I compete with Oracle daily , working for another software vendor, but I wholeheartedly recommend their database to almost any scale solution. It's a great piece of technology. And most large organizations that use Linux use it to run Oracle, or an application server of some sort, giving Oracle the largest Linux databsae market share (by revenue).
SQL Server 2005, by my estimation, is also good, but very new.
DB2 UDB has some positive traits, particularly the parallel edition for large data warehouses, but otherwise has aspects that I don't like (particularly their locking / concurrency management). Ditto for Sybase, adding in (what I feel to be) a very difficult recovery process compared to Oracle, which has some fairly well trodden paths to recovery (especially in 10g).
There are laws in most jurisdictions to punish filers of frivolous lawsuits as an abuse of the system. Though I admit most "large" cases , even if groundless, don't often fall under that due to expensive lawyers fooling people into believing there actually is a case there.
The (HUGE) difference is that in those countries , the government was police, judge, and jury. Here it is governed by civil action, presided by a judge, determined by a jury of 12 individuals.
No longer do corporates have to stick to Java or ASP.Net, they can mix and match. You'd hope that this would enable people to concentrate on the best way to do things, but no, it'll just end up in a language pissing match again, thus ensuring the lovely ideals behind SOA go out the window.
But the idea of SOA is to allow heterogeneity to proliferate -- to allow mix & match. It's the old saw of separating interface from implementation.
Certainly, SOAP web services can be done wrong --.NET remoting in particular isn't designed to be interoperable, whereas ASP.NET and WSE are better at it -- but SOA is much broader than just SOAP or even HTTP.... it can apply to most messaging systems, or even databases, or even regular flat file transfers, so long as an appropriate contract is defined.
Sometimes vendors overdo the "dummy" aspect, but there's no doubt that we're more productive at developing today because of higher level languages and more sophisticated tools. Some might argue this "dumbs down" programming, but I don't think that's the point, the point is to automate manual / rote chores that are often error-prone and better handled by a computer (most of the time). Memory management & garbage collection being an important example.
The JBoss/Microsoft announcement was more about interoperability between Microsoft server products (.NET web services, Active Directory, SQL Server, Ops Manager) than it was about "running well on Windows".
It also seemed to be mostly a PR move -- "we're announcing that we'll some day announce something of substance"....
Yes, it did. They threw out hundreds of man-years of work.
They put a lot of stuff on the back-burner, like WinFS. The media's reports of stuff being "thrown out" are exagerrated.
I guess you missed the news about the rollback to the Windows Server 2003 codebase.
That's a myth, frankly. Yes, a number of the more ambitious features were shelved, but many are still in there.
Dude, Vista isn't two months late, it's six years late. Two months is just the very latest in a very long list of slips.
This is a bizarre statement, as if you're holding Microsoft to statements made in 1997-1998, back when "Cairo" was the buzzword (which eventually became Windows 2000). Considering XP was released in October 2001, I don't think it's fair to claim Vista is 6 years late.
I attended the PDC in 2003, and they were aiming for Longhorn beta in 2004, final release in late '04 / early 2005. So I would say it's two years late.
This line of reasoning reminds me of the Team OS/2 folks (of which I was one) claiming how much of a failure "Chicago" was -- many man years wasted, tremendous quality problems, schedule slippage, etc. It was due for an early 1994 release and was pushed until August 25, 1995 as "Windows 95". And we all know how much of a "failure" it turned out to be.
because a corporation has a number of benefits: limiting liability, tax incentives, and the ability to embark on pretty much any kind of legal commercial activity, something that non-profits are often restricted in doing.
and yes, there's the privacy thing. they don't have to tell the public what they're doing, except the IRS (and the SEC once they reach a certain size).
malware will not be required to ask you for a password to elevate privileges - see? all those 'this is not a virus, it asks for your password and that should set your alarm bells going' argument goes puff! in smoke.
It's one thing to say it took someone 30 minutes to gain root access from a local acocunt; it's a very different thing to say that a piece of malware will *automatically* do this in a matter of seconds/minutes. Yes, it's a step towards an automated solution, but since the approach wasn't made public it's unclear whether it's universally exploitable, or only under certain conditions, etc.
This is exactly what Oracle is doing. SAP is a ripe target -- they're doing well, but they're a lumbering giant, without the competitive zeal that Larry brings. Having said that, the sight of 10,000 Germans targeting you can be pretty daunting.:-)
I might add that Oracle is hedging this with their investment in their Fusion middleware. It's clear the Fusion strategy is a distraction; it's not their main thrust, otherwise they'd have much tighter timelines. But it's just enough to keep BEA and IBM on their toes -- enough to give BEA a headache due to its relative size, enough to trounce Sun where needed, but not enough to displace IBM. There remains the risk that there will be a middleware renaissance due to software-as-service, SOA, etc., where companies will realize they don't have to spend millions on a rip-and-replace with SAP/Oracle apps/Siebel/Peoplesoft.
But a full-time DBA can manage many, many Oracle instances. Operations DBAs, generally speaking, are responsible for uptime, and periodic operational tuning. It takes a different kind of DBA or even Oracle-experienced developer to understand how to write and tune SQL and design an optimal I/O layout.
Are you suggesting that MySQL doesn't require a DBA? The physics and computer science under the covers is the same... If you push MySQL to the same degree many customers push their Oracle databases, you're going to need professional help.
More likely, people don't understand what they're paying for in Oracle because the developers are too lazy to understand it, and decide to build those features themselves.
This may sound condescending, but it is very prevalent in the Java community, for example. People just don't understand how much they're getting and treat the database as a dumb object store. If that's all it is, sure, use MySQL. But I am quite confident that a team that understands Oracle will be tremendously more productive and have a more performing, scalable application than if they used it as a dumb store (the way you would use MySQL, which couldn't do inner queries until recently, for example).
The ironical thing about this is that the future of OSS software is actually *more* secure than anything the closed-source industry could create.
This is true for cases of "dead" or "dying" products, where there isn't market incentive to keep maintaining and supporting the product based on the revenue it generates. It's arguably why Netscape was originally open sourced and eventually spun off into a non-profit foundation.
Whereas in cases where there still is market demand, it's very common for another company to step in and maintain/support the codebase.
Even in cases of small proprietary software companies, large customers often request that small software companies put their code in escrow as a hedge against their viability -- they'll then either take on the maintanence themselves or sell it to someone who wants to. The software industry has been doing this for a long time.
Can the same be said of Oracle? If Oracle falls apart tomorrow due to some massive accounting fraud being publicized, where does that leave all the current Oracle users?
Another company would step in to take on maintanence and support of the product. This would likely consist of most of the old Oracle employees. Sure, there is risk there, but since we're talking about "worst case scenarios", there's risk in an open source project too, which usually relies on a small number of core developers. If they leave, it's not guaranteed that people with the same level of talent and productivity will quickly step up to take the project over.
What if your CRM breaks, who will fix it?
Not necessarily the OSS community. The problem with any community is that it evolves, maintains, and fixes what it wants to -- it doesn't have to listen to customers that are not also contributors. This is reflective of the old attitude of "if you don't like it, submit a patch, or fork it". To a large customer, that's not good enough.
Of course, open source arguably provides a free escrow. Customers could just take the code and support it themselves or pay a 3rd party to maintain it and evolve it in a closed-source manner, since GPL2 and their ilk are only about redistribution. This is how Google and other software-as-a-service companies can exploit open-source... but I digress.
But the point is that a large commercial customer typically prefers a contractually-obligated entity to perform front-line maintenance and support -- they often want to be insulated from the community, unless they already have enough of a brain-trust invested in the community (which is historically pretty rare).
1. I misspoke - yes, you do ship a (3rd party) servlet container.
2. Perhaps you're right. As with all anecdotes, YMMV, but I'm speaking broadly about mid-size ($200m+ revenue) to large-ish ($1b++) financials & telecoms in U.S., Canada, and European or U.S. banks in Japan. JBoss is present (particularly in fnance) but is no where near #1 across companies or within any single company. I find slightly more than half of financials are mostly IBM (particuarly Retail) and the rest are BEA (which tends to be brokerage, though some exceptions exist). Some financials go for 70%+ standards on one server, some have a complete hodge-podge mix of IBM, BEA, JBoss, etc.
In the end, all I'm really criticizing is the constant public " JBoss is the #1 application server" line which is very misleading... IBM likely is the only company that can honestly say that, though even that requries a lot of fine print (it's largely due to their mainframe presence -- same reason they're #1 in databases).
While I tend to prefer Hibernate these days, I have had a lot of success with TOPlink through 2002 (when I stopped using it) in several projects. THe mapping workbench always sucked, but it wasn't a big deal to create the mappings in XML or Java (which is what you'd do in HIbernate anyway). I've found that TOPLink usually generates quite good SQL. You have to poke it with a stick at times, but you have to poke HIbernate a lot too.
TOPLink is also completely non-intrusive to one's class hierarchy (at least on the projects where I've worked on it) -- it used reflection to scan for changes back in the day. HIbernate is admittedly much faster here.
One anecdote on this..... I did an informal poll of a number of sr. financial services architects & developers in London last November (including some very public figures & bloggers), several of them rated TOPLink and Kodo above Hibernate in terms of overall features and performance. I admit, even I was surprised at this (I would peg Hibernate as an equal or superior). So, your dev VP is in good company. TOPLink was the only game in town until Kodo and Hibernate, really.
Boss has fairly high revenue for a 150 person company, but since it isn't public knowledge it is hard to say. They are profitable with 175 employees, so you know JBoss has to have at least modest revenue. Not IBM numbers, but still.
Agree on this count - my point wasn't that they weren't a viable company, it was that they're so small that their revenue makes them effectively irrelevant. To put this in perspective, BEA is considered a pip-squeak compared to the big 4 (SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle) with it's $1.2 billion in annual revenue. BEA's headcount is considered relatively low by industry standards for its revenue & license runrate (it's around 3200 employees). Compared to JBoss, this is almost 20x larger.
Their power is mostly that of influence, which admittedly has been historically high, but now I feel is something they've squandered to great lengths through a combination of the attitude of their public personas and the astrotufing compain.
On the other hand, JBoss has been the dominant player in the enterprise Java space this last year. Not only does JBoss have #1 market share among application servers
Disagree. Market share is share of MARKET. Market implies revenue first and foremost. Secondly, "usage share" (for lack of a better term) must be something emperically measurable with reasonable repeatability. JBoss downloads are not a reliable indicator of share, nor are magazine surveys or analyst surveys.
The major exception to this rule has historically been free web servers, as Netcraft (and anyone for that matter) can crawl the Internet for this. Since JBoss doesn't ship a servlet container, this doesn't work.
they have been the major contributor to the Java EE 5 (EJB3) specifications which are the most important enterprise Java thing happening now.
Disagree. EJB 3, while a useful standard, is competitively irrelevant -- it does nothing to differentiate vendors. Most of the influence on EJB 3 came from two sources -- the popularity of Spring-like dependency injection (which is from Interface 21, who have nothing to do with JBoss) and Hibernate.
Yes, the Hibernate folks like Gavin are JBoss employees and major contributors to the persistence spec , but firstly, this has nothing to do with the JBoss Server, this has to do with the popularity of HIbernate. Secondly, in my opinion this whole persistence thing is (to quote Don Box) the Java world's Vietnam. They can't stop throwing resources into the black whole when other communities (.NET for one) don't even bother and are just as productive.
The most interesting things happening in the Java world right now, from my perspective, are things like Azul, Eclipse, AspectJ, Spring, WebLogic Real Time, JBI, JSR-168, the SIP servlet stuff, etc. EJB3 is important but it's catch-up with existing alternatives.
And I'd also say the the even bigger trend in the industry goes way beyond Java - it is the focus on integration, SOA, portals, etc., which JBoss really doesn't have much influence on. Building isolated web applications connected to databases is boring, the market is saturated, and there likely will be better/more productive ways of doing that soon. The real pain will be service-enabling legacy systems, high speed, high reliability messaging, mainframe integration, data transformation, etc.
I think it's fair to say that JBoss is one of the top few companies shaping the Java landscape now - and they are certainly more of an influence than their competitors (IBM and BEA).
This is completely contrary to my perspective on the marketplace. Whose influence are you talking about? Spec leading? Sales? Marketing? I just don't agree. From my perspective, JBoss is widely regarded as company with some interesting innovations in their server and some very imporant innovations in other products (HIbernate) , tarred by unethical and arrogant business practices. This is by both developers (read Hani's Bile Blog -- and note
I mean granted, Hibernate is newer and cleaner, but TOPLink is the old faithful ORM with great features. If they merged the two projects that would be good. Most of TOPLink's team still remains in Ottawa, I believe, so they're independent from the rest of Oracle's middleware team.
I can unequivolcally state that I am the leading Slashdot poster with Batman in my name. That statement doesn't generate revenue or otherwise help me in any useful way.
This is something I wish more people understood. Being the "leader" doesn't really mean much for business unless it gives you power of some sort. That power is either influence or money.
The Linux Kernel team and Apache Foundation, for example, have power through influence. Redhat, on the other hand, arguably has power because of its position as the Linux revenue leader.
JBoss has neither revenue nor major influence. Most uses of open source J2EE only require a servlet container, which JBoss doesn't provide! Hence the real influential power in the open source Java space is Apache's Tomcat. And generally speaking, I find JBoss is out there but not very prevalent in existing IBM or BEA customers. And I find people usually rely on it for EJB, not JMS or XA transactions, or JCA.
Unless you've got some hard numbers to back up your assertions, I'm afraid that the massive, OSS, J2EE market simply doesn't exist.
In terms of revenue, you're absolutely correct. But if you count usage, I would say that Apache Tomcat likely beats every commercial or OSS vendor by a wide margin.. but then again, it's only a JSP/servlet contianer. (Note I work for BEA but I don't speak for them)
Spring and Hibernate, yes. Struts, yes. Velocity is not widely used.
And let's also note that it's not about "no J2EE", it's about "no EJB 2.x". Java EE consists of many important frameworks: Servlets, JSP & JSTL, the WAR/EAR deployment model, JMS, JCA, JTA, the various JAX api's, etc.
Gwynner Dyer makes an intersting observation that it isn't Islam, per se, that is extremist, it is Arab Islam. The problem is likely the rut that Arab nations are in socially, economically, and politically, and have been in for centuries. This rut has arguably been held in place by the autocrats sponsored by Western nations as part of the after effects of colonialism and WW2. A group of extremists believe that this rut is due to losign favour with Allah, and the only way to make up for it is to go back to the traditional ways... Instead of looking emperically at the more likely culprit, this century anyway, of Arab leaders turning towards socialism/state control over free markets and capitalism.
The most populated Muslim countries are in the South Pacific (e.g. Indonesia, the Phillippines, etc.) -- certainly Muslims across the world are outraged by these cartoons, but the most extreme calls aren't coming from those areas, from what I can tell. It arguably is the Arab extremists that are trying to formet their rage into a broader religious struggle across nations.
what I said: Photoshop will still cost as much as it does until a group with enough incentive decides to seriously take them on.
what you said: you only need just enough of them to get the software fixed and/or forked.
Sounds similar. Our disagreement is one of incentives -- I don't think there's been a fork of GIMP because there are going to be only two broad incentives to do so: a group of volunteers that don't like GIMP and want something better, or a group of people that want to make money by killing Photoshop. Generally speaking, neither has happened.
The following point to me is rather bizarre:
Suddenly, the consumer sees another competing product, but this one's free. So they give the "new guy" a try. That's the beauty of this whole FL/OSS movement.
That has nothing to do with FL/OSS, that's the way MARKETS work -- whether the code is freed or not has nothing to do with whether a competitor exists and/or is cheaper.
Ok, so forking a codebase in theory makes the costs associated with creating a competitor product lower, but one would have to wonder how radical the difference between is if it doesn't require a ground-up rethink. Perl, for example, may be a conceptual derivative of awk, but I don't recall it being a fork. Again, this has nothing to do with the availability of the source -- it's just a software marketplace at work.
The Eclipse project is good evidence that it make sense to let go of a project. IBM creating the foundation was arguably when it really took off, particularly in terms of making competitors comfortable with using that platform for their dev environments.
And three years from now, GIMP will still be free, while Photoshop will still cost more than a new low-end computer.
If its free, but it sucks, is it really free?
In the Open Source world, if enough people don't like something, it gets forked and fixed.
Ah, but In the real world, most software consumers are not also software producers. If people don't like something, they switch to a competitor's product. Hence why Photoshop will still cost as much as it does until a group with enough incentive decides to seriously take them on.
Slashdot Mirror
I compete with Oracle daily , working for another software vendor, but I wholeheartedly recommend their database to almost any scale solution. It's a great piece of technology. And most large organizations that use Linux use it to run Oracle, or an application server of some sort, giving Oracle the largest Linux databsae market share (by revenue).
SQL Server 2005, by my estimation, is also good, but very new.
DB2 UDB has some positive traits, particularly the parallel edition for large data warehouses, but otherwise has aspects that I don't like (particularly their locking / concurrency management). Ditto for Sybase, adding in (what I feel to be) a very difficult recovery process compared to Oracle, which has some fairly well trodden paths to recovery (especially in 10g).
10g is big, but it's not hard to install, unless you're X11 challenged...
There are laws in most jurisdictions to punish filers of frivolous lawsuits as an abuse of the system. Though I admit most "large" cases , even if groundless, don't often fall under that due to expensive lawyers fooling people into believing there actually is a case there.
The (HUGE) difference is that in those countries , the government was police, judge, and jury. Here it is governed by civil action, presided by a judge, determined by a jury of 12 individuals.
Freedom is not "license" -- it is responsibliity.
No longer do corporates have to stick to Java or ASP.Net, they can mix and match. You'd hope that this would enable people to concentrate on the best way to do things, but no, it'll just end up in a language pissing match again, thus ensuring the lovely ideals behind SOA go out the window.
.NET remoting in particular isn't designed to be interoperable, whereas ASP.NET and WSE are better at it -- but SOA is much broader than just SOAP or even HTTP.... it can apply to most messaging systems, or even databases, or even regular flat file transfers, so long as an appropriate contract is defined.
But the idea of SOA is to allow heterogeneity to proliferate -- to allow mix & match. It's the old saw of separating interface from implementation.
Certainly, SOAP web services can be done wrong --
Sometimes vendors overdo the "dummy" aspect, but there's no doubt that we're more productive at developing today because of higher level languages and more sophisticated tools. Some might argue this "dumbs down" programming, but I don't think that's the point, the point is to automate manual / rote chores that are often error-prone and better handled by a computer (most of the time). Memory management & garbage collection being an important example.
The JBoss/Microsoft announcement was more about interoperability between Microsoft server products (.NET web services, Active Directory, SQL Server, Ops Manager) than it was about "running well on Windows".
It also seemed to be mostly a PR move -- "we're announcing that we'll some day announce something of substance"....
Yes, it did. They threw out hundreds of man-years of work.
They put a lot of stuff on the back-burner, like WinFS. The media's reports of stuff being "thrown out" are exagerrated.
I guess you missed the news about the rollback to the Windows Server 2003 codebase.
That's a myth, frankly. Yes, a number of the more ambitious features were shelved, but many are still in there.
Dude, Vista isn't two months late, it's six years late. Two months is just the very latest in a very long list of slips.
This is a bizarre statement, as if you're holding Microsoft to statements made in 1997-1998, back when "Cairo" was the buzzword (which eventually became Windows 2000). Considering XP was released in October 2001, I don't think it's fair to claim Vista is 6 years late.
I attended the PDC in 2003, and they were aiming for Longhorn beta in 2004, final release in late '04 / early 2005. So I would say it's two years late.
This line of reasoning reminds me of the Team OS/2 folks (of which I was one) claiming how much of a failure "Chicago" was -- many man years wasted, tremendous quality problems, schedule slippage, etc. It was due for an early 1994 release and was pushed until August 25, 1995 as "Windows 95". And we all know how much of a "failure" it turned out to be.
because a corporation has a number of benefits: limiting liability, tax incentives, and the ability to embark on pretty much any kind of legal commercial activity, something that non-profits are often restricted in doing.
and yes, there's the privacy thing. they don't have to tell the public what they're doing, except the IRS (and the SEC once they reach a certain size).
malware will not be required to ask you for a password to elevate privileges - see? all those 'this is not a virus, it asks for your password and that should set your alarm bells going' argument goes puff! in smoke.
It's one thing to say it took someone 30 minutes to gain root access from a local acocunt; it's a very different thing to say that a piece of malware will *automatically* do this in a matter of seconds/minutes. Yes, it's a step towards an automated solution, but since the approach wasn't made public it's unclear whether it's universally exploitable, or only under certain conditions, etc.
This is exactly what Oracle is doing. SAP is a ripe target -- they're doing well, but they're a lumbering giant, without the competitive zeal that Larry brings. Having said that, the sight of 10,000 Germans targeting you can be pretty daunting. :-)
I might add that Oracle is hedging this with their investment in their Fusion middleware. It's clear the Fusion strategy is a distraction; it's not their main thrust, otherwise they'd have much tighter timelines. But it's just enough to keep BEA and IBM on their toes -- enough to give BEA a headache due to its relative size, enough to trounce Sun where needed, but not enough to displace IBM. There remains the risk that there will be a middleware renaissance due to software-as-service, SOA, etc., where companies will realize they don't have to spend millions on a rip-and-replace with SAP/Oracle apps/Siebel/Peoplesoft.
This was intended to be a response to the grandparent; I realize the parent was defending Oracle.
But a full-time DBA can manage many, many Oracle instances. Operations DBAs, generally speaking, are responsible for uptime, and periodic operational tuning. It takes a different kind of DBA or even Oracle-experienced developer to understand how to write and tune SQL and design an optimal I/O layout.
Are you suggesting that MySQL doesn't require a DBA? The physics and computer science under the covers is the same... If you push MySQL to the same degree many customers push their Oracle databases, you're going to need professional help.
More likely, people don't understand what they're paying for in Oracle because the developers are too lazy to understand it, and decide to build those features themselves.
This may sound condescending, but it is very prevalent in the Java community, for example. People just don't understand how much they're getting and treat the database as a dumb object store. If that's all it is, sure, use MySQL. But I am quite confident that a team that understands Oracle will be tremendously more productive and have a more performing, scalable application than if they used it as a dumb store (the way you would use MySQL, which couldn't do inner queries until recently, for example).
The ironical thing about this is that the future of OSS software is actually *more* secure than anything the closed-source industry could create.
This is true for cases of "dead" or "dying" products, where there isn't market incentive to keep maintaining and supporting the product based on the revenue it generates. It's arguably why Netscape was originally open sourced and eventually spun off into a non-profit foundation.
Whereas in cases where there still is market demand, it's very common for another company to step in and maintain/support the codebase.
Even in cases of small proprietary software companies, large customers often request that small software companies put their code in escrow as a hedge against their viability -- they'll then either take on the maintanence themselves or sell it to someone who wants to. The software industry has been doing this for a long time.
Can the same be said of Oracle? If Oracle falls apart tomorrow due to some massive accounting fraud being publicized, where does that leave all the current Oracle users?
Another company would step in to take on maintanence and support of the product. This would likely consist of most of the old Oracle employees. Sure, there is risk there, but since we're talking about "worst case scenarios", there's risk in an open source project too, which usually relies on a small number of core developers. If they leave, it's not guaranteed that people with the same level of talent and productivity will quickly step up to take the project over.
What if your CRM breaks, who will fix it?
Not necessarily the OSS community. The problem with any community is that it evolves, maintains, and fixes what it wants to -- it doesn't have to listen to customers that are not also contributors. This is reflective of the old attitude of "if you don't like it, submit a patch, or fork it". To a large customer, that's not good enough.
Of course, open source arguably provides a free escrow. Customers could just take the code and support it themselves or pay a 3rd party to maintain it and evolve it in a closed-source manner, since GPL2 and their ilk are only about redistribution. This is how Google and other software-as-a-service companies can exploit open-source... but I digress.
But the point is that a large commercial customer typically prefers a contractually-obligated entity to perform front-line maintenance and support -- they often want to be insulated from the community, unless they already have enough of a brain-trust invested in the community (which is historically pretty rare).
1. I misspoke - yes, you do ship a (3rd party) servlet container.
2. Perhaps you're right. As with all anecdotes, YMMV, but I'm speaking broadly about mid-size ($200m+ revenue) to large-ish ($1b++) financials & telecoms in U.S., Canada, and European or U.S. banks in Japan. JBoss is present (particularly in fnance) but is no where near #1 across companies or within any single company. I find slightly more than half of financials are mostly IBM (particuarly Retail) and the rest are BEA (which tends to be brokerage, though some exceptions exist). Some financials go for 70%+ standards on one server, some have a complete hodge-podge mix of IBM, BEA, JBoss, etc.
In the end, all I'm really criticizing is the constant public " JBoss is the #1 application server" line which is very misleading... IBM likely is the only company that can honestly say that, though even that requries a lot of fine print (it's largely due to their mainframe presence -- same reason they're #1 in databases).
While I tend to prefer Hibernate these days, I have had a lot of success with TOPlink through 2002 (when I stopped using it) in several projects. THe mapping workbench always sucked, but it wasn't a big deal to create the mappings in XML or Java (which is what you'd do in HIbernate anyway). I've found that TOPLink usually generates quite good SQL. You have to poke it with a stick at times, but you have to poke HIbernate a lot too.
TOPLink is also completely non-intrusive to one's class hierarchy (at least on the projects where I've worked on it) -- it used reflection to scan for changes back in the day. HIbernate is admittedly much faster here.
One anecdote on this..... I did an informal poll of a number of sr. financial services architects & developers in London last November (including some very public figures & bloggers), several of them rated TOPLink and Kodo above Hibernate in terms of overall features and performance. I admit, even I was surprised at this (I would peg Hibernate as an equal or superior). So, your dev VP is in good company. TOPLink was the only game in town until Kodo and Hibernate, really.
Boss has fairly high revenue for a 150 person company, but since it isn't public knowledge it is hard to say. They are profitable with 175 employees, so you know JBoss has to have at least modest revenue. Not IBM numbers, but still.
Agree on this count - my point wasn't that they weren't a viable company, it was that they're so small that their revenue makes them effectively irrelevant. To put this in perspective, BEA is considered a pip-squeak compared to the big 4 (SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle) with it's $1.2 billion in annual revenue. BEA's headcount is considered relatively low by industry standards for its revenue & license runrate (it's around 3200 employees). Compared to JBoss, this is almost 20x larger.
Their power is mostly that of influence, which admittedly has been historically high, but now I feel is something they've squandered to great lengths through a combination of the attitude of their public personas and the astrotufing compain.
On the other hand, JBoss has been the dominant player in the enterprise Java space this last year. Not only does JBoss have #1 market share among application servers
Disagree. Market share is share of MARKET. Market implies revenue first and foremost. Secondly, "usage share" (for lack of a better term) must be something emperically measurable with reasonable repeatability. JBoss downloads are not a reliable indicator of share, nor are magazine surveys or analyst surveys.
The major exception to this rule has historically been free web servers, as Netcraft (and anyone for that matter) can crawl the Internet for this. Since JBoss doesn't ship a servlet container, this doesn't work.
they have been the major contributor to the Java EE 5 (EJB3) specifications which are the most important enterprise Java thing happening now.
Disagree. EJB 3, while a useful standard, is competitively irrelevant -- it does nothing to differentiate vendors. Most of the influence on EJB 3 came from two sources -- the popularity of Spring-like dependency injection (which is from Interface 21, who have nothing to do with JBoss) and Hibernate.
Yes, the Hibernate folks like Gavin are JBoss employees and major contributors to the persistence spec , but firstly, this has nothing to do with the JBoss Server, this has to do with the popularity of HIbernate. Secondly, in my opinion this whole persistence thing is (to quote Don Box) the Java world's Vietnam. They can't stop throwing resources into the black whole when other communities (.NET for one) don't even bother and are just as productive.
The most interesting things happening in the Java world right now, from my perspective, are things like Azul, Eclipse, AspectJ, Spring, WebLogic Real Time, JBI, JSR-168, the SIP servlet stuff, etc. EJB3 is important but it's catch-up with existing alternatives.
And I'd also say the the even bigger trend in the industry goes way beyond Java - it is the focus on integration, SOA, portals, etc., which JBoss really doesn't have much influence on. Building isolated web applications connected to databases is boring, the market is saturated, and there likely will be better/more productive ways of doing that soon. The real pain will be service-enabling legacy systems, high speed, high reliability messaging, mainframe integration, data transformation, etc.
I think it's fair to say that JBoss is one of the top few companies shaping the Java landscape now - and they are certainly more of an influence than their competitors (IBM and BEA).
This is completely contrary to my perspective on the marketplace. Whose influence are you talking about? Spec leading? Sales? Marketing? I just don't agree. From my perspective, JBoss is widely regarded as company with some interesting innovations in their server and some very imporant innovations in other products (HIbernate) , tarred by unethical and arrogant business practices. This is by both developers (read Hani's Bile Blog -- and note
I mean granted, Hibernate is newer and cleaner, but TOPLink is the old faithful ORM with great features. If they merged the two projects that would be good. Most of TOPLink's team still remains in Ottawa, I believe, so they're independent from the rest of Oracle's middleware team.
I can unequivolcally state that I am the leading Slashdot poster with Batman in my name. That statement doesn't generate revenue or otherwise help me in any useful way.
This is something I wish more people understood. Being the "leader" doesn't really mean much for business unless it gives you power of some sort. That power is either influence or money.
The Linux Kernel team and Apache Foundation, for example, have power through influence. Redhat, on the other hand, arguably has power because of its position as the Linux revenue leader.
JBoss has neither revenue nor major influence. Most uses of open source J2EE only require a servlet container, which JBoss doesn't provide! Hence the real influential power in the open source Java space is Apache's Tomcat. And generally speaking, I find JBoss is out there but not very prevalent in existing IBM or BEA customers. And I find people usually rely on it for EJB, not JMS or XA transactions, or JCA.
Unless you've got some hard numbers to back up your assertions, I'm afraid that the massive, OSS, J2EE market simply doesn't exist.
In terms of revenue, you're absolutely correct. But if you count usage, I would say that Apache Tomcat likely beats every commercial or OSS vendor by a wide margin.. but then again, it's only a JSP/servlet contianer. (Note I work for BEA but I don't speak for them)
Spring and Hibernate, yes. Struts, yes. Velocity is not widely used.
And let's also note that it's not about "no J2EE", it's about "no EJB 2.x". Java EE consists of many important frameworks: Servlets, JSP & JSTL, the WAR/EAR deployment model, JMS, JCA, JTA, the various JAX api's, etc.
Gwynner Dyer makes an intersting observation that it isn't Islam, per se, that is extremist, it is Arab Islam. The problem is likely the rut that Arab nations are in socially, economically, and politically, and have been in for centuries. This rut has arguably been held in place by the autocrats sponsored by Western nations as part of the after effects of colonialism and WW2. A group of extremists believe that this rut is due to losign favour with Allah, and the only way to make up for it is to go back to the traditional ways... Instead of looking emperically at the more likely culprit, this century anyway, of Arab leaders turning towards socialism/state control over free markets and capitalism.
The most populated Muslim countries are in the South Pacific (e.g. Indonesia, the Phillippines, etc.) -- certainly Muslims across the world are outraged by these cartoons, but the most extreme calls aren't coming from those areas, from what I can tell. It arguably is the Arab extremists that are trying to formet their rage into a broader religious struggle across nations.
I don't think you read my point.
what I said: Photoshop will still cost as much as it does until a group with enough incentive decides to seriously take them on.
what you said: you only need just enough of them to get the software fixed and/or forked.
Sounds similar. Our disagreement is one of incentives -- I don't think there's been a fork of GIMP because there are going to be only two broad incentives to do so: a group of volunteers that don't like GIMP and want something better, or a group of people that want to make money by killing Photoshop. Generally speaking, neither has happened.
The following point to me is rather bizarre:
Suddenly, the consumer sees another competing product, but this one's free. So they give the "new guy" a try. That's the beauty of this whole FL/OSS movement.
That has nothing to do with FL/OSS, that's the way MARKETS work -- whether the code is freed or not has nothing to do with whether a competitor exists and/or is cheaper.
Ok, so forking a codebase in theory makes the costs associated with creating a competitor product lower, but one would have to wonder how radical the difference between is if it doesn't require a ground-up rethink. Perl, for example, may be a conceptual derivative of awk, but I don't recall it being a fork. Again, this has nothing to do with the availability of the source -- it's just a software marketplace at work.
The Eclipse project is good evidence that it make sense to let go of a project. IBM creating the foundation was arguably when it really took off, particularly in terms of making competitors comfortable with using that platform for their dev environments.
And three years from now, GIMP will still be free, while Photoshop will still cost more than a new low-end computer.
If its free, but it sucks, is it really free?
In the Open Source world, if enough people don't like something, it gets forked and fixed.
Ah, but In the real world, most software consumers are not also software producers. If people don't like something, they switch to a competitor's product. Hence why Photoshop will still cost as much as it does until a group with enough incentive decides to seriously take them on.