Monday, May 5, 2008

And then there were 3

Oracle has now officially acquired BEA, leaving the app server marketplace for Java EE at 3 major vendors with IBM and JBoss completing the trinity. After having personal experience with both BEA WebLogic and Oracle's Application Server, I plea to Oracle, just use BEA's app server and don't mess with it. Orion was a good product and you turned it into a trainwreck. There is no reason that an application server install should take 4 days and 300 gb of memory. JSPs shouldn't be stored in the database. Oh, and your installer should not need to install JDK 1.2 to run. Leave it alone Oracle and focus on improving your DB.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

A Polarized Community?

The news that SpringSource announced yesterday regarding their application server is not surprising but possibly very concerning to many developers in the Java landscape. We see now a very clear divide between people's perception of what is standard for Java Enterprise Development. Is the standard the open source platform that is used in a greater number of projects or is the standard the framework released by the Java Community Process? In my opinion it is very clearly the former.

I'm in the fortunate position of seeing every Java requirement that comes in to my consulting company and guess what? The number of Spring requirements far outweighs the number of EJB, let alone JSF reqs. I still see more Struts requirements than JSF and EJB reqs combined. So now, is the news that not only is there a non-standard framework, but also a non-standard application server something to be concerned with? Hell no.

How many developers have actually taken advantage of the fact that your app can be ported to different app servers with "no code change"? I've been on one project in the last 10 years that did so and guess what? We still had to change a lot of XML to make sure that stuff didn't break. Portability is a farce at the app server level and it's largely unnecessary.

So if there is no need to port my SpringAppServer application to JBoss or WebLogic or god help me WebSphere, what are the issues with adopting SpringSource Application Platform? It surely will present some amount of a learning curve. It may not be adopted by many of my clients initially who continue to write checks to IBM and BEA for inferior products that lag behind the so-called standards.

On the flip side, it will provide the ability to roll out smaller, componentized versions of your applications. It will let you keep multiple versions of the same components running on the same server. It will let you deploy your app without restarting your server. It will cost about $15k per cpu less than BEA or IBM products. Oh, and it will not force you to use JDK 1.4 or prior in order to run on the system.

Is it really a polarized community if everyone is heading in one direction?