they gonna pick?"

Hmm... makes one think, eh? As a developer, I've seen a lot of "certification wars" in the corporate contracting world. Here's my take.

The problem with "level-ified" certifications kinda resembles the "megahertz myth [to quote Apple]" issue. If you're assuming the client is a techno-yokel, you run into this problem with such cert programs.

Imagine, for example, two imaginary Linux certification programs. The first program (call it "EZLinux") sets out their certification map as follows:

• Level 1: Ability to use rm, ls, cp, and mv commands.
• Level 2: Understanding how to use RPM and DEB packages to update and modify a system.
• Level 3: Ability to use fdisk to create and manipulate partitions.
• Level 4: Actually got Mandrake running with help from the friendly neighbor kidz.

Okay, so that's an example of a *terribly* useless "certification" program that wouldn't be worth the paper the cert was printed on. Let's look at the other ficticious program, called "UR-Uber-H4x0r Linux":

• Level 1: Ability to quote verbatim the man pages for all Mandrake 8 standard linux commands (doesn't necessarily require deep understanding, just inhuman memory).
• Level 2: In-depth knowledge of kernel configuration and compilation, demonstrated by ability to correctly by hand [no Xconfig for you, for added flavor] compile a 2.4.x kernel for every known supported platform in existence.
• Level 3: Linux Torvalds willingly calls you Daddy, and calls you up for kernel hacking advice. Alan Cox routinely shows up at your pad asking for tree contributions.

Now, if you were Joe Hiring Manager, you might not actually know the difference between the two programs. Joe might look at them both, and say "wow, that first one has an extra level, so it's gotta be better!" ...

Companies will always try to use these tactics to make their products/programs/certs seem better than the others out there. Now, here's the real kicker: if Joe Hiring Manager actually understands why a certain cert is better than the others, he also (in all probability) understands why the product the cert is for is better. Hence, the better product wins. The key is education.

Just my take, that's all :).

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I've screamed at IBM (and BEA)

[Guppie]

In Norway, IBM is by far the most arrogant and useless company you can buy software from. My company have used Websphere and DB2, and the help from IBM (after hours of phone-screaming) was worth next to nothing.

We used Websphere 2.x and 3.0, IIRC, and they were CRAP, i know DB2 is a decent database, but we were not able to configure it to run any faster than mySQL, thanks to lousy support from IBM.

In the end, we dropped Websphere for Weblogic, no great support from BEA either, but at least the appserver ran 24x7 w/o great problems...