The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Using JBoss

Using JBoss - Will I loose my job

I am exploring J2EE and have discovered jBoss. Almost all the material I have read have been written by jBoss evengelists.

Naturally I always take materials I read, especially technical, with a pinch of salt.

I have often heard, and seen practised, the maxim You never loose your job, if you recommend an IBM solution"

Is jBoss too risky to use incommercial and production environments?

Ram Dass
Monday, September 29, 2003

> Is jBoss too risky to use incommercial and production environments?

I don't know jBoss, but sometimes the question is the answer.

Mark T A W .com
Monday, September 29, 2003

Depends on the situation.

JBoss is used a lot on the low to medium end in the J2EE world. Search monster.com: you'll see lots of listings for it.

If it's up to you to make the technology recommendation, you can always recommend JBoss "for now", and port to WebLogic or WebSphere when or if you need to.

Portabella
Monday, September 29, 2003

In general the J2EE spec is fairly generic, if you use a tool like XDoclet you can probably achieve as much app server flexibility as you'd realistically need.

With regard to never getting fired for recommending IBM solutions... hmm, I don't like the sound of that HR practice.

Walter Rumsby
Monday, September 29, 2003

We have been using JBoss on many customer engagements (some of them run their products on it) for about 3 years now.

It is not upto speed to Weblogic but is defnitely a good (and free) alternative.

Their messaging bus (JMS) is a little shaky but other than that you will do great. I encourage you to move onto that.

Tarun Upadhyay
Monday, September 29, 2003

You might be out of a job unless you learn to spell a very simple word.

"lose"

It's not that difficult, why do people find it so hard ????

Damian
Monday, September 29, 2003

maybe English is not the posters' native language, try to say(or spell!) 'lose' in Zwahili...

ps. it's also not my native language

Guyon Morée
Monday, September 29, 2003

"If it's up to you to make the technology recommendation, you can always recommend JBoss "for now", and port to WebLogic or WebSphere when or if you need to."

Yes, this sounds like a great way to hedge your bets. If it turns out you need nothing more than JBoss, or the project flames out, you haven't put out cash for an appserver. If the project goes great guns and you need features not in JBoss, moving to a commercial server should be a straightforward process.

Jim Rankin
Monday, September 29, 2003

If you decide to go down the "JBoss for now, possibly something else later" route, make sure you take care to keep your code as vendor-neutral as possible. Every J2EE vendor has their own set of extensions that can make for uncessessary work should you wish to port to something else later.

I realise this sounds obvious, but some of those extensions are subtle - for example, one vendor may allow you to use a superclass of an EJB in a relation, while another may not.

Burninator
Monday, September 29, 2003

While I cannot give any specifics, I can tell you that JBoss is being used successfully in production systems by some of the largest companies in EDI.

Banks, however, love IBM and all of their crappy products.

Brian
Monday, September 29, 2003

Swalihi : English :: lose : -tifu

Do I get extra credit?

--
ee

eclectic_echidna
Monday, September 29, 2003

we use jboss for our own product and our big client has a Websphere cluster. Websphere has had problems of their own. JBoss was relativly easy to set up, but the documentation costs money and its not very well written.

Vince
Monday, September 29, 2003

Apparently JBoss is breaking the J2EE specifications for app servers. Therefore use JBoss and you may get locked with a single app server vendor ... that's a complete no, no.

Instead you can download the evaluation from BEA - WebLogic is a solid app server and comes with tons of examples.

Dino
Monday, September 29, 2003

Breaking the J2EE spec? Could you post evidence of that? All I've seen so far is that they aren't certified as J2EE by Sun because it is very expensive to apply for that certification.

To the original poster -- for some "don't get fired" justification, browse the JBoss web site for a list of their major customers, and/or contact them about getting more detailed information about how certain major customers are using it (e.g. "HP uses JBoss to support an XYZ application with X number of thousand users").

T. Norman
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Oh yeah, just upgrade from JBoss (free) to Weblogic ($40000) or Websphere ($90000). It sounds so easy. It costs so much.

Nada
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Can I say this: IBM software is a RIP OFF! Right, I've vented... well, not completely... WebSphere isn't even that good!!!. It's certainly not worth that amount of money. (When IBM claim MS is a monopoly they completely ignore the fact that their software is in general overpriced and underwhelming).

If you want a decent commercial J2EE server have a look at Orion - http://www.orionserver.com/ - I believe the license is "free for development and non-commercial use", otherwise the price is a $US 1500/year/server license. Oracle also do a good, reasonably priced ($US 5000) J2EE server - it's good because it's based on Orion. There are probably other decent, reasonably-priced commerical J2EE servers out there too, don't get FUDded into choosing WebSphere.

If you're starting out with J2EE JBoss might not be the best solution as (at least I understand) the documentation isn't so great (and it costs). If you're just playing around with/learning web stuff grab a copy of Tomcat - http://jakarta.apache.org/

Walter Rumsby
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Check out http://pramati.com/index.htm. I thinks its J2EE app server certified by Sun and costs lot less.

Nitin Bhide
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

xrefer has been using JBoss for 3-years having previously used BEA WebLogic. At the time we found JBoss to be 20-30% faster than WebLogic and more stable with heavier loads. We've never looked back.

If you need scalabiity then skipping a per-server fee certainly helps a heap.

Carl Roach
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Why can't you get a copy of JBoss and code up some quick trials as a testbed? You might want to suggest it to your boss as a *possible* solution, but you want to test it out.

Sounds like this sort of project would be an enjoyable, brief break from regular work.

The Pedant, Brent P. Newhall
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

I think Walter's right. I'm guessing 75% of J2EE programming is actually Servlets/JSP stuff, and Tomcat does that just fine. You really only need jboss or orion or websphere or whatnot if you want an EJB container, among some other things.

Vince
Tuesday, September 30, 2003

> I'm guessing 75% of J2EE programming is actually Servlets/JSP stuff, and Tomcat does that just fine.

I prefer servlet containers over application servers as well, with an O/R mapping layer instead of EJBs, but it's often a tough sell to management.

Portabella
Wednesday, October 1, 2003