Sun 'Calls JBoss bluff' on J2EE compliance

joshmccormack writes "According to c|net's news.com Sun has finally responded to JBoss Group's request for J2EE compliance testing. Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist stated in the article he thinks JBoss Group is bluffing, that their code won't pass the tests, and that some of the code is just copied from Sun."

Cruise Missle into Microsoft??

[Black-Man]

No... that would be BEA and IBM. Since when does Microsoft have a Java App Server??

Finally!

[delirium28]

"Call their bluff"? Come on. JBoss has been waiting for almost a year for this test. Will everything pass without a hitch? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that they won't get the certification right away.

I love JBoss, I've used it for pilot projects for a few years now, but I've never been able to get it into production, and one of the reasons is that it wasn't "certified" by Sun. All hail the day when JBoss is certified!

---
I read your email...

Re:Compliant or not?

[BrianB]

The problem is that J2EE servers usually implement the standard and then have non-standard extensions. So, the reworking would basically involve removing the calls to the vendor specific pieces.

Re:Compliant or not?

[mightycthulhu]

Each vendor has custom deployment descriptors that tell teh app server "how" to deploy the j2ee app.

These need to be custom written (or generated with xdoclet) for each app server.

Each vendor also may more or less strictly enforce the j2ee spec or have hidden proprietary features which freshman developers may unwittingly rely upon.

to be fair

[Anonymous Coward]

There are features in websphere and weblogic that JBoss doesn't have. For example, weblogic has T3 connection pooling that allows webserver to use it's pool of connections. Websphere has tight integration with VAJ. JBoss has it's strengths too, so in terms who is better it depends on the user.

for people who have to connect to DB2, websphere and VAJ is obvious. For those who want to share a connection pool with the webservers weblogic is nice. I think Jboss will pass with minor fixes and changes. No big deal by any means.

JBoss failure means $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

WIth the horrendous price of Bea's Weblogic and IBM's Websphere, the biggest surprise was the large number of IT departments who were paying up for these compliant solution. I am usually a supporter of Sun but this incident is bringing that into question. I know some of the people involved with JBoss and can attest to their tenacity to provide an opensource alternative EJB server.

Re:Go get em JBoss!

[dingd0ng]

It's about time Sun gave JBoss the chance to prove themselves. However, we've been using JBoss successfully for over two years, and will continue to do so regardless what happens between Sun and JBoss. But...go JBoss!!!

Re:How does that help Sun?

[ChaoticChaos]

I think your point is spot-on. I've read that as well. I was talking to someone today about Sun's sad stock price and commented that it is a shame there isn't a small royality they make on Java period. Just a tiny one would help Sun tremendously.

Re:Sounds like a setup to me

[mpechner]

There are some things going here.

People from the JBoss team will be present.

It will be the same test BEA and IBM has to pass.

If this wasn't the case, we'd all be paying for JRun licenses instead fo using TomCat.

No joke.

[CatOne]

We (IONA) certified our app server on Sun, and we failed something like 50 tests which we investigated and found the tests were acutally bad. The thing is, others had passed these same tests -- what we found is that the J2EE reference implementation had bugs which "passed" these bad tests, so obviously everyone else who was certified was using large parts of the reference implementation in their test suite. Heh.

Re:Cruise Missle into Microsoft??

[lewp]

He's right, though.

This hurts IBM and BEA a lot more than it will hurt Microsoft. Moving a Microsoft shop to J2EE is hard. They're two totally different things. It's like trying to turn a toy factory into a car factory.

Re-training and re-certifying all your developers is likely to hurt your pocketbook a lot more than the cost of a Windows license, or even a Websphere license, even if it is (and it is) ridiculously expensive. Thus, we're not going to see a mass exodus away from .NET, no matter how much I'd love that.

Moving a Weblogic shop to JBoss is easy. You just start dealing with a different company. Most smart companies do this all the time when they see a better deal. You call a different support number, maybe spend a week or so in a class learning what's different, and save a lot of money. Of course, the fact that JBoss is widely regarded as being more developer-friendly than the big commercial servers is great, too.

I'm glad Sun is offering to do this. I'm not surprised they had to think long and hard before doing so.

Re:Sounds like a setup to me

[Tailhook]

XDoclet is a code generator. It uses metadata in JavaDoc tags to generate source files that make a complete EJB. This is merely one function of an integrated environment. XDoclet does not provide integrated version control, integrated UML design, server side debugging or any other of a large number of features you get with a typical J2EE development tool such as JDeveloper 9i.

I'm not knocking XDoclet or JBoss or anything else. I'm only pointing out that there are obvious advantages to the commercial platforms. When a project grows beyond a handful of geeks you need "high-touch" tools.

I know J2EE developers that could just barely manage to install J2SE+J2EE properly on their local machine on a good day. You can not expect these people to adopt XDoclet/Ant/CVS/ArgoUML/etc and make it all function productively. You can expect them to write perfectly good business applications from within an integrated environment.

Bear in mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

That JBoss has been openly critical of Sun's numerous failures to produce ANYTHING of quality surrounding Java / J2EE (and justifiably so), so there is little to no motivation for Sun to play nice with JBoss, even tho they are shooting themselves in the foot by smearing the most successful open source J2EE app server implementation ever.

I may not agree with everything the JBoss team says and does (some of the discussions can be permanently damaging to small children and the elderly), but at least the thing works. Compare that to the steaming pile of crap that IBM puts out as an application server and I am damn glad there is an alternative (Weblogic is ok, but expensive).

Re:Sounds like a setup to me

[steve_l]

Sun dont want to let jboss near the tests, but apache forced them in to it last year, when they threatened to stop working with Sun unless open source projects got access to the test kits (not the reference impls) under various terms and conditions. Axis is the first Apache project to do this, and it has been beneficial. Except when their tests are different from the spec, which happens sometimes.

A certified JBoss (it'll happen eventually) will hurt BEA and IBM, and Sun via licensing fees. But it is good for Java.

Sun is afraid of JBOSS; So is BEA

[cfury]

I just spent a night at BEA eWorld speaking to a sales rep and developer at a dev2dev Open Source Software roundtable. I thought at first this would be a good thing... You know, how to use OSS tools and software, getting BEA to acknowledge that it's cool, and that, most importantly, developers WANT OSS tools and software.

But the evening turned into a whole BEA vs JBoss debate. The sales guy was kind of rude and cocky about JBoss... and everytime we tried to change the subject (to the benefits of OSS, for example), he kept going back to slamming JBoss.

I was very disappointed in the BEA sales rep, I expected a much more professional and conversational attitude. His partner, whom I think was a developer, had a much better view and kept trying to calm his friend down.

Admittedly, I can see where JBoss is a potential threat to BEA, but really, they have nothing to be afraid of (so far.) Their products are positioned for large applications and large enterprises, and JBoss would have trouble supporting that right now... (unless a large application needed to support a smallish to medium sized app...)

The plus side was there was a whole table full of people who were *for* OSS, including other tools, not just JBoss. In fact, I was later told that our table (in a room full of discussion groups) was the most active and interesting. Maybe someday those guys will be managers, directors, etc and will make decisions based on wisdom and common sense, and not sales and marketing pitches.

[Disclaimer: I love BEA's products. They're doing some great stuff -- they just need an attitude adjustment when it comes to OSS and other tools.]

And while I'm rambling... I just spent the last two days trying to get corporate approval to run the Tomcat based servlet container that comes with the Actuate 6.0 Reporting tool. There are a whole slew of valid business reasons why this is a Good Idea, but it was a no go. Instead, we have to link that product into our BEA servers, which aren't load balanced or very well protected for failover right now. Big Corporations seem to be afraid of OSS, and have extremely arbitrary rules for choosing software. This is something the OSS community needs to work hard to change. We're making headway, especially in terms of operating systems (RedHat), but we need to push even harder for other products.

Re:Sounds like a setup to me

[iabervon]

The test suite is very thorough and pokes around in obscure areas of the various specs, some of which are ambiguous.

This is obviously a good reason to ignore Sun's certification: the test suite relies on unspecified behaviour, and is therefore not 100% compliant itself. Of course, the J2EE specification itself is badly managed; it is impossible to write code for container-managed relations which is legal with both the second proposed final version of the latest release and the final release. Most of the incompatibilities between JBoss and other implementations that I have noticed has been that JBoss only follows the version of the specification that it says it does, while Weblogic (e.g.) lets you use features together which were never both permitted in a single version.

Of course, the certification is essentially bogus anyway; I've seen obvious non-compliant behaviour from a version of Weblogic that was certified.

Open Source Question

[SerpentMage]

Here is why JBoss is neat, but a bit misguided (hence why I like Apache Jakarat more).

Ok lets consider the argument. You have compliance testing so that you can write an app to the spec and have it work on different containers. Ok, sounds good. Why do you want to use different containers? because different containers have different implementations and strenghts. Ok, sounds fair...

BUT, with Open Source you have the sources and you can do what you want with them. This is why there are X number of attachments to Apache HTTPD server and Jakarta Tomcat. In other words api compliance is not the issue in Open Source since you do not need to be compliant to other implementations (hence the success of the Apache projects)

So now please answer why JBoss needs to be compliant other than allowing legacy to run?

Re:It'll pass, no problem

[timeOday]

I've been bitten by scenario 2, with CORBA. There was some vendor-dependent code in our stuff, but it's a good product so who cares, right? Well, one year they assigned us a new sales rep and he decided we hadn't been paying nearly enough, or maybe he just wanted a bigger comission and thought we couldn't migrate, who knows. So they tried to quadruple the price.

We ended up porting to TAO. It wasn't THAT bad, but we did end up writing some stuff twice - first vendor dependent, then vendor neutral. Not money well spent.

On another but related topic, since TAO was free, the management couldn't believe it would be any good, so we had to give the impression we were just using it for a while until we found something more expensive. Of course, TAO was more standards compliant, open source (fabulous for debugging), and the developers would respond to questions on the same day (much better service than from our very costly support contract with the "other guys.") It made a great impression on me and everybody else for open source, and I gather JBoss is just that sort of project too.

Re:Open Source Question

[hconnellan]

The problem is that many people allready use JBOSS. Probably more than use WebSphere and BEA combined.

I agree that you should try to conform to standards but if the stardards authority deliberatly tries to shut you out then there isn't much you can do.

The same thing happened between UNIX/Linux and X/XFree. Linux and XFree are now becomming the defacto standards. Sun is scared that the same thing will happen with JBOSS.