I am a long time java developer on JBoss(and Tomcat). In the last year I had to develop over weblogic and I have to say - I really miss JBoss.
Since my experience with weblogic is pretty shallow, I am asking the more experienced guys out there: Is there a reason for spending money on weblogic? Isn't JBoss giving you all that you need?
I suspect the reason Weblogic gets chosen is a pleasant sales person comes to visit a manager with money to spend, gives him the sales pitch and hey-presto, the company is using Weblogic. I don't know if the JBoss support contract comes with a sales force, but would be surprised if it did and that the playing field has leveled in that respect.
In my experience, other than the pretty console you get with Weblogic (which isn't worth forking out the license fees for) there's not much between the 2. I suspect these days JBoss has market share (just guessing that), which in my book that translates into more help available online, etc when you're stuck on something.
It's also worth considering that the Weblogic licenses (last time I saw them) where the usual server-side terms - per-processor, per-box, etc. This will limit you in scalability terms because with JBoss you can keep adding hardware without occurring extra cost, while with Weblogic your licenses will need upgrading too.
Whichever you choose you're going to be able to build your system on top of them without too much trouble, but my preference would be JBoss.
JBoss (Red Hat) has yet to release a commercially supported 100% JEE 5-compliant container*. There is a beta of JBoss 5 out. Hopefully they won't be 3 years behind for JEE 6. JBoss is more concerned with their microcontainer than JEE x because that's what they say their customers are more interested in. I have never met any of those customers. But it does mean that JEE is a second-class citizen in their world. As proof, their containers don't even ship in compliant mode; you have to tweak some config files to make it spec-compliant.
If Sun wasn't about to be consumed by the blackhole that is Oracle, I would recommend Glassfish.
Well, i'd recommend using Spring+Tomcat and would introduce a full-blown JavaEE Application server only if i absolutely have to.
regarding Weblogic and JBoss, i'd prefer JBoss as Weblogic is more complex.
I really like WebLogic. I'll suspend the licensing cost for the moment and just say that in their heyday they were the best Java EE app server on the market, hands down. BEA had a lot of extremely talented people developing their code, and it showed. If money was not part of the equation, and I had an employer that insisted on spending money that wasn't mine, I'd still choose WebLogic over WebSphere or JBOSS or Glassfish or anything else on the market.
I'm saddened by Oracle's purchase. I think that the talent has leaked away, and Oracle has no clear idea of what they want to do with WebLogic. They've been stuck on version 10.1 for a few years now.
<prejudice-ahead> Glassfish sounds like it's a much better effort from Sun, but their history says they write great standards and lousy implementations. I don't consider Glassfish to be a viable alternative.</prejudice-ahead>
WebSphere is a typical IBM project: twice the cost, half the functionality, poor documentation, and you have to buy all their nonsense (e.g., Eclipse based IDEs) to use it.
JBOSS isn't bad, but only because the price difference is so strongly in its favor.
I'd rather recommend Spring, Tomcat and ActiveMQ as an excellent alternative. If EJBs are absolutely required, add OpenEJB to that mix.
Personally I would choose JBoss (community version) over Weblogic (Server) because it's free (you know, like in freedom). But that isn't answering the question, so...
I can see two main reasons for choosing Weblogic:
*) The term easier is subjective. Most things are easy when you know how to do them.
It depends.
Do you happen to be in a company who likes to buy support from other companies like "Oracle" and don't really care about the money spending as long they are covered by the manufacturer ( Yes, I know Redhat sells the support also but some companies don't like to buy from them )
Anyway , this is a rather subjective question, I don't think there would be a correct answer.
I'm saddened by Oracle's purchase. I think that the talent has leaked away, and Oracle has no clear idea of what they want to do with WebLogic. They've been stuck on version 10.1 for a few years now.
There are a couple of problems with the above comment. First, Oracle only purchased BEA 1.5 years ago, and even then that wasn't a DOJ approved transaction. The final sale was not approved until something like 12 months ago.
Secondly, Oracle has made three releases of Weblogic since acquisition. They are now on version 10.3.1 (or "11g").
Lastly, I think Oracle is - surprised to say that I am - moving in a clear direction. With the recent acquisition of Sun, Oracle is now the primary provider of Java technology and has what many consider to be the leading Java application server. They would not have invested in these companies and technologies without a clear plan to dominate the market. I think Oracle's recent movements in the JEE6, Weblogic, and JDeveloper spaces show that they are pushing extremely hard to become the Java leader.
I'd still prefer JBoss; it's simple and just works. I'm having loads of problems converting a Seam 2.x app from JBoss to Weblogic, but I'm hopeful that I will be successful at some point.