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Open Source Winning Java Server Market
Seldo writes "C|net is reporting that free open-source J2EE servers are gaining market share. From the article: "Analysts say it's difficult to measure the extent to which open-source Java application servers, such as Tomcat and JBoss, have eaten into the revenue of commercial providers of Java application servers. But the growing popularity of the open-source application servers is undeniable." The article also points out that the emergence of J2EE as a standard led to a commoditization of Java-based application servers, giving the low-cost OSS alternatives an advantage."
Second of all, let's try this again. What about the spec is crap? Can you give some examples? Your argument of "J2EE is crap" really isn't convincing me or anybody who reads this Slashdot that J2EE is an inferior technology. Mmmmkay?
Comparing the market for OS Java application servers to the rise on Linux - that has got to be a positive thing for Java in general. Right?
The J2EE market has until recently been a bit like the Unix market 20-30 years ago. Relatively portable and aimed at businesses.. with big money to be made.....and then there was Jboss
There are a few more open-source J2EE app servers than just Jboss and Tomcat - and its good that these are targeting different markets (just like the various Linux Distributions target different types of user/server markets )
Yeah! Companies are really starting to understand the value of open-source (free speech) software. This GetThere guy is really saying you can take you proprietary code and shove it where the SUNW don't shine.
Will the companies that sell J2EE app servers today be in some sort of trouble if J2EE becomes a commodity? No, they're not in trouble at all because they make money from their unique products and services around J2EE. Oracle make money from their databases, for IBM and Sun its hardware + services. Macromedia sell J2EE as a backend to a Flash/swt gui builder kit(yuck! but hey different strokes to move the world i guess) . BEA well... er.. yeah they are in a world of shit probably! (but BEA can adapt and focus on their performance centric niche market).
J2EE was always intended to be a commodity thats why the big guns adopted it because they understood the importance of customer demand for inter-operation and portability. The fact that there are various OS implementations simply proves commodity status has been achieved. I reckon Jboss & tomcat will do for Java adoption in business what Linux did for the Unix market. The big vendors will adapt, costs will fall, and one-hell-of-a-lot more people will finally know what 'Container Managed Persistence' is.
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
I think they are talking more about vendors like BEA. Which, come on, give me a freakin' break. Finally people have realized that 35K per CPU licensing for a Java application server compared to 0K for Tomcat is just ludicrous. And iPlanet, yeah, for as much as they paid for that guy, I guarantee they do care. They should have stuck to just being a web server, because as an app server it is the biggest piece of crap ever coded (or damn close). I don't think microsoft even cares, as you noted, and definitely agree on the IBM thing, WebSphere is the sum of the parts and a solid product. Big Blue will always be able to push whatever they want, does the phrase "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" ring a bell? Of course, if they could just get MQ to be stable on M$ platforms, they would take over the world (or did that already happen?)
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
What companent is JBoss? I thought it covered pretty much every part of the J2EE spec now that the Resin web/JSP server has been integrated.
.Net. Both are efforts to get their respective owners' products embedded in back office situations. The APIs of .Net seem to compare directly with those of Java. If Java solutions become cheaper to deploy, and if they run faster and more reliably than .Net solutions, .Net will undoubtably suffer. In fact, I would bet that Microsoft is among the most worried with the open-source J2EE servers.
Actually, I think IBM is being threatened. WebSphere is horribly overpriced, buggy, and very late to support new J2EE specifications. While IBM will still get hardware and integration revenue from their customers, I think they will miss the WebSphere revenue. IBM probably worries about this the least, though, as more and more of their business comes from the integration side.
Sun has been relegated to 4th place among commercial J2EE servers these days. I would bet they're far worse than 4th place when considering open source implementations. Even if they aren't upset about losing the revenues from iPlanet, I'm sure they can't be happy about losing control over what is becoming the de facto reference implementation for J2EE.
BEA can't be happy--much of their revenue comes from their overpriced J2EE server.
Microsoft is worried because the open-source J2EE servers are, much like Linux, making robust Unix-based server applications cheaper to deploy than equivalent Microsoft-based solutions.
I'm not sure how the strategy behind Java is really that different than
--Be human.
Sure. But not with this stuff you're offering. Let's see... Phoenix requires you to restart the server each time I deploy a new 'block' to the server? Uh-huh, so where are the HA features? How do I service my customers while that server is being kicked down? Where is the clustering for HA? How about fail-over?
One obvious and glaring omission in all of the overviews is the lack of basic notion of transaction handling in these frameworks. So I have my blocks deployed and I need to make sure that my block A and block B are working nicely together, committing their changes in an atomic fashion. So how do I enlist these different blocks within the same transaction? Surely you don't suggest I manage my transactions myself in the code and write my own logic for things like transaction context passing? How is transaction demarcation handled within these 'blocks'?
Why do you think people use J2EE?
If you like actually being able to simply, freely, quickly create a server app
It looks neither simple or quick to me. Looks like some very basic features have been omitted that are available on all J2EE applications servers. Writing log components, deployers or rmi code doesn't really require all that much. And the hard parts they just decided to ignore as 'unnecessary'.