Hi Michael,

On 7/25/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> What is the feature difference between Websphere, Weblogic (i.e. the
> proprietary Application servers) and the open source ones?

What they have in common is that they are all J2EE Application Servers
with value added products (such as business process management) which
can classify them as middleware servers.

The difference is in the vendor (who licenses it, supports it, trains
it), the pricing and in the quality (robust, ease of administration,
scalability etc). Of course personal experience and preference also
differenciates them, but we will try and pretend to be objective.

> Am I right to say that banks/insurance companies can only use
> websphere/weblogic?

No, you are wrong. There are many banks, including South African ones,
that use JBoss in their enterprises.

>Would an open source web server also meet their
> requirements?

JBoss is not a Webserver. It bundles tomcat which is part webserver,
but webserver is about 5% of JBoss. Banks and other high transaction
load enterprises use open source web servers all the time (Apache Web
Server as well as the web server in JBoss), and they are chosen for
their features and scalability not for their licensing fee (in most
cases 0.00).

>If this is the case, what do websphere/weblogic have that
> other EA servers don't.

I don't know of things they have that other EA servers do not have.
What they do have in many cases is a long-standing trust relationship
with a company (say Sanlam) that dates back to the days the mainframes
got installed. People often assume because their mainframes are good
everything else is too.

>
> I single out bank/insurance because these are examples of companies that
> have massive scalability and performance requirements. i.e. Internet
> banking. Could you run an internet banking site on jboss? I'm really
> referring to any enterprise that has large enterprise requirements.

A good place to see some banking case-study/reference info is at:
http://www.jboss.com/customers/index

Things to specifically look at on that page are:  CitiStreet (a division
of Citibank), DGI (The French national tax authority....not banking, but
obviously very high volume financial transactions), EBRD-The European
Bank of Reconstruction and Development and NorisBank.

> Should I even be grouping webpshere/weblogic together?

They are both J2EE application servers. So is Oracle Orion, JBoss,
Geronimo and some others. You can group them in that sense. Although I
am not sure BEA Weblogic has gotten J2EE 1.4 compliance yet. The
marketshare of the three leaders in this area has shifted in recent
years to JBoss on top, then BEA, then Websphere, but BEA is dropping
quickly. Also surveys on production support satisfaction puts JBoss on
top - that's by Forrester or Gartner, I forget which.

>
> Could a bank/insurance company then use Jboss or another open source
> application server?

Yes.

>Would it meet their technical requirements, as opposed
> to their admin/political requirements?

Yes.

> If so, what are the fundamental reasons why companies pick their application
> servers?

Different reasons, but in South African corporates it is often
politics that dictates.

>
> Does anyone know of a company that has migrated off a proprietary
> application server?

Yes. Check out the case studies URL I mention above for international
companies. You can contact me off-list and I can talk to you about
local companies. NDA agreements prevent me from disclosing to much,
esspecially in public forums like these.

Regards,
Lisa

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