I attended the Triangle JUG's J2EE
Container Shootout last night and it was a lot of fun due in great part
to the flamboyant verve of Marc "you can walk through walls, just like
us" Fleury of JBoss fame. Also behind the panelist table were: Robert
Patrick of BEA, Greg Ackerman of IBM, and Farzin Barazandeh of Oracle.
There were twelve questions and each panelist was given from 2-4 minutes
to answer each. Then there were free form questions from the audience. I
will try to summarize from my notes what I considered to be the most
interesting question and answers for you:
What applications justify the use of EJB?BEA: Robert
says that even for small apps, you should design with future migration to
EJB in mind. Use EJB if your developers have the skillset for EJB.
ORACLE: agrees that skillset is important. If you are a database house,
you might not want to go the EJB route. EJB is not yet truly mature and
does not do all the things that a great database can do.
JBOSS:
Marc says: don't access the database directly from Servlets and JSP, use
EJB intead. EJB caches data for web applications very well and can be ten
times faster than ordinary database access. But Marc doesn't stop there.
He goes on to say that some companies allow licensing costs to drive
their architecture choices and stay away from EJB because of cost, with
JBoss you don't have to worry about licensing costs. From the way the BEA
panelist rolls his eyes, I get the feeling that he has come up against
Marc before.
IBM: Greg also agrees that skillset is important
and agrees with the other vendor's points. He also adds that EJB 2.0
brings some real developer productivity increases to the table. Greg
recommends using IBMs "redbooks" and J2EE best-practices to determine your
architecture.
What is the biggest threat from dot-Net and what
are you doing about it?BEA: Robert says that it is a
sure bet that dot-Net will be "ready for prime time" in the near future.
Currently, dot-Net only makes sense for small systems. To combat the
threat Sun needs to work closely with the ISVs, improve development tools,
and must have interoperability with dot-Net via web services.
ORACLE:
Farzin answers that the biggest threat from dot-Net is the fact that it is
from Microsoft and therefore will automatically gain acceptance. Java
can't let it's community driven nature slow it down and at the same time
needs to stick to the standards to ensure interop, portability, etc.
JBOSS: Marc proclaims that he is a "closet Microsoft lover" and that
he takes Microsoft very seriously. But, he contends that Java has nothing
to fear from Microsoft. Java is portable and the runtime is free. The
difference between JBoss and Microsoft is philosophy. Microsoft wants to
commoditize the $20/hour developer and JBoss wants to commoditize the
runtime and the application server. As far as the standards are
concerned, Mark says that Sun does move slow. Use JBoss and the standards
will follow.
IBM: Greg says that IBM vs. Microsoft is not the
story. Dot-Net is vapor now but Microsoft will eventually get it right.
He says that to fight against Microsoft, Java needs to be more of a
standard. Sun can't keep veto power and expect Java to keep up.
Do you support JDO and what are your plans for JDO?JBOSS:
we have been supporting JDO for quite a while via Castor and other means.
But, JDO has not taken the persistence crown. EJB/CMP is much more
powerful than JDO. JBoss is working to decouple the CMP engine from JBoss
so that it can be used independently of EJB.
ORACLE: The Oracle
app server does not supprt JDO, but our new TopLink product is very close,
and may enable Oracle to support JDO in the future.
BEA: does
not support JDO and says that JDO is not compelling vs. CMP 2.0.
IBM: Websphere 4 and 5 do not support JDO. IBM is still trying to
figure out what to do about JDO.
Which of your competitors
products would you choose?ORACLE: Farzin tried to
answer Orion, but Oracle's app server is an OEM version of Orion, so that
did not fly. Then Farzin said that Websphere is too big, Weblogic looks
OK, but since JBoss is free and easy to use he would choose it.
BEA:
Robert said that JBoss is free and for development purposes would get the job
done, but for mission critical apps he would choose WebSphere - but only
if he could affort the IBM consultants required to set it up. He said
that "WebSphere can be made to work," the dev tools are good, and the
admin console is nice.
IBM: Greg said that he might download
Oracle's app server, but he would be worried that Oracle would change
code-bases before the download was complete. For mission critical apps,
he would choose WebLogic because there are so many developers that are
familiar with it.
JBOSS: Marc said that he would choose Oracle
because Oracle is Orion and Orion was developed by Rickard Oberg's
room-mate and therefore Orion is very similar to JBoss. His second choice
would be WebSphere because IBM will be around for ever and ever - it is
always a safe choice.
What do you see happening with J2EE and
development in 5-10 years?JBOSS: Marc says that J2EE is
at the end of its road. Now developers need to learn to be container
developers, to take apart the containers, and to pick and choose which
parts they want to use in their apps. Then developers will be able to
walk through walls like the JBoss folks do. Also, the dot-Net ability to
hang attributes on methods and fields of classes will be come very
important and combined with interceptors will enable aspect oriented
programming, grid computing, blah, blah, blah. I'm not kidding, Marc
really likes to say "blah, blah, blah."
BEA: Robert
says it is very difficult to predict the future, but that he sees that
XDoclet-like method and field attribute driven development will be
important and that web services will be very important.
IBM: I
can't remember what Greg said, but I am pretty sure he mentioned web
services and grid computing. Oh yeah, he started off by saying that J2EE
is not at the end of the road - it has a long, long way to go.
ORACLE : I can't remember what the Oracle guy said at all. Sorry folks.
Well, my lunch hour is over so this concludes my coverage of the Triangle JUG
J2EE Container shootout ;-) Thanks to the Triangle JUG board, JUG member
volunteers, and to the folks who submitted the questions for making this
possible.
See also:
Andy Oliver's comments
Rickard Oberg's comments
Dave Jordan's comments