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Sun 'Calls JBoss bluff' on J2EE compliance
joshmccormack writes "According to c|net's news.com Sun has finally responded to JBoss Group's request for J2EE compliance testing.
Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist stated in the article he thinks JBoss Group is bluffing, that their code won't pass the tests, and that some of the code is just copied from Sun."
I'm surprised that Sun put any kind of a negative spin at all on this. An Open Source J2EE compliant Container would be a Cruise Missile right into the Microsoft camp. It's un-friggin ridiculous how damn much IBM, et all, wants for a J2EE compliant server. Honestly, it's outrageous for small companies and your partners you want to deploy to. Honestly, I'm surprised IBM charges as much as they do with all the payroll savings they now have from sending jobs over to India. Where are the savings going? ;-)
But the company asserts that its software is compatible with J2EE because applications written for commercial Java applications servers can be reworked to run on JBoss in a matter of hours or days.
So... what is compliance in this case? It seems to me that if the application has to be reworked and the J2EE standard says otherwise, then there's no issue - JBoss is not compliant? Is that what the J2EE certification actually dictates?
Those of us that have used the "big 2" webapps (weblogic + websphere) and jboss can tell you that jboss will pass J2EE compliance without any issue.
JBoss isn't necessarily as efficient or as fast as the "big 2", but its always first in adapting new versions of J2EE and JSP. JBoss is always on top of new java technology, and doesn't have the vendor specific code that the "big 2", unfortunately, have.
JBoss is really gaining serious popularity in the Java world. Its really a nice product and is true to the "non-vendor specific code" that other app servers claim to have, but don't.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Regardless of the outcome of the tests, the only way to make progress is to let things happen. Even if they can't pass the tests, they'll come out of it more experienced and have feedback.
Perhaps Sun finally felt some heat from the tech community? (pun intended)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
However, Phipps said he doubts that JBoss software will pass the compliance test. Basing his opinion on public information, he said, JBoss software does not appear to implement all of the J2EE specification.
Sun should already know if JBoss can pass the test since sun already had the test suite and JBoss is freely avaliable. My guess is they were pouring over the spec next to JBoss with a fine toothed comb to find things that weren't implemented and add the to the suite before it is released.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Uhhh, have you heard of .Net? It's popular with many shops because of the lower cost of entrance.
The cost of a J2EE Container is a big obstacle for many shops.
"I predict that now that we're calling their bluff, they will make up another excuse for not doing the tests," Phipps said.
A comment like this from Sun is unnecessary and appears childish. This kind of remark is unprofessional and serves no purpose except to build animosity.
What will he say if it does pass? If it does not pass, did his comment serve any purpose except to give JBOSS a reason to believe the test was biased?
If Sun thinks the JBoss group copied code, then why don't they prosecute them under copyright law?
Physicists do it with a big bang!
Even if it isn't 100% J2EE compliant, it still works as bean container, and is in general easier to use and way less expensive than the commercial alternatives, there are some of us who like to use java based web platforms, but don't have six figures to spend on it. And if it isn't J2EE compliant, this isn't such a big issue if the points of non-compliance are openly known. Viva the OSS MM
Sun makes money by charging for the testing and certification and licensing of the J2EE standard to the likes of IBM and BEA. If I can download a free product, that's licensing fees that don't go to Sun. Sure, I'm not buying Microsoft's products, but it's not like Sun would be benefiting either.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Isn't it ironic that this guy Phipps' job title is given as "chief technology evangelist" yet he snidely quips that he doubts JBoss, a product that has done much to advance J2EE in the small to mid-size business arena, will even pass the tests?
Sun got their head stuck up their ass and their code isn't worth copy/pasting most of the time!
I don't know about J2EE, but their J2ME KVM implementation was such bad code that we had to rewrite some of it to get it pass its own test. Terrible C coding practices I've seen in this VM when we were writing our own code based on their standards to work in sillicon.
Me think they're ashamed that open source software like JBoss are quicker to adapt and evolved according to the needs of their users than Sun could ever be with all their corporate bullshit they spread like jelly.
GO JBOSS! Give them hell
It's funny how people that whine about jobs going to India when no one raised a complaint when Blue collar jobs have been heading South and West for two decades. Before it was a result of globalization and the change to a service economy, but now that White collar workers are being affected, people open their mouthes and bitch.
Bringing up Mono supports his point.
Seriously. If you develop "enterprise" applications in Java, EJB is a terrible architecture choice. This leaves 2 other parts of J2EE: servlets and JSP which are mostly OK. There are lots of OpenSource or cheap commercial high quality containers that support JSP and Servlet specs: resin, jetty, tomcat, NewAtlanta to name a few.
So why would anybody care about this whole fight between Sun and JBoss. Sun hypes stupid EJB technology and JBoss is trying to cash on this hype. I have no sympathy for either one of them.
Ignorant (intentionally so...) from the corporate types.
OSS may not pass everything the first time, but telling it what it doesn't pass just hastens its compliance, and it will inexorably march toward it.
OSS development is like the gentle ocean and the sandcastle: it takes a while, but the sandcastle will fall, and once the tide turns, it doesn't matter how many people are rebuilding the castle.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
There are reasons why JBOSS might fail the compliance test. However these reasons are beacuse the spec is idotic, such as unnecessary ro even crippeling of synchronization in certain functions. So failing might be a good thing in some areas.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
public static void main(String[] args){
....sorry about stealing someone's code..
System.out.println("Hello world");
}
How much code does it take to be identified as "stolen"?
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
What country are you from (or when were you born)? There was all kinds of "bitching" when the blue collar jobs left the United States.
Difference between now and then though is that the blue collar people could at least retrain to white collar. If the white collar goes away, what exactly is left?
War industry and aerospace (almost the same thing really) will be my guess for our future.
That and Sun pushing EJB's for everything when they are designed for serious transactional applications. For non-transactional applications, 75% of the time you're better off cooking your own simple caching/pooling mechanism.
Read this and try forming opinions other than "Sun sucks" or "Go JBoss, you rock".
.Not would be much more prevelant. They should also thank JBoss for technical innovations like drag and drop deploy of .ear's and hot deploy (is anyone at IBM reading this?), which has been picked up BEA and Oracle to varying degrees because of the competition.
.Net
I love JBoss. I use it daily. I even contributed some patches to it back in the 2.4.4 days. I like
Sun stuff. I use it daily. The company I work for is a Sun iForce Partner (we're also and MS partner, in case you think I'm realy biased). I look at this issue, and read the above article (which I was pointed to on the JBoss forums, ironically) and I see two sets of people acting incredibly childish. I won't say the two companies or organizations, because I know there are people on both sides of this issue that don't share these opinions. So Sun won't certify JBoss? Big woop. I'll still use it. So will most of the developers I work with. And we'll still use it for dev and then port to BEA or OC4J because it's easy to do (Websphere bites and is incredibly hard to port to...yet certified!). If JBoss "goes beyoind J2EE" and doesn't support the standard anymore (J2EE 1.4 in the future, it complies to 1.3 as far as I can see), I will stop using it.
Period. End of story. I'll use OC4J...not open source but free for development and certified. It's also easy to use.
I don't give a rat's ass about AOP, or even JMX or micro-kernel crap. I care about writing EJB's (Session not entity...we've discovered Apache OJB),JSP's and servlets to the J2EE standard that are easily moved from one app server to another. I care about using the latest features of the spec. As soon as I can't do that, I'll stop using that server. If JBoss goes to far beyond J2EE they will lose. If they don't like the current spec, maybe they should get involved with the JCP to affect some change, like Apache.
As for Sun folks thumbing their nose at JBoss, perhaps they should remember that without JBoss, there would be hundreds of thousands less J2EE developers out there and likely
Given that, and the exchange in the above article, maybe I'll switch to Jonas or OpenEJB (or another Open Source server if it exists).
This whole thing is ridiculous. Stop whining and start working to beat out
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Are you saying J2EE creates applications that are bloated, heavy, gus-guzzling, expensive, unreliable crap?
Not that I would argue.
(BTW I know several people who own Hummers, both real ones, and that Cheby POS. And I was reffering to all of them above)
All they want is an 'under control' J2EE that is Tomcat, and everyone else making money. Doesnt matter Jboss outperforms Websphere. They dont realize Jboss's success as J2EE will proliferate Java as a language as well as an alternative to
So now please answer why JBoss needs to be compliant other than allowing legacy to run?
Because if JBoss is not compliant, nobody will use it. The fact that it is open source is a really poor argument for not needing standards compliance. Should GCC's cc be non-ANSI C since if you needed it to be ANSI C you could just open up the source and make it conform? The Apache HTTPD server is compliant to the HTTP spec. Tomcat is a reference implementation of a servlet container.
There's an ocean of difference between being able to access the source code and being able to effect changes to that source code. Open source should conform to standards.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Towards open source. When it helps them against MS they love it, when it can hurt them a la JBoss they seem to be evil. Sun wants to be a software company and sell their POS Sun ONE app server, which is why they are trying to FUD JBoss. Remember, they speak of J2EE 1.4 which is not even final, so there is not test to pass. I am not aware of too many tests that can be passed before they are written.....
The key point is that now is the time when many companies are making that decision... Now is when the barriers to entry for an application server environment must be few, and far between...
At the moment, the entry to J2EE is pretty well blocaded by the $$$,000 that IBM and BEA are charging. So companies will invest in the initially cheaper MS environment.
If there is a "portable" (and hence more preferable) solution available, and it stacks up cheaper, then it will hit MS as hard as it hits IBM/BEA...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
We have *always* been a commodity. It's only recently that USians and other participants in Western-style societies have been faced with the reality of competing with the real world.
As it was with the whole crypto discussion some years ago, so it is with being intelligent: Ths US and other industrialized societies have no monopoly on intelligence. Lots of people are smart, and they are beginning to compete in the world marketplace for such services.
Is it the Java expert? No.
Is it the Database Expert. No
Is it the Security expert? No.
Is it the Netowrk expert? No.
Is it the monkey-ass MBA? Damn strait!
If a F500/1000 company is going to use JBoss and hire the JBoss consultants, it will be at the recomendation of some MBA. It will be hard enought to get it in there since JBoss is not out taking them to Hockey games or buying rounds of golf. It has NOTHING, NOTHING, to do with the technical merrits of the software. This, my fellow techies, is why Open Source is having a difficult time.
Well, three reasons...
No marketing
No "Tech support"
nobody to sue if things go wrong.
I can't speak for Sun's true motivation here - that would be speculation. What I am fairly certain of is that the high per-CPU licensing cost of most J2EE application servers, the pricing model encourages companies to buy the biggest iron they can to avoid buying more licenses as well. Coincidentally, Sun happens to sell big iron servers.
So what happens if JBoss gains credibility through licensing? Well, the cost model gets turned on its head. If the incremental software cost is now $0 instead of $10k for each additional CPU/Server, you can now consider multi-CPU Wintel boxes, or even clusters of low-end commodity server hardware.
Suppose you go "cheap" with a Sun 280R, list price $13k, with BEA Weblogic, ~$10k = $23k for the solution.
Now, suppose it takes only 2 $3k Dell servers to attain equivalent performance - total cost is $26k by the time you add 2 CPU licenses. It's both cheaper and simpler to go with one server.
Turn it around now, for the JBoss case:
Sun Fire 280R = $13k total cost
And suppose that it now takes *4* of those $3k Dell servers to attain equivalent performance. Your total cost, $12k, is still $1k cheaper. For what you were paying before, you could have 7 of these servers, and spare change to boot.
It seems to me that Java isn't a huge money makes (nor a huge money loser) for Sun, it is merely a means to the end of driving Sun hardware sales. Change the J2EE cost model, and the plan is toast.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
There is no reason to use EJB, unless your server talks to other EJB servers. Most applications talk to a database, a mail server, etc and there is no place for EJBs for that.
JDO/Castor are much better solutions for most databse applications. EJB proponents tell you that the EJB servers take care of resource, pooling/managemnet, big deal... making resource pool/resource management is what 3rd graders do for computer science. Why these EJB "architects" thinks such simple stuff is so hard to do is beyond me.
Now the EJB proponenent's savior tool is EJBDoclet and XDoclet these days... Use of XDoclet type of tools for writing code is just plain stupid. In trying to keep Java language "pure" you are now forced to write code in comments, what stupidity? I for one, am glad about the stock market crash, because at least now engineers will make the decisions and not the "architects" who have done nothing but bull shitted their way to the top and failed companies.
Be gone EJBs for ever.