Jboss vs Websphere - your opinion?

[rivka zam]

hi friends,

We are currently trying to decide whether to start a new J2EE project with Jboss or with IBM's webshpere.

Please give some advice.

thanks
Rivka

[Wiley Snyder]

$$$

[P. Bravo]

JBoss! Jboss is better than Whebesphere because:
- Is 100% off
- You make all configuration.
- Your client will be happy because of the economy!!! money for you!!!
- and you will contribute for open source community



Don�t copy! Makes! To be free!!!

[Paul Sturrock]

Money will probably decide this, but there are advantages to using WebSphere for development only. The RAD development tool set is fairly good and WebSphere is far stricter when it comes to adhereing to the J2EE spec. so is useful if you are writing an app. that can be deployed across many different application servers (as a J2EE app. really should be). JBoss is relatively easy to use, but it lets you be sloppy.

[James Longhorn]

Money is not everything.
We had several cases in which Websphere found to be much more productive and ready for production.
Security - Websphere has much more security features and integrations than JBoss. Very relevant in enterprise applications
Management - Websphere has internal tracing, excellent monitoring and profiling tools and capabilities. It also integrates much better to management platforms.
IDE - RAD is very good. Smooth integration with the application server

It is not a fair play... IBM invests lots of money in making it a very good product.

PS: Costs are not that high... it is better check cost/performance ...

[rivka zam]

Paul said:

>The RAD development tool set is fairly good and WebSphere is far >stricter .when it comes to adhereing to the J2EE spec. so is useful if you >are writing an app. that can be deployed across many different application >servers (as a J2EE app. really should be). JBoss is relatively easy to >use, but it lets you be sloppy.

As much as i know it's not simple in reality - i developed a little web application using RAD and it's running on Websphere. Now i'm trying to deploy it to JBoss using IntelliJ. IntelliJ has no automatic way to import RAD's EAR file. I believe i need to change config xml files. I'm still struggling with this...

Thanks
Rivka

[Animesh Saxena]

Some Advantages....................Hope this helps
1) Because of their cost structure and the international reach of JBoss Group, they literally have some of the best developers in the world working on the project.
2) They support the J2EE standard, though they are not tied to it for marketing or business reasons, and they have implemented features not mandated by the J2EE standard in order to build a better product.
3) Because they have such great developers and are driven by nothing other than technical reasons, they are actually able to innovate and extend the capabilities of J2EE containers.

[P. Bravo]

Ok your right, but all depends!!!
if you wants use one AS for one aplication for student, use Jboss
if your problem is productivity use JBoss with JBoss IDE in eclipse
if you need good support use JBoss!

Ok this good reasons for you use JBoss.
Ok, but JBoss isn�t better for all!!!

Websphere make a lot of many things automatic!!! (high productivity)

But an we speak here: check always the cost/benefit

[Paul Sturrock]

Originally posted by rivka zam:
As much as i know it's not simple in reality - i developed a little web application using RAD and it's running on Websphere. Now i'm trying to deploy it to JBoss using IntelliJ. IntelliJ has no automatic way to import RAD's EAR file. I believe i need to change config xml files. I'm still struggling with this...

Thanks
Rivka

Deploying on JBoss is easy. Just copy your ear file into the deploy directory of your server. Assuming you have written a J2EE compliant application, JBoss should just deploy it. You may be using some container provided services that require configuration on JBoss, and that you'll have to do manually.

I've no idea what Intellij provides you with, but Ant is the best way to configure deployments to different servers.

[Paul Sturrock]

Originally posted by Animesh Saxena:

3) Because they have such great developers and are driven by nothing other than technical reasons, they are actually able to innovate and extend the capabilities of J2EE containers.

Some of these incredible JBoss employees hang around in these forums, so I'm sure they'll be very flattered to be described this way. However, remember that JBoss Inc. is a company, and as such is just as driven by profit as their competitors.

[Kenneth A. Kousen]

I had a conversation recently with a client about this issue. (Actually, we were talking more about WebLogic versus JBoss, but the ideas are similar.)

The real question for an application server -- or any software for that matter -- is total cost of ownership. My client told me they bought their commercial servers a few years ago, so that now the only cost to them is in upgrades (a relatively rare, highly discounted expense) and the support contracts. JBoss may be free, but large companies will probably want the support contracts the same way they want them with IBM or BEA, and those costs are comparable. When you finally factor in that they had a fair base of experience in-house with the commercial product, initial cost turns out not to be that big an issue.

I believe that if a company does not have an existing installed base, they definitely should look at the open source leader. JBoss also brings an ease of installation and deployment that feels like a breath of fresh air compared to WebSphere. I also like that JBoss is always a state of the art server, especially compared with the commerical products. But simply pointing to the initial cost of the server licenses, while favorable, isn't necessarily the biggest selling point.

Ken

[Pradeep bhatt]

Paul,

I have a question regarding RAD. Can RAD be used for just Websphere app server or can it be used for other app servers?

[Pradeep bhatt]

One more thing. Websphere has a good documentation library but I am not happy with JBoss documentation. A year back one had to pay for JBoss docs .

[Paul Sturrock]

Originally posted by Pradip Bhat:
Paul,

I have a question regarding RAD. Can RAD be used for just Websphere app server or can it be used for other app servers?

I currently have RAD configured to include the JBoss IDE plugin. Works fine.

One more thing. Websphere has a good documentation library but I am not happy with JBoss documentation. A year back one had to pay for JBoss docs .

JBoss documentation has got a lot better. It was pretty poor round the 3.2 stage, but is a lot better now.

[Pradeep bhatt]

How does Clustering support differ in these servers ?

[Scott Selikoff]

Since this turned into a 'Bashing Websphere' thread (an event I'm normally happy to chime in on) I'll play devil's advocate for a little while...

WebSphere is far more powerful than JBoss. It is primarily designed for gigantic systems running dozens of servers with thousands/millions of users. While WebSphere does cost a lot, especially for support/training, if you are a Fortune 500 company, or Fortune 100 company to be more specific, using it gets you levels of features and controls found nowwhere else.

I could go into more details, but there hundreds of features WebSphere has, just read their product documentation pages (of which there are also hundreds of documentation pages). If you are running a small system with 1-2 programmers and dozens/hundreds of users, JBoss is fine, but it doesn't scale as well (or at least it hasnt in the past, its improving in leaps and bounds these days).

Now with that said... please return to your regularly scheduled WebSphere Bashing...
[ February 09, 2006: Message edited by: Scott Selikoff ]

[Paul Sturrock]

Originally posted by Pradip Bhat:
How does Clustering support differ in these servers ?

Ehm...in the implementation? I'm not sure what information you are after. From a developer's point of view all you initially need to know is do both servers support clustering and the answer is yes.

[Eric Gero]

I agree with Scott here, I have never used JBoss, but I do use WSAD 5.1. At first I wasn't crazy about it as an IDE, but once I started figuring things out, I realized how power it was.

After reading about JBoss in this forum, I think I will check it out. It seems like it would be worth it for smaller projects.
Eric