Which is the best EJB Container to learn?

[Andy Ng]

I just start learning EJB, do anyone know which is the best EJB Container (J2EE application server)?
I heard about orion, weblogic, websphere, and jboss, but which one is best to start with?
Which one has good documentation and easy to install.

[Rick Salsa]

Well, that depends on how much money you have Websphere and Weblogic both cost a lot of money. I've heard that you can now get weblogic for free under a developers license. I haven't looked into that yet.
You could try Oracle's that has good documentation. Personally I like JBoss, but again, it lacks full documentation right now. You can purchase the documentation for a small fee and the server is free as well.
Orion is free, but poor docs from what I heard. I like JBoss, it's pretty easy to setup.
If you do get Weblogic, or webshpere, they should have a program to help you deploy your entity beans.
HTH,
/rick

[Michael Pearson]

You can download trial versions of mosts App Servers for free. That includes WebLogic, WebSphere, Orion, Oracle, etc.
Both IBM and BEA have extensive documentation and tutorials. That's probably the largest difference between them and the others. Download a couple and see which interface you like the most.

[Doug Wang]

Originally posted by Andy Ng:
... which one is best to start with?
Which one has good documentation and easy to install.

Good question.
For commercial product, I vote for WebSphere. But it is not so easy to install, the numerous ducument can help you out. For free one, I heard that most ppl would like to vote JBoss.
Rick, have you tried both JBoss and Resin? How about comparing JBoss with Resin? Do these free servers have any tools to help to deploy my entity beans?
Thanks.

[Reid M. Pinchback]

I've used WebLogic 5.1 and JBoss 2.something-or-other. They differ quite a bit, but not really from a coding standpoint (which is good; that is one of the aims of J2EE).
- if you need a high-capacity fault-tolerant environment, WebLogic beats JBoss (at least for now)
- if you want to run multiple server processes on the same machine, that is a bit easier with WebLogic than with JBoss.
- if you want to do automated builds and deploys to your container, JBoss is much better than WebLogic.
- if you want the newest J2EE bells and whistles, you'll usually get them in JBoss before WebLogic.
- While JBoss documentation isn't great, it tends to be better than WebLogic simply because BEA isn't good about bothering to update their docs to match their new releases.
- I haven't been impressed with WebLogic support; I think the user community support for JBoss is better.
- The pricing model for WebLogic stinks if you are writing small systems but are deploying them on servers with multiple CPUs. JBoss is free; even if you pay for support it has to be cheaper than WebLogic.
- I think JBoss bugs get fixed faster; a past coworker of mine had done a fair bit of WebLogic work and found that it took bugs a long time to get fixed, and usually a bunch of new bugs were introduced by the fixes (often old bug fixes were accidentally removed).

[arun sahni]

I just started with WebLogic7.0 which I found is easy to learn and work with compare to others and early version of WebLogic. It has inbuilt deployer which make life little easier and configuration is also easy. You can download for 60 days evals.
[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: arun sahni ]

[Marcos Maia]

I suggest WebLogic, it�s easy to install and have a really good documentation, and if you install it with samples you�re gonna have lot�s of them to study as well.
The great administration console also makes your life much easiyer
You can download WebLogic here

Originally posted by Andy Ng:
I just start learning EJB, do anyone know which is the best EJB Container (J2EE application server)?
I heard about orion, weblogic, websphere, and jboss, but which one is best to start with?
Which one has good documentation and easy to install.

[Rick Salsa]

Originally posted by Doug Wang:

Rick, have you tried both JBoss and Resin? How about comparing JBoss with Resin? Do these free servers have any tools to help to deploy my entity beans?

I personally haven't used Resin at all, not even looked at it. I got hooked on JBoss and quite like it (it's free ). JBoss doesn't have a deploy tool at the moment. Not sure if they are going to make one?? I actually use ant for my build process and write a lot of the deployment descriptors myself.
If you want a tool to write descriptors for you, look at XDoclet. It's an excellent open source tool that will create EJB classes and deployment descriptors for you.
/rick
[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: Rick Salsa ]

[Doug Wang]

Thanks Rick for the information and sharing of your experience.

[jawwad ahmed]

Well can any body tell where to get free copy of weblogic and told above.
Thanks
Jawwad Ahmed

[arun sahni]

check link below :
http://commerce.bea.com/downloads/products.jsp