JBoss open source vs. JBoss enterprise

[M Burke]

JBoss wants a boat load of money for the commercial version, so I want to find out if it’s a good value. I need to find a one to one feature comparison between the free version of JBoss and the commercial product. Your experiences and opinions are also welcome.

I also want to find what monitoring tools are available for the free version. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Peter Johnson]

Feature comparison:
JBoss EAP 4.3 (the commercial version) is JBoss AS 4.2.1 + patches + Seam (I forget the version) + JBoss Messaging.
I suspect that EAP 5 will be similar (it is based off of 5.1.0), but I am still waiting to get my evaluation copy.
In essence, there is nothing special about the commercial version other than the various components have undergone more rigorous testing and you get support. With the free version you get to fix problems yourself or post your problems on a forum and hope that someone helps you. If you are reasonably confident in your technical abilities and do not mind doing your own app serve debugging and patching, then the free AS version is for you. If you expect someone else to fix problems, buy support.

Free monitoring tool:
http://www.jboss.org/jopr
This is the open-source version of JBoss Operations Network (the commercial monitoring tool)

[M Burke]

Thanks for the help, Peter.

As far as debugging, how often is this necessary with open source? Is the open source version unreliable with J2EE compliant apps? Or, are there just certain components that are troublesome?

[Peter Johnson]

Since the commercial and community versions of JBoss AS are derived from the same source code base, the question is moot. Both are open source, but one provides guaranteed support.

Note that this implies that even if you purchase the commercial version with support that you have access to the full source code (there are three basic commercial downloads - binary, source and documentation). So even with the commercial version you could do your own debugging/fixing. And it is not that different from the community version so you could still get help on the forums.

My prior question still stands - if you run into a problem, how confident are you in your ability to provide a timely fix to the problem? Or would you prefer someone else to guarantee a fix in a specific time period? For example, if your web site generates $100K per minute for your company, how long can you afford for your web site to be down? Of course, if your web site generates only $1 per minute, commercial support might not be worth it.

Please pay careful attention to the above terminology. "Commercial" stands for the product for which you can get support. "Community" stands for the free download. Both "commercial" and "community" are "open source" - that is, you have full access to the source and use an open source license (LGPL). [I am going on memory on that last point, I don't have access to any of my copies of EAP at this time to verify the license, but I believe they are LGPL.]

[M Burke]

Thank you, that does help.