interesting analysis James. Worth reading.
I have to say I think Gemstone has done a GREAT job at their website and is
making some tremendous contributions, of course thats only since about Feb
of this year.
Perhaps as you suggest - too late... :-(
Thanks for taking the time to do this.
- tim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Cook [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 12:46 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Poll: Summary of EJB Container Poll
>
>
> 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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