Question for Brian and Christopher...

[Mel Riffe]

Firstly I'm a big believer in Open Source. And open source in the enterprise is an attractive offering for many IT shops regardless of technology (Java, .Net, C++, etc). Plus every corporation has its own unique requirements and constraints.

Given that short preamble, what do you see are the limitations or obstacles open source must overcome to be consistently on the 'short list' of corporate enterprise solutions? Can we (we as in believers of the open source movement) compete against commercial offerings? I think we can, but I'd like to get your points of view.

Looking forward to your comment (and comments from the regular forum patrons)...

Mel Riffe

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

Mel,
I think the 'short list' is growing rapidly. Ant, Hibernate, Eclipse, JBoss are rapidly becoming part of this list. I think *some* open source projects are great contenders to their commercial counterparts. Also, one of the great things is that you can get only what you need. A good example is a recent client of mine that wanted to venture into the world of business rules engines. An initial evaluation of ILog JRules prove that it what *too much* product for what they wanted to do. Basically they wanted a 'light' version of the product. That's when we turned to Drools (drools.codehaus.org) which provided us with just what we needed. Both products are JSR-94 compliant (rules engine API JSR).

I think the first inroads are made in the development productivity area with tools like Eclipse, XDoclet, Middlegen. The next frontier is to get management to buy into this products in production environments. Products like JBoss, Struts, Tapestry, Hibernate and Spring. Small and mid-size business don't seem to have a problem, it it mostly large corporations when I see a bit of push back. Hopefully things will get better...

[Mel Riffe]

Brian,

I too have seen small/mid-sized companies embrace open source; my current employer's tool set includes: Eclipse, Tomcat, WebWork, Hibernate, Maven, CruiseControl, and Scarab, not to mention all the supporting open source libraries.

I feel books like yours will give us consumers of open source the right tools to start convinicing management of its benefits.

One last question: Where do you see portals in the enterprise space? Espeically coupled with workflow or rules support.

Thanks...

Mel Riffe

[Kishore Dandu]

how about ur opinions about Spring & hibernate from a wider adoptation perspective?

[Christopher Judd]

I have been using Spring and Hibernate for the last 6 months. Recently I have also started using OJB. At this point, I can not immagine developing with out Spring and at least Hibernate or OJB.

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

Mel,
I've been wanting to get aboard the Portals wagon but I haven't had the chance to find a project that needed that level of pluggability and needed to support a high rate of change (the factor that in my opinion make portals an attractive solution). On the other hand I did started to play with JetSpeed but I wasn't very impressed (of course that was a while ago) so the project might be much better now. I now there are a lot of CMS and Portal projects out there it just seems that the learning curve to get something simple up and going is kind of steep.

Brian

[Alexandru Popescu]

Given that short preamble, what do you see are the limitations or obstacles open source must overcome to be consistently on the 'short list' of corporate enterprise solutions? Can we (we as in believers of the open source movement) compete against commercial offerings?

Most of the time, OS projects do not fullfil the requirements of a big company. And I am not talking here about feature lists or performance issues. I big company will not base its solutions on projects that do not provide the correct support for the users, does not show that the project developers are active and to a project that lacks documentation. If an os project has all these aces in its pocket than there are big chances it will be a winner. Otherwise...

./pope

[Mel Riffe]

Originally posted by Brian Sam-Bodden:
Mel,
[snip] I now there are a lot of CMS and Portal projects out there it just seems that the learning curve to get something simple up and going is kind of steep.

Brian

Brian, it's been my experience there's a lot of heavy lifting to do before you can do something simple with regards to Enterprise Java (Servlet Containers, Application Servers, Frameworks, JARs, WARs, EARs, etc). And it is for that reason your book is so valuable.

I was really hoping to get a copy of the book (watch out Amazon, here I come). I really appreciate the work you and Christopher endured to bring this book to life. I have a feeling it will help a lot of people wanting to do Enterprise Java development.

I too have the same opinion of portals: nice concept but is it a solution waiting for a problem?

Thanks, again...

- Mel