Can JBoss/IONA Displace BEA/IBM in the Enterprise?

Anonymous queries: "It was recently announced that JBoss and IONA have entered into a partnership where IONA (who had their own J2EE certified application server) will now provide enterprise support for JBoss. Will relationships like this one allow open source projects to compete with and displace closed source commercial products. Are large enterprises likely to stop paying huge licensing fee's to BEA & IBM, and start deploying on JBoss with an enterprise support contracts from IONA."

Comments

the end.

[BeatdownGeek]

Will relationships like this one allow open source projects to compete with and displace closed source commercial products. Are large enterprises likely to stop paying huge licensing fee's to BEA & IBM, and start deploying on JBoss with an enterprise support contracts from IONA.

Does this mean the question mark is obsolete.

Big Blue

[adamy]

If IBM thought they were going to make money (lose less Money, which ever way) by supporting JBoss, you can be sure they will have it analyzed and supported in a Heart Beat. THey have a lot of realy smart people. There is no reason they would miss up on a support opportunity. And you can be sure the JBoss group would be just as glad to sign a contract with them for support as well.

Will people switch away from Websphere...Lets give it a few years and see. The two have coexisted for a while now. I think they will continue to do so for a while.

Re:Big Blue

[Anonymous Coward]

While IBM talks up "services" quite heavily, don't get them wrong -- Linux is a key part of their plans to sell expensive proprietary software.

They give away a standard and open OS, but that allows them to sell WebSphere and DB2 into shops that would never previously considered a "proprietary" IBM hardware/OS combo. If/When JBoss and Postgres start talking business away, IBM probably won't be so keep on Linux anymore.

Isn't it the tool set as a whole?

[msuzio]

I avoid EJB development like the plague it is, but from what I understand in discussions with fellow developers, it is really the integrated tool set that they like. The fact that Websphere works well with Visual Age, and the sets of management tools for it, seem to be the selling point.

I think for places with more of a limited budget, JBoss is already well suited to be the choice. Why pay uber-bucks when JBoss does the job well enough and you can spend that cash on a beefier infrastructure (so that even if someone argued that JBoss isn't as fast or whatever, who cares... I'm got a 16 CPU Dell Server running Linux that I host it on). For places who tends to spend more money (and time) on development anyway (major auto maker, name begins with 'F' and rhymes with 'ord'), IBM probably will still own the EJB biz. Not sure if IONA can change that, they're a good company but still much lower-profile than BEA or IBM. Most people know of IONA only if they had been exposed to CORBA previously, and that's still a pretty low number of developers.

Just my general thoughts observing from the outside. I hope JBoss does take off, at least then I'd know there's an EJB suite I wouldn't mind working with...

Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this guy up. He is absolutely correct. Two things that too many slashdotters miss in situations like this is that:

1) The best technology rarely wins in the business world

and its corrolary

2) The lowest cost option is not always the lowest cost option

First, its hardly arguable that JBoss is better than Websphere App Server. Even? Arguable, I don't think JBoss comes close, but this is opinion now. Even if it was, business decisions rarely come down to good technology. They hinge on "solutions" making "good business sense". You know what makes good business sense? Integration. IBM's WAS is just the beginning, there is a whole family of Websphere software that integrates into WAS/on top of WAS (not to mention Tivoli Security/Management software that integrates seamlessly). JBoss can't even hold a candle to this portfolio.

Moreover, cost means a lot of things to a lot of people. Dollars are the least of it, to a major corporation cost is resources, time, efficiency/productivity, and least of all dollars.

What happens when a software developer (such as JBoss) has a 3rd party supporting the package. Yes, you guessed it, good ole' pointing fingers. Customer: "IONA! MY JBOSS IS BROKEN FIX IT!", I can hear it now: IONA: "Well, that's a JBOSS software issue, open up a defect and get a fix.". Businesses (esp big enterprises) will not stand for this. What do you get when you buy IBM software with IBM support? You get full accountability. It's all IBM, you know why I know this? I've worked with and/or for IBM my whole life. This is one reason IBM consistently wins.

Let's not even get into the cost analysis when you analyze software integration (e.g. how well IBM Business Intelligence/DB2 software integrates into WAS). Oh yes, WAS integrates well with Portal, Commerce, and other EAI tools. JBoss has no such functions. It's not even a competition, on any level, see, now it comes full circle.

Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Customer: "IONA! MY JBOSS IS BROKEN FIX IT!", I can hear it now: IONA: "Well, that's a JBOSS software issue, open up a defect and get a fix.".

IONA is an (ex)application server vendor - not your typical J2EE consulting company offering support. Their appserver was built on an their infrastructure (not bolted on).

JBoss code base is open source - not a black box. So, it is not terribly difficult process to provide fixes.

Besides, the customer never interfaces directly with JBoss or other company in these contracts. There is no - let us open a bug - rather than we will open a bug with JBoss and will send you a fix..

In short they have the knowledge, experience and relationship to work in exactly these situations.
>> Businesses (esp big enterprises) will not stand for this.

Enterprises like accountability. IMHO This is precisely the reason why they will want support for open source products from established companies.

Personally, I would like to see more of these partnerships.

Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole?

[blippo]

This is so funny:

"You get full accountability. It's all IBM."

Have you ever read an IBM support contract or a software licence agreement?

Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I have, I work for IBM. Sure, it's a bunch of legalese, anything involving a transaction of more than $0.02 usually involves such contracts. Have you read your lease? Have you read your homeowners convenant? How about your car insurance? They sound pretty restrictive, but in practice, they generally will do anything in reason to provide said sold service.

Erosion, not conquering

[j3110]

JBoss will erode away the lower ends of the J2EE spectrum for sure. This deal only raises the level of the metaphorical water. I don't know if JBoss will ever be able to compete with IBM, but they may be able to play games with BEA. BEA is more like JBoss in that they are primarily centered around their J2EE server. JBoss can snap into any architecture that BEA already has and they can just avoid paying BEA. IBM sells the J2EE server, the development tools, the database server, the server hardware to run it on, and probably a building to put it in if you asked :)

I think Geronimo has a greater chance of causing havok in the J2EE arena. JBoss isn't getting big business promotion like Geronimo will being part of the ASF. IBM and SUN like Apache and their licensing. In fact, it would be very likely that Geronimo would become certified for free. ASF has a history of making very popular software packages, especially Java related. They had the most popular regex library, XML parsers, Logging library, and the biggies Struts and Tomcat. J2SDK 1.4 clobbered the regex library and xml parser because honestly, if you're going to get the latest stable version of Java, and it comes with a regexp library and XML parsers, are you really going to go download another?

I'm very excited and hopeful about Geronimo. If it doesn't get screwed up by JBoss, it's likely to become the most popular J2EE server.

What I do believe will happen with JBoss out there though is that there will be a greater number of developers using J2EE that would otherwise not have. Most people judge J2EE wholistically as a sum of all it's parts instead of a some of the best parts. You don't have to use all of J2EE, but it's very nice to have a robust, generic, mail API that supports MIME attachments, a transactional message server, transparent session data replication and clustering, declarative security and transactions, database abstraction gaurantee of at least SQL92 standard (or even better JDO or Hibernate or CMP Object-Relational mapping that is completely database independant), and even some integration into existing authentication schemes that JBoss supports. Tomcat can handle some of that, but JBoss integrates it, and brings security, transactions, and EJB.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[brainlounge]

JBoss will erode away the lower ends of the J2EE spectrum for sure.

That's already happening:

- On development/integration machines. Our development is all done with JBoss. When we ship, we can cross-deploy to the customer's App Server, even to another OS quite seamlessly. Nothing you can do very easily without J2EE. (And you don't _really_ want to code on AIX machines, don't you?)

- In low-cost projects. Non-business-critical applications with no need for huge administration and support. You really need the money for development, then.

Being very sceptical in the first place, JBoss blew me away when I got to know it a few month ago. Really cool stuff. Technically, it plays in the same league like all the commercial ones.

From documentation and support aspects ('support' meaning: calling a hotline, wait one hour, someones coming in, fixing your problem), JBoss is not a good choice. Support through internet forums etc. is quite good, though.
But you can pay for documentation from "JBoss - The Company". Anyone ever read one of these? Are they good?

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[Nevyn]

I think Geronimo has a greater chance of causing havok in the J2EE arena.

Err, somethign that won't be at the level of JBoss for another year or two, at least. Why do you think so ... the license, AIUI companies are already shipping JBoss as the "cheap" solution ... maybe they'll all switch, but that isn't real growth.

ASF has a history of making very popular software packages, especially Java related.

While I'm not big on Java, the above seems a little rosier than life IMO. ASF do apache-httpd, and that is obviously very poopular ... you could also imply that APR is because of that (although I'd disagree, peolpe only ship it because apache-httpd needs it). Ant is somewhat popular, and log4j might be considered to be as popular as apache-httpd in it's specific niche ... but note that the Java-1.4 logging package looks nothing like it.

But looking at all the other projects, I haven't even heard of half of them ... www.apache.org looks more like sf.net everyday. As always with OSS I think the second commer will need to be much better to overtake what's there.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[MikeApp]

ASF also produces Tomcat!

Tomcat is the Reference Implementation for the Servlet/JSP spec. It is not as fast as many other containers but is in wide use because of this status and the support of the ASF. I would not be surprised if Geronimo reaches the same status within a few years.

If you want free development (and deployment, though w/o clustering), the "platform edition" of Sun's app server is free and has worked well for me so far.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[j3110]

Yeah, I know it's eroding, this is just going to mean more of the same, I think.

I read some of the documentation. I was expecting better, but it definately adequate. I stick mostly with O'Reilly books these days (Entereprise JavaBeans and Java Enterprise in a Nutshell) for anything that isn't JBoss specific. The docs are handy, but the forums and other books are a more useful combination.

I would like to get the forums from JBoss exported and Lucene indexed for a neat Eclipse plugin, or at least something with better search capabilities and faster.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[j3110]

Struts is the single most popular web framework for Java. Log4J is still a lot more popular than 1.4 logging. The only things 1.4 really took away from them was regexp and XML parsers, which most people depend on 1.4 for now.

It's not that much too rosie :)

Yeah, it'll take Geronimo some time to catch up, but if you go back a couple of years and look at JBoss you would have said without help from somewhere, they would never catch up with BEA or Websphere. They haven't really, but they have definately narrowed the gap (maybe really close on WebLogic). What JBoss did manage to do is cut out all the small players.

The second commer doesn't have to be that much better actually. We're talking Java here, not kernels. If Geronimo gets any bit better than JBoss, it'ld take me a maximum of an hour to make an average sized project work on Geronimo. There is a spec for it. While the spec isn't perfect, it certainly is much easier to port from JBoss to Geronimo than from Linux to FreeBSD. (Not that it would be hard in either case.) A lot of people use JBoss for testing and development, then they deploy on Weblogic and Websphere. That is a pretty good testament to how well the J2EE spec is working (there are a lot of holes in the J2EE spec, just the holes don't amount to as much as you would think).

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[Nevyn]

Log4J is still a lot more popular than 1.4 logging.

Yeh, I'd heard that from friends who use Java. The point there was that the OP seemed to be suggesting that if a J2EE container came from the Apache group it would suddenly be used by everyone, because everyone loves the Apache group or the license would be so much better etc. My point was that even though Java people I know say log4j is better than 1.4 logging Sun didn't just use what apache produced..

if you go back a couple of years and look at JBoss you would have said without help from somewhere, they would never catch up with BEA or Websphere. They haven't really, but they have definately narrowed the gap (maybe really close on WebLogic). What JBoss did manage to do is cut out all the small players.

This is exactly what Linux did, things like ConvexOS died out very quickly. Then it seemed obvious that BSDi couldn't last ... and eventually SCO and now Solaris.

The second commer doesn't have to be that much better actually. We're talking Java here, not kernels.

I'm not convinced, people don't use kernels they uses OSes. POSIX is a spec too, and certainly back in the day (now things like TuX and divergant extension APIs make it somewhat harder) Linux to FreeBSD were simple to move between. But Linux was there first, it had the mindshare and hence the developers and users. Red Hat is shipping JBoss now, people who don't know anything about J2EE containers (like me :) know that JBoss is one. And as Geronimo improves so will JBoss.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[Anonymous Coward]

J2SDK 1.4 ships with Xerces and Xalan from the ASF. Is that what you mean when you say 'clobbered'?

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[j3110]

My only meaning was that people aren't downloading the official Xalan or Xerces. They get what SUN puts in the rt.jar. I don't know if SUN is using Xerces or Xalan code, but even if they are, it's not Xalan or Xerces strictly speaking.

Re:Erosion, not conquering

[j3110]

People don't use application servers, they use end products. An application server is very much similar to a kernel in that they run an application. Also, they have to provide standards like JMS, EJB containers, etc. where kernels don't really implement an interface, you just have libraries that implement an interface for cross-platform at source level. With Java, I would have binary compatiblity between JBoss and Geronimo.

What if FreeBSD's kernel was better than the Linux kernel? You would see a lot of people move toward FreeBSD (and we've seen this happen in some sectors of the market before when FreeBSD got a leg up on Linux).

My premise, that I should have stated, was that Geronimo being an ASF project instead of a project hosted by a for profit company headed by a man that has been known to alienate developers (http://www.coredevelopers.net/ incident where some of the core JBoss developers split off) has a chance of gaining more developer attention. Large companies don't donate code to JBoss, but they do to the ASF. SUN will certify Geronimo for free.

All I'm trying to say is that projects started at Apache generally have a greater following, and often better products. It's do partially to the license (corperate involvement) and partially to the Apache trademark, following, and the general trust for ASF's quality of code.