selecting application server

[Kaarthik Sivashanmugam]

Hi All,
What are the criteria to be considered while selecting an application server for a project ? And as a related question, are there any disadvantages in using free application servers like JBoss ?

Your response will be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Kaarthik

[Scott Duncan]

Administration, performance, ease of use, J2EE compliancy to name just a few. Performance is a hard thing to measure since all the major players claim to outperform each other. There used to be a feeling that Tomcat could not perform as well as the others but several benchmarks have disproved this notion (to a degree). Since Tomcat is the servlet container for JBoss, you may want to consider this. Adminstration is a biggie for me. WebSphere base comes with a disfunctional web based admin console. This fact forces you to purchase another product (Network Deployment) to properly administer your servers and apps. This isn't the easiest thing to set up either. I like JBoss because it supports packaged deployment and hot deployments while the big players who charge thousands per cpu do not. Administration isn't the best but once you start it becomes easy. The free documentation kind of sux also.

[Paul Sturrock]

You could discuss this for days. See here to fully understand your choices. One big commercial consideration is who you sue if the product just does not deliver the services you were sold - which is kind of tricky if you go for an OpenSource product (despite the fact you haven't paid for the product, you may well have invested months of unrecoverable development effort in it, writing vendor specific code).

The free documentation kind of sux also.

And in the case of JBoss, so does the paid for documentation.
[ July 22, 2004: Message edited by: Paul Sturrock ]

[Nicholas Cheung]

Open source products usually lack of support.

Think of it. If you using Tomcat to be the Servlet and JSP engine, and when it downs someday, and you dont know how to solve the problem, what should you do? Send an email to Jakarta? She may reply you 1-2 days, or even weeks. But you are urgent to recover the system!!!

But if you purchase the app server from big companies, like BEA, IBM or even Oracle, they give you full support when you need them.

Thus, if the project is small, it does not matter for what kind of server you are using. But if it is a huge project, I dont think it is worth to save the cost of the app server to sarcify the support, as you may lose more when your system cannot be back up asap (like Internet Brokage System)!!!

Nick