Bob Tanner wrote:

> Any JBoss users on the list?
>
> I see it has hit the 100% Active ranking this week on sourceforge and I was
> wondering if someone would care to post a little bit about it.
>
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JBoss was initially the brainchild of two developers, Rickard Oberg and Marc
Fluery.  Obviously, since then, it has grown but Marc still leads the project
and Oberg is lead technologist.

Strengths of JBoss:

- Only open-source EJB solution (yes, I know about JONAS but I know very few if
any who use it).
- Modular construction
- Heavily based on JMX
- Very active development staff
- Just came out with JBoss 3.0 supporting EJB 2.0
- Tied in with Tomcat or you can use their front-end stuff

Weaknesses of JBoss

- No documentation to speak of
- Seems to get "rewritten" quite a lot.  With JBoss 2.0 and now with 3.0, heavy
slant towards JMX.  However, I would be nervous about my application server
undergoing a lot of change from major version number to major version number.
- Up to 3.0, no enterprise features such as clustering, but JBoss has had hot
deploy of classes for quite a while.
- Monitoring (from a sys admin point of view) is almost non-existent.  But I am
not terribly impressed with BEA Weblogic's either.  I hear IBM Websphere has
very good monitoring capabilities.
- Performance is a great unknown.  Right now, as JBoss is not a J2EE licensee,
they do not have access to ECPerf so standardized benchmarks from them will not
be forthcoming anytime soon (but what other vendors have published ECPerf
benchmarks).  I have not used JBoss for a paying gig, so I can't get a good
handle on performance.  I have heard third-hand, that performance is rather
poor.  Take that for what it is worth.

All in all, however, I would not hesitate to use JBoss as an embedded
application server that is the underpinnings of software product I was
developing or for a departmental application where my base would be somewhere
in the < 50 CONCURRENT user range on a single server (no clustering) in an 8-5
mode.

--
Perry Hoekstra
E-Commerce Architect
Talent Software Services
perry.hoekstra at talentemail.com