This is copied from my previous posting on the Glassfish advocacy list
because I'm told that not many people read that list and so Glassfish
users would be a better place for this. I've gotten a couple of good
responses so far but would love to see more.
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My company currently has a software-as-a-service sales application which
runs on Tomcat. We are looking into doing web services and looking
at EJB's. We'd like something free-as-in-beer. I am looking into
JBoss, Glassfish and Tomcat w/OpenEJB. I am willing to consider others.
I'm googling around trying to find good comparisons but most of what
I find seems to be out of date and not very detailed. I know the picture
changes fairly frequently. I'm trying to find out what it is right now.
Since this is the Glassfish advocacy list, I'm expecting to find a lot
of people who can answer the question: Why should we choose Glassfish
over the others? At least, maybe someone can point me to a web page that
can answer that? I can't seem to find it from the Glassfish home page.
If you'd like to tell me why we should not choose Glassfish, that would
be appreciated too.
Reliability is the #1 biggest issue for us. Our app is used globally by
thousands of people simultaneously. We need to be up 24/7. Downtime
at 3am here is downtime at 3pm somewhere else. It costs us and our
clients money and that's a serious problem.
We also want to get into clustering for fault tolerance, failover and load
balancing. We currently use multiple servers but our clients know about
the multiple servers and when things get slow, they log out and log back
into another server. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons.
My boss is leaning strongly towards JBoss, because we run RedHat servers
and he thinks that may mean better support since we already have a
support contract with RedHat. He also likes JBoss because it has been
in heavy production use for a long time. I'm a little more open minded
and I am under the impression that Glassfish is a bit more up to date
with the latest JEE standards. I am also under the impression that it
has been heavily used in production environments a for a while now.
BTW, my boss and I are the primary software developers as well as
app server admins of the system. It's a small company.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
--Bill Davidson