This is not a scientific poll, but a rather informal gathering of answers to a
rather informal question:
"What EJB (not application server) container product do you use?"
Results as of 8/14/2000
BEA Weblogic 110 (33.5%)
Orion Server 44 (14.2%)
Inprise Application Server 27 ( 8.7%)
IBM Websphere 26 ( 8.4%)
Pramati Server 23 ( 7.4%)
IONA iPortal 22 ( 7.1%)
Sun/Netscape iPlanet 13 ( 4.2%)
jBoss 12 ( 3.9%)
Gemstone/J 10 ( 3.2%)
Allaire JRun 8 ( 2.6%)
Jonas 7 ( 2.3%)
Oracle IAS 3 ( 1.0%)
Persistence PowerTier 3 ( 1.0%)
Sybase EAServer 3 ( 1.0%)
Silverstream 2 ( 0.1%)
OrCAS Enterprise Server 1 ( 0.6%)
ObjectSpace Voyager 1 ( 0.6%)
Unify eWave 1 ( 0.6%)
Total Votes 310
The following are some insights into the EJB marketplace from a lowly
developer's perspective. These are just ramblings that I perceive from some of
the polling data above and my experience with EJB over the past two years.
Master of its Domain
================
I suppose the surprise to me is that Weblogic really does own this market. There
is plenty of competition for the number 2 spot, but number 1 is firmly seated in
BEA's favor. One would claim that this is because they were there first, and to
some degree that is true. I think Weblogic has succeeded because of its early
grass roots style. Remember when the product was Tengah, and the company was
Weblogic?
For about a year or more, the WebLogic website was the only place in town to get
real hands-on EJB information. They had a freely available download of their
entire product set. All of there documentation was online. They had plenty of
examples in code and theory.
They Might Be Giants
================
Contrast that with the two other companies that were soon on the scene.
Persistence Powertier and Gemstone/J. Still stuck in the monolithic sales
process of old, you had to contact a sales rep to get a demo version of the
product. Their documentation was buried behind password protected areas of their
website. With the exception of Chris Raber, pre-sales development questions
often fell on deaf ears.
I had met personally with district sales reps for both of these products, and I
let them know about the contrast between them and their single biggest
competitor. I wasn't alone either. I think, in their hearts, the sales people
realized the problems. An army of developers were *buzzing* about WebLogic, but
only the sales reps were espousing the features of Powertier and Gemstone/J.
It's unfortunate that Gemstone couldn't turn the boat around fast enough. They
barely registered in the poll.
To their benefit, Gemstone has been pro-active lately in launching their EJB
portal and distributing some decent developer CDs. Perhaps, it is too little,
too late.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
======================
Does Weblogic deserve the number one spot? Most of the developers that I have
spoken with that use the product, hate it. They often complain about its
tendency to deadlock given its concurrency model. They complain that this also
causes problems with scalability that causes them to throw much more hardware at
roblems in order to boost transaction throughput.
The Upshots
==========
I suspect that the poll is somewhat skewed by a ground swell of grass roots
campaigning by the new-blood EJB containers. I believe that we have to take the
scores of Pramati and Orion with a grain of salt. I do believe that a few of
these companies will continue to be purchased and consolidated into J2EE
application servers.
I think that the next breakthroughs in usability and developer-friendly
containers are coming from this market. I believe it was Ejipt (now JRun) that
introduced us to the concept of directory-based deployment. Simply compile your
new beans and they are automatically deployed in the container.
jBoss is pioneering the Sun's JMX architecture, bringing with it, the ability to
easily manage every component in the server in a standards-friendly manner.
No one beats ObjectSpace's Voyager product for deployment simplicity. Your
clients can communicate with the server with less than a 20KB client-side jar.
Far cry from the 1MB to 2MB downloads needed by some of the guys at the top of
the food chain. ObjectSpace also pioneered the stub-less remote objects. Stubs
and skeletons are generated "on demand", thus freeing the programmer from
another time consuming step in development.
Pramati wins the GUI battle hands down. A nice GUI environment is essential to
teach new developers how to build and deploy EJB. Sure the command-line guys are
snickering, but if you are a manager with 10 new developers to get up to speed
quickly, your ears probably perked up.
Where are They Now?
=================
Whether people padded the poll numbers for certain servers, it is interesting to
note that a few of the heavyweights are really not represented at all. Gemstone,
Oracle, Persistence, Sybase and SilverStream *combined* barely cleared 5% of the
market!! This fact stunned me, especially considering that Gemstone was 3.2% by
itself.
Biases
=====
Now that I have managed to insult every vendor by stating that Weblogic's number
one rank is not deserved, and Orion's number two rank is a result of ballot
stuffing, I can now be candid. Do what you will with these numbers, for they are
only as good as the people who answered honestly and in good faith. Hopefully
you can use these numbers together with anecdotal evidence to derive a picture
of the market.
jim
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