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191

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4

Hi

I am confused by J2ee webservers !! I downloaded a free Glassfish server from sun, then as I am an Oracle developer downloaded the latest JDeveloper, which comes with a Weblogic server from BEa/Oracle. One is free the other costs $1000s. What is the real difference.

I want to write a SOAP interface to my Oracle database 10g, can I get away with the Glassfish server, why should I used a Weblogic server, and how does this differ from the Oracle Application server for J2EE apps.

As you can see I am confused to say the least, and would appreciate any enlightenment. I am an experience SQL PL/SQL developer, but new to Java so have a certain lack of knowledge in this area.

+2  A: 

Personally, if you are looking for an open source J2EE app server, I'd tend to go with JBoss if only because it has a much larger market share, making it a lot more likely that you are going to be able to find people that can answer questions or that have done some particular task and have posted instructions.

For the most part, if you are writing a pure J2EE application, it is relatively transparent to the developer what application server you deploy to. If you decide to take advantage of application-server specific extensions, then the choice of app server may matter to developers, but most Java shops are using a rather vanilla setup that can move reasonably easily between application servers. If you want to embrace one particular application server's extensions, there may be some performance/ productivity gains available in exchange for a loss of productivity.

The people that are more likely to care about what application server you are using are the admins. Different application servers have very different administrative interfaces (and different levels of administrative complexity and configurability). The bigger the site and the more critical the application, the more this sort of thing comes in to play. Different application servers also have different JVM implementations which has different performance characteristics. You also have the cost of support. Even if you use a free application server like JBoss, you probably want to purchase a support contract if you are deploying a mission critical application there. If you're deploying something smaller scale where you're comfortable relying on free sources of assistance (i.e. Google, Stackoverflow, etc.) one of the open source app servers is probably a no-brainer.

Justin Cave
+1  A: 

I think Glassfish is a better J2EE app server to start with than JBoss. JBoss is a big and quite complex application, and Glassfish is smaller and I find it easier to understand.

But I agree that the documentation and the market share is better for JBoss.

The various commercial J2EE app servers are more suited for large production environments, and they are overkill during development for a J2EE app that should be app server independent..

Anders Westrup
+2  A: 

This should clear up your confusion over Weblogic and Oracle Application Server. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/231812/will-oracle-retire-10gas-in-favor-of-weblogic Weblogic is Oracle's strategic J2EE platform going forward.

I don't know Glassfish or JBoss particularly, but both the Oracle and Weblogic application servers will provide a fully integrated suite of functionality including SOA, security, grid/clustering, systems management and development tools, over and above just the standard J2EE container. Not to mention a very high standard of customer support.

Freakent
+1  A: 

If you just want to write SOAP interface, you don't need to use glassfish because it's application server,and has a lot of J2EE stuff which is just slow down request processin. You could use lightweigh web application containers like Jetty and Tomcat. Also you could use any soap endpoint implementation AXIS,XFIRE and etc.

Pavel Rodionov
True! Why use more?
Yar