JBOSS's Inner Circle Looks at J2EE and Points Beyond
by: Chris Bedford
Does your boss know about JBOSS? If not, you might want to let her know that
JBOSS is a zero-cost application server that compares very favorably with top
tier commercial offerings. It is one of the most frequently downloaded open
source packages around, and for good reason. JBOSS has historically pioneered
the use of innovative, time saving app server features (such as the use of
dynamic proxies as an alternative to tedious, compilation-based remote object
stub generation.) The JBOSS core
development group is currently working on a 4.0 release that includes some
really cutting edge stuff – like extensive use of aspect
oriented programming, and the ability to imbue plain old java objects with
entity bean like capabilities (remoting, persistence) without having to
implement an EntityBean, SessionBean or WhateverBean interface.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to speak with three
members of JBOSS's inner circle, Marc Fleury, Founder and President of the
JBOSS Group, Scott Stark, CTO, and Ben Sabrin, Director of Sales and Business
Development. I've reorganized the order
of questions and answers a bit so that business related issues ($) are addressed first, followed by the more technically
oriented parts of the discussion. I started off my conversation with Scott.
$$
CB:
I've been reading a number of online threads about all the
hassles you are facing trying to get JBOSS through J2EE certification. If I understand Sun's process correctly, all
licensees are subject to intellectual property restrictions that prevent them
from releasing a certified product as open source. Is that more or less
correct?
SS:
That's what [Sun] just changed. They came up with a new
restatement of their JCP certification process,... applicable to J2EE 1.4. So that issue isn't relevant anymore.
CB:
So it will be possible for you to have the J2EE stamp of
approval and have an open source release ?
How Important is CORBA – J2EE
Integration?
Rod Johnson's new book, Expert
One-on-one J2EE Design and Development
(ISBN 1861007841),
makes the very interesting point that Web Services and SOAP allow
you to provide remote access without RMI.
If you go this route, then RMI-IIOP (the wire protocol for CORBA – J2EE interoperability) becomes much less important.
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SS:
Yeah,
but it's still a question of money.
It depends on how Sun is going to classify JBOSS.... We're open source, we
should be [treated] the same as any other open source consortium. If they...
qualify us as a commercial entity then that's a whole lot more money... It's going to come down to an ROI [decision]
on our part. Is it worth it for us to
invest the time to conform to a test which contains things that we don't really
agree are relevant? For example, RMI
over IIOP and its propagation of transactions and security [between]
application servers. No one's ever come to JBOSS and asked for that.
CB:
So there's not a
lot of CORBA integration going on out there?
SS:
We don't see it.
[Ben and Marc walk in, looking happy. We're introduced...]
BS:
We were just checking the news wires...
[about our] endorsements from the CIO of Corporate Express and the CEO of Web
Methods... We just became a partner
with WebMethods. They're going to be offering JBOSS to their integration
customers [and] JBOSS Group is going to be providing the services... Corporate
express has standardized on JBOSS. They are the largest B2B supplier of office
equipment and office goods and furniture in America. Their entire Internet-based ordering system is going to be
powered by JBOSS -- some 30 to 40 thousand transactions a day...
CB:
Actually that was going to be one of my questions... I mean, what are JBOSS's current
major deployments?
BS:
Corporate Express would be one of them. [Also] the Norway Post which controls
the Post Office for the entire country
of Norway. It's a 300 CPU deployment. That's a pretty big success story... We just controlled the German election
systems for their latest general election.
Which as we've experienced here in the States, needs to be reliable.
SS:
We should try to sell that to Florida...
BS:
Yup. [laugh] We're also in the process of taking over the
security component of the... MCI provisioning system... 24 CPU's and 3 E10K's around the country.
CB:
What are some of interesting things that your customers are
doing with the framework that go beyond corporate web application development?
SS:
The best case is IGT out
of Las Vegas [CB: IGT is a manufacturer of slot machines and other gaming
devices. They provide the hardware, and the software that runs and monitors the
machines]. They simply use the JMX kernel
as the mechanism to deploy their services. They had existing services –
legacy socket protocols [to gather statistics from the slot machines] – and
they simply wanted the ability to hot deploy them, to have XML based
configuration... the ability to look at and change the configurations at run
time.
CB:
In one of Marc's earlier
interviews I first came across the idea of how JBOSS commoditizes its free
code base and promotes the knowledge of its developers as the paid-for,
value-added component... The flip side
being the model where you pay a lot for app servers with drag-and-drops tools
that supposedly let you do it all with cheaper, less skilled developers. I really like the idea of paying for developer's knowledge instead of code licenses. As a developer who's taken a lot of time to
hone his own skills I find it appealing that people would pay a lot for that
;^) Could you tell us a little bit
about this philosophy of delivering enterprise systems?
MF:
It's what we do professionally... [If] our customers can use a tool that takes
a data source that just displays a table on their web page, then they don't
need our services. They don't need to be paying our rates to do that... That's
typically the market of .Net and IIS server, [where] you can automate a lot of
things and don't really need any knowledge to build that web site. That's a
market in and of itself -- where you're going to be paying whatever you're
going to be paying for .Net... and then you pay 30 dollars an hour for your web
development... [With] our customers...
the price of a license is not even a deciding factor. The quality of the code
base is -- and what they do with
it is really important to them...How much can they customize it? ... People really need to customize
application servers a lot; that's when they bring us in. So we're more
responding to a need than coming from the get go with this philosophy.
Chris has over 16 years of software development and management experience
and
was a key contributor on the engineering teams that won the 1992 Sun World
Prize and Unix Review's Product of the Year Award for 1997. Chris obtained
his
BS in computer science from Yale University and is a Sun Certified Java
Programmer, as well as an IBM Certified XML Developer and OO Analyst/UML
Designer.
Last Modified
November 27, 2002
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New Review:
Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.
jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
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