Hi,
> JBuilder
JBuilder 4 is out now..supposed to be J2EE ready and pretty good, but still
a little slow do to 100% Java/SWING. However, if you run it with JDK 1.3, it
should be much faster than if you are using JDK 1.2.2.
> Visual Cafe
Pretty kick ass, except, like JBuilder, I don't like the fact that you can't
see a tree-view of your packages/classes. Other than that, its very fast at
compiling, pretty easy to work with, has multi-tabbed windows, and is pretty
rock solid (version 4.0 anyways).
> Forte
I like this and don't like it. I like it because its so open, its free, and
has some pretty nice features. I don't like it because in my opinion, it has
a steep learning curve. Its also slow due to being SWING, but again JDK 1.3
does a decent job on speeding up. The thing I hate most about it is that at
least on the Windows platform, each of many windows uses a tab on the start
menu task bar (I never know what to call it, but when you run a program a
button shows up on this). Also, its not MDI. I click on one window and I
can't find another window behind it. I have to minimize one window to get to
it. Not that this is much different than what happens in a MDI app, but at
least in MDI, I know what windows belong to the Forte program. I know SDI is
all the rage these days, (I have no clue why..its much less organized to
me), but I like MDI so that all windows in one program are inside that
program!
> Netbeans
Same as Forte, but newer. Forte is built up from the netbeans source, with
some additions.
> Visual Age
This one I hear is terrible for all but IBM WebSphere. But some people like
it.
I use KAWA myself. Its $129 to register. Its fast, you choose your compiler,
it has debugging (which I never use anyways). It has source control support
but at best its a little clunky. I think I like it best because its sooooo
easy to set up. I can create a new project, add my source code dir, set up a
classpath and an output dir, and Im done. Forte is ok with that, but its a
bit confusing, but it does ok at this. Kawa is at www.tek-tools.com
> Target app servers are:
>
> J2EE SDK (reference implementation)
I wouldn't use this.
> JRun 3.0 from Allaire
We have JRUN 3.0 beta, and didn't like it much. Still a bit buggy, but for
$5000 per cpu per server, I would rather use other app servers with much
more creditable performance.
> JBOSS (www.jboss.org)
Haven't heard too many good things about this, but haven't heard much
either.
> Weblogic 5.1
Ok..here is the deal. At $15K per cpu per server for clustering, its VERY
expensive. What sucks about WebLogic as far as price..they charge you the
same price for QA, pre-stage, staging, etc servers. To me, this is bullshit,
excuse my french. A non-production server is only used for testing, should
be FREE to use. I also find it not quite J2EE compatible. I have had a
terrible time getting a simple app to run. Its not .EAR ready, it doesn't do
.war hot-swap, it doesn't support auto-load of web-apps, and a number of
other problems still exist. There 6.0 should be better, due out in December
or sometime thereafter.
I tell you the one you should really consider, that is rock-solid. Orion app
server. www.orionserver.com. Its free for all use except production. That is
$1500 per SERVER (not cpu). Its got the best J2EE implementation available,
including pre-support for EJB 2.0 and Servlet 2.3. Its much faster than any
server I have seen and worked with, includgin WebLogic, JRUN, Resin (which
is right on par with it), Apache, IIS and WebSphere. For static content,
Apache and IIS are probably the fastest, but that is for only HTML files.
Something Orion supports is gzip compression, which means all text content
is compressed before being sent (if you set the type to text/g-zip I think)
and thus speeds up text delivery for content sites and so on. Best of all,
its super easy to configure. There are plenty of us Orion users that can
help get you started. Its fully clusterable, as a decent GUI admin tool
(including remote use of it), and its pretty configurable. I would give it
consideration if I were you...there are a number of people that have put it
in use for high-volume sites and it holds up very well. It also is 100% java
written so it runs on all JDK 1.2.2 platforms. You also now get a
load-balancer software program with it so you can run the load-balancer on
one computer, and have two or more orion servers running, and hit the ip of
the load-balancer machine. Its Orion aware so you can test your
load-balanced/fail-over configuration with it.
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