JBoss isn't the only open source EJB solution.  OpenEJB, part of the Exolab
projects, has been around for two years now.  It is an EJB container system
only and is not an EJB server, it needs to be plugged into an app server
platform.  In other words, it is a server plug-in like Apache Tomcat.  It's
never been popular because it has never been plugged in to any production
worthy server platform that we are able to talk about.  Hopefully soon we
can make some announcements.

OpenEJB was founded by Richard Monson-Haefel (author of the O'Reilly EJB
book) and myself this month, two years ago.  We have full EJB 1.1 compliance
at the moment and are working on 2.0.

The website, openejb.exolab.org, is very out of date at the moment.  We are
working to get that updated hopefully this week.  The mailing list is were
all the action happens anyway, that's where you'll find the most current
information.

As mentioned, OpenEJB is not an out-of-the-box server, so there isn't much
for you unless you are looking to embed an EJB container into your platform.

Regardless, you'll be hearing quite a bit more about OpenEJB in the future.

David Blevins
---
OpenEJB - EJB Container System
www.openejb.org
ftp.exolab.org/pub/openejb/

> 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
>
>
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