Friends, Recently I was asked on how do I compare Weblogic vs Websphere, and what are the pros and cons of using one over another. I answered IBM support, DB2 backend, IBM stack as some of the factors but could not think of any technical pros and cons of one over another.
Does anyone know the technical pros and cons of using one over another ?
I would appreciate it.
Regards, avajurug
Refering to my question on serverfault:
Websphere is slow, big and buggy (gigabyte big fixpacks, version 6.1.0.xx.xxx is a absolute other than 6.1.0.xx.xxy. The releases cause side effects, bad performance, horrible maintenance. The webinterface is absolutly slow (nearly unusable) and a cold restart after a fault can take more than five hours. The big Pro: It is from IBM! So it feels like a "industry standard"... Everywhere you go, you'll find websphere servers.
You should use IBM things (IBM stack) only if you want to live with IBM. A migration from the native features of a websphere server to another Application server is very expensive.
Weblogic is a very good product! It has a very heavy footprint which causes not as much performance than lightweight server (SpringSoruce DM, JBoss...) do. But it is reliable, enterprise ready and to expensive since Oracle bought BEA.
Glassfish with it's IO model (Grizzly...) seems to be a nice choice! Have a look at it. There is also SUN support, the WebInterface is nice, Session replication is possible (works well in cluster environments), It is from SUN. There are a lot monitoring features, OSGi is used for a lot of things.... Maybe it will be one of the big sweet spots of SUN Microsystems.
We've used WebSphere for about 5 years now and we have one system running weblogic. Can't say there is that much technical difference. Most J2EE server have the same features these days: clustering, monitoring, ejb containers, you name it.
What I like about Websphere are the things you mention: Support, patching, upgrading and the IBM stack it self. Most of our other software is also IBM and work better with websphere than other application servers.
I disagree: the big con for WebSphere is that it's from IBM. This was once a great hardware company, but they're a shell of their former self. Now they're a parasitic consulting firm that acts as a Trojan horse to inject unsuspecting organizations with their bloated projects that cost N times their competitor's offerings and provide 1/Nth the functionality. They make their money by gouging customers, screwing their workforce, and cutting the taxes they pay.
As much as people at my former employer used to complain about WebLogic licensing costs, WebSphere's prices are worse. Perhaps my current employer negotiated a bad agreement, but we have to purchase WebSphere licenses in blocks of $4M at a time, with attendant RSA licenses and other nonsense.
WebSphere has a single configuration for all apps deploy on an app server. Change one app and the configuration is changed for all apps on the server.
WebLogic (and JBOSS) use a separate domain for each deployed app. Changing configuration for one app doesn't affect all the others.
My current employer's installation of WebSphere comes with a deployment queue that causes deployments to back up during the day like airplanes waiting to take off at Kennedy Airport. This gives that single threaded configuration time to sort itself out. No such issue with JBOSS or WebLogic.
WebSphere has traditionally lagged behind its competition in supported JVMs. That might not be the case now, since most Java EE apps run on JVM 5 at a minimum.
I'd rather use JMS than MQ Series.
Is it any wonder that my current employer is getting off WebSphere and onto JBOSS as quickly as they can?
WebLogic is a solid product that was the industry standard for a long time. I think BEA has lost a lot of their talent over the years, and the purchase by Oracle has left them in limbo for the last two years (stuck on version 10.1). But it's far better than WebSphere will ever be.
My recommendation would be to use anything other than WebSphere. You'd be better off to learn Spring and use Tomcat.
Hi,
WebSphere is not a single product but a family of products. WebSphere Application server (WAS) is one of the foundation products in this family. Weblogic probably is similar (with a few products under its umbrella)
So the question boils down to: which product(s) are you trying to compare?
Like everything else there are pros and cons. If you intend to use stack built on top of WAS like WPS, WESB etc then starting of with WAS and expanding to these products makes a lot of sense. Development for applications on WAS, WPS and WESB is best done with the associated IBM IDEs, RAD and WID are the tools in the case of products mentioned above.
Clarify your question and i would suggest getting in touch with IBM and Oracle/BEA sales folks for comparisons once you have the product of interest.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM so i might be biased in my answers though i try not to.
I do a lot of legacy integration, with the stack IBM has behind a Websphere Application Server. Z/OS boxes are now like any other box on the network. You can easily access the information you want.
Wrong, Each applications can be configured on WebSphere individually.. Not sure how duffymo was configuring. WebSphere has very good support for individual deployment configurations. It takes2-5 mins for starting.