WebLogic or WebSphere

[Zhining Zhang]

hello, all,
Which one is better for my next job? It is said that WebLogic has more customers in market. But I found there are more job opennings for WebSphere than for WebLogic.
Please give me some advices. thanks!
-Zhining Zhang

[Anonymous]

Several months ago the job openings of weblogic was more than the job openings of websphere. I have traced it every day for months and found that the job openings of weblogic decreases and the job openings of websphere grows.

[William Barnes]

I have traced it every day for months

That is interesting. How do you do that?

[Sylvester Saloon]

Guys did it occur to you that the proprietors may be the same people sponsoring the job ads.
Could Tomcat be the real leader?
Talk about amusing job ads: I saw one that required 3 years experience in C#, 5 years in jsp, and also another 5 years of J2ee exposure.

[Fei Ng]

"Talk about amusing job ads: I saw one that required 3 years experience in C#, 5 years in jsp, and also another 5 years of J2ee exposure. "
thats funny!!!

[Jim Baiter]

BEA is claiming a near 4-1 lead in market share, see http://www.bea.com/about/meta_survey/index.shtml
I have worked with both, I would say BEA is still better but WAS (Websphere App Server) is narrowing that margin. The market has changed to where EJB is being used more for data warehouse fronting where it used to be a dot-com favorite. This market is definitely IBM turf so those that say WAS will take over the market share may be correct.

[Oleg Shklyar]

Hi guys,
Just little bit objective info for further discussion:
- IBM bundles WebSphere soft pack with hardware (one of the company I know get it together with Compaq server) for a pretty good price;
- the guys from the same company(see above) spent so-o much time to figure out and to fix every day WebSphere3.5 ( I've heard 4.0 is much better).
- one more thing: client wanted to use some specific Windows only application working together with Application Server - the solution was to use JIntegra(now it is integrated with BEA WLS6.1);
- WebSphere 4.0 still doesn't support EJB2.0 (or am I wrong)?
I think this is the hard time for very specific and dedicated business like BEA(IBM spreaded its business everywhere: hardware, RDBMS, support for several software solutions on VisualAge base(C++, Java, COBOL) plus Smalltalk and so on - they are a little bit flexible to survive in that jobless calm).

[Jim Baiter]

Websphere 4.0 - WAS 4.0 is definitely better. But it is still new and I suspect there are many bugs to iron out. The tools such as WSAD (the websphere studio) look good but the copy I have requires a huge amount of memory and resources to run. The tools I've seen for WAS 4.0 are still admittedly beta.
I am concerned about the server memory usage and unreliability of redeployment. You can start and stop the EAR's from their admin webpage and alledgedly redeploy but I found sometimes this works and others it doesn't. This means you have to restart the app server which may or may not be desirable. IBM recommends developers run their own copy anyway so this is a minor gripe. On the memory side, I noticed a very simple EAR, one that just contained an "increment" session bean example they provided was consuming 6M of memory with the default pool size. We have some apps which may deploy 100 beans of all types so this concerns me.
WAS 4.0 is EJB 1.1, they don't yet support 2.0. They do provide some quasi-CMR (relationships) using their tools for the mapping. They also have a COM bridge built in with the enterprise edition. I haven't tried it yet but I have used the freebie "bridge2java" which is on DeveloperWorks successfully with Websphere to do Excel integration.
[This message has been edited by Jim Baiter (edited December 18, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Jim Baiter (edited December 18, 2001).]