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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."
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.
Karma Clown