With the merger of SUN and Oracle: What is the future of Open ESB a.k.a. GlassFish ESB? Is this a product which will be discontinued as Oracle has Oracle Service Bus (was BEA AquaLogic Service Bus)?
A:
Oracle has a long and distinguished history of buying companies that developed java appservers, renaming that company's appserver as "Oracle AppServer", and quietly ditching the previous one. As a result, each major version ofOAS is completely different to the previous one.
First, they wrote their own (it was crap, noone used it), so they bought Orion and renamed OC4J to OAS. Then they bought BEA, and are in the process of turning Weblogic into OAS. Now they've bought Sun, and Glassfish's technology is going to be better going forward than Weblogic (which, IMO is a bit of a dinosaur), and so expect Glassfish to suddenly be renamed OAS at some point in the future.
skaffman
2009-12-02 23:13:36
LOL at *which is a bit of a dinosaur*. What is the point of buying BEA then? And I wonder how you would call WebshitSphere which is always 1 year beyond everybody :)
Pascal Thivent
2009-12-02 23:55:25
skaffman, I disagree about the dinosaur comment. WebLogic is still my favorite Java EE app server. I might be thinking too fondly of the BEA glory days, but I think it still wins in a race with WebSphere and JBOSS. Can't claim personal experience with Glassfish, so I can't comment on that.
duffymo
2009-12-03 02:50:43
+1
A:
Oracle is a tough one to predict.
OpenEJB is easier to predict, because it's open source. It appears to still be active, so it's likely to carry on for another year. Who can see further out than that?
The larger question is: What will the adoption rate of EJB3 be? Has the world passed the EJB model by?
Personally, I don't consider EJBs to be important anymore. I prefer Spring. As long as it's vibrant, I can't see any compelling reason to go back to EJBs.
I'm not certain about OpenESB, because I'm ambivalent about ESBs in general. I've seen them as a piece of a "BIG SOA" selling strategy on the part of vendors that was big on promise and short on delivery. An ESB can be either a centralized mediator for all your web service traffic or a single point of failure bottleneck, depending on your point of view. I think that a lot of the functionality that is usually centralized in ESBs (e.g., transformation, routing, logging, auditing, etc.) could be done better and faster in hardware - think Data Power or smarter Cisco switches.
duffymo
2009-12-03 02:54:37