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

Posted by Cliff on from the topics-from-the-watercooler dept.

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."

12 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. the end. by BeatdownGeek · · Score: 4, Funny
    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    Does this mean the question mark is obsolete.

  2. Big Blue by adamy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Big Blue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  3. Isn't it the tool set as a whole? by msuzio · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

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    1. Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Isn't it the tool set as a whole? by blippo · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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?

  4. Erosion, not conquering by j3110 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Erosion, not conquering by brainlounge · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Erosion, not conquering by Nevyn · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

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    3. Re:Erosion, not conquering by MikeApp · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Erosion, not conquering by j3110 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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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    5. Re:Erosion, not conquering by j3110 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

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