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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."
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.
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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?
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.
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.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
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).
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