Interesting Article on JBOSS and WebSphere Community Edition
We’ve all been wondering what’s going on with WebSphere App Server’s near glacial release cycle, which IBM has indicated that it will be 2008 until a certified JEE 5 version appears.
Based on what IBM has done with Eclipse and their Rational Software development platform, my guess is that IBM will eventually ditch the original WAS codebase, or least most of it, and replace the core with WAS CE. They will then add on top of that their JMX Jython scripting interfaces, BPEL integration (merging of the Process server), an updated administration console, EJB / JPA based clustering, cell support, and some TIM/TAM security integrations. It makes a lot of sense from a business aspect as it greatly reduces their cost of development, depending more on the community.
Ironically, even as stale as the commercial WAS version is, it still has won Developer.com’s 2007 Product of the Year.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/was/
Prediction: Expect WAS 7 to be Geronimo at the core, JEE 5 certified, and built on the JDK 6.0
WebSphere Community Edition Gaining Market Share Nearly Three Times as Fast as Rival JBoss
According to Evans Data Corporation, in a single year WebSphere Application Server Community Edition gained 16 points of market share with Eclipse developers, versus only a 6.6 share gain for JBoss.
“WebSphere Application Server Community Edition enables customers and Business Partners to tap the low cost of entry of open source technology to quickly develop and deploy applications,” said Robert LeBlanc (pictured), general manager, IBM WebSphere. “With more than 250,000 downloads in less than six months, WAS Community Edition is gaining momentum with customers of all sizes and industries.”
WAS Community Edition, which is free to download and use, pre-integrates Apache Tomcat with several of the most commonly used open source components, such as web services, security, authentication, messaging and web tier clustering. IBM began to offer customers solutions based on Apache Geronimo in May of 2005 when it acquired Gluecode Software. It launched WAS Community Edition in November of 2005.
The second Annual Eclipse Global Enterprise Report from Evans Data Corporation surveyed software developers on their attitudes, awareness, perceptions and concerns of developers regarding Eclipse and Eclipse-related products. Eclipse is an open source, platform independent framework for developing software applications.
Linux distributors have also embraced WAS Community Edition. Mandriva, particularly popular in Latin America, bundles WAS Community Edition with Mandriva Corporate Server. RedFlag Linux in China agreed to distribute WAS Community Edition with both RedFlag Desktop and RedFlag Server. Additionally, Novell’s Integrated Stack for SuSE Linux (ISSLE) includes WAS Community Edition and IBM DB2 Express-c.
For additional information and to download WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/community/.
