WebLogic Versus JBoss

Contents: What is an Application Server? General Information About the History Of Application Servers General Information About JBoss General Information About WebLogic Comparison Of JBoss and WebLogic Conclusion

What is an Application Server? An application server is a program on a computer that runs other applications. Since the Java platform became very popular, the term “Application Server” may refer to J2EE application servers in some texts.

Types of Application Servers We can divide application servers into three types: J2EE based Non-J2EE based (PHP, Perl etc.) Microsoft based (COM, ASP.NET etc.)

History Of Application Servers In latter 1990’s Centralized computer concept became more important due to demand in sharing data and functionalities with other applications, This would have been a return to the much older model of computing as it was done in the 1960s, with a large, very expensive central computer being accessed by multiple users using dumb terminals. The difference now was the widespread use of the GUI. These servers first appeared in client/server computing and on LANs. At first, they were often associated with "tiered" applications Since the breakout success was made by Java, application server always refers to J2EE

History Of Application Servers JOnAS application server, developed by the ObjectWeb consortium, is the first non-commercial, open source application server to have reached the official certification of compliance with J2EE, The term application server has also been applied to various non-J2EE and non-Java offerings. (with the rising popularity of .NET-Microsoft Application Server). Additional open source and commercial application servers are available from other vendors (the Base4 Server and Zope ),

JBoss JBoss is an open source application server which was first released in 1999. Source code can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jboss The latest release of JBoss Application Server is JBoss AS 4.0

JBoss Properties JBoss 4.0 is compliant to the J2EE 1.4 specification. So J2EE components such as JBs and EJBs can be reused even if they were developed on other application servers It also supports J2EE Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture

JBoss Properties Since JBoss is java based, it can be used on any operating system that supports java JBoss requires smaller memory than other application servers, so it is faster It has a very powerful documentation on its web page

WebLogic a J2EE application server and also an HTTP web server by BEA Systems for Unix, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and other platforms, supports Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and other JDBC-compliant databases WebLogic Server supports WS-Security and is compliant with J2EE 1.4 The most reliable server is no doubt BEA’s WebLogic Application Server. It is the only one which can resist to over 3000 concurrent clients without throwing exceptions

WebLogic Architecture: BEA WebLogic Server is part of the BEA WebLogic Platform™. The other parts of WebLogic Platform are a) Portal, which includes Commerce Server and Personalization Server (which is built on a BEA-produced Rete rules engine), b) WebLogic Integration, c) WebLogic Workshop, an IDE for Java, and d) JRockit, a JVM for Intel CPUs.

Extra Properties Of WebLogic: 1) Rich client options - supports Web browsers and other clients that use HTTP; Java clients that use RMI or IIOP; and mobile devices that use WAP. 2) Enterprise e-business scalability - Critical resources are used efficiently and high availability is ensured through the use of Enterprise JavaBean business components and mechanisms 3) Robust administration - offers a Web-based Administration Console for configuring and monitoring WebLogic Server services. 4) E-commerce-ready security - provides SSL support for encrypting data transmitted across WebLogic Server, clients, and other servers.

WebLogic Properties WebLogic Server includes .NET interoperability and supports the following native integration capabilities: Native enterprise-grade JMS messaging J2EE Connector Architecture WebLogic/Tuxedo Connector COM+ Connectivity CORBA connectivity IBM WebSphere MQ connectivity Latest version 9.1 - Diablo

Comparison Matrix JBoss WebLogic J2EE specification Web services JMS Java Connector Architecture EJB JBoss J2EE 1.4 WS BasicProfile-1.0 JMS 1.1 JCA 1.5 EJB 2.1 WebLogic Enterprise Web Services 1.1

Use JBoss When.. For better performance and for applications that are not extremely complex, JBoss is the optimal choice. It is also free but is needed more knowledge about J2EE and have to manually create deployment packages. Runs on any Java platform; is robust and can handle mission-critical applications. Lacks some control and management features for PITH (Projects in the Huge); simple projects require only some programming knowledge; anything else and you'd better have depth.

Use WebLogic When... The WebLogic Server is the most reliable server and complex application server and offers the best support for the real-world applications. Although it needs a higher level of understanding of the J2EE concepts, has a complex configuration and is very expensive, this server is the best choice for a secure and fault-tolerant application.

Conclusion: Since JBoss is open source, and is a very complete and well-build package, people tend to use JBoss more commonly and experienced less frustration with JBoss. With a basic open source framework to build on and make desired small changes to, people can get what they want in a hurry. On the other hand, WebLogic is the most reliable application server and is more suitable for complex, fault-tolerant applications.

References JBoss 4 Application Server Guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server JBoss 4 Application Server Guide http://www.cs.utt.ro/~ionel/papers/J2EEComparison.pdf Performance Comparison of Java Application Servers -Bogdan Pop, Radu Medeşan and Ioan Jurca

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