I know the answer! how about you guys jboss will own #1! marc -----Original Message----- From: Rickard �berg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 11:29 PM To: Xavier Faure; marc fleury Subject: FW: Poll: Summary of EJB Container Poll Hey This came to EJB-INTEREST yesterday. Interesting reading. /R ---- 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 -- Rickard �berg Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.telkel.com http://www.jboss.org http://www.dreambean.com
