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20031229 Monday December 29, 2003

WebSphere version 6.0 - when's will it release? Today I discovered that WebSphere is one of the first appservers to support J2EE 1.4. Too bad it's a developer release and not a real release. At my current project, we've been developing on Tomcat 4.1.29 (and MySQL) because it's the only platform I've tested AppFuse on. We plan to migrate to WebSphere and DB2 in the coming months. They currently have a license for WebSphere 4.x, which I heard sucks - especially (IMO) because it only supports Servlets 2.2 and JSP 1.1. Luckily, the app we're deploying to production will be the first Java-based webapp, so we will hopefully be able to use WebSphere 5.1.

I just wish 6.0 was out as a real release, then we could start using JSP 2.0 and leave all those damn <c:out value="..."/>'s behind. Posted in Java at Dec 29 2003, 11:15:14 PM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

If you have the chance, avoid WebSphere altogether... it's very clunky to develop with and much more finicky than the other containers I've used (Tomcat, Resin, Orion, WebLogic), especially JMS with MQ. Run away!

Posted by Jason Carreira on December 30, 2003 at 09:07 AM MST #

Jason, which version of WebSphere are you referring to? I agree that version 4.x is the absolute pits compared to WebLogic and Tomcat. Making JMS/MQ work with WebSphere was a nightmare of patches and add-ons. But 5.x was greatly improved (they removed the requirement for a DB-based config repository) and I hear 6.0 is even better. I guess all those shops like it because of the many add-ons and scalability support - the very things that make it complex and hard to work with. WebLogic was certainly easier to work with if you were not using IBM's IDEs.

Posted by Richard Mixon on December 30, 2003 at 12:08 PM MST #

I'm referring to WAS 5.0... We develop on both WAS5.0 and WLS8.1 and I must say, WLS is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to use as a development platform. WLS is set up to let you quickly do development, edit config files, etc. WAS and it's crappy configuration repository (the file based one is awful, never had to deal with the db one, we've got good db management scripts in place, it might actually be better for us) makes it nigh-on impossible to hand edit anything. You've got to go through their slow and confusing web admin console (finding anything is a nightmare) to make changes. The embedded MQ runs as several separate processes and hang all the time. There's no way to just delete a file to clear the queues like in WLS, you have to go through their command-line app to manually do it. We're working on scripting that, but come on!

It seems like they never developed any software using it. This is especially true since we're not using WSAD, and they seem to think everyone should just use their tools. The whole thing is as unfriendly as possible to the developer. They're listening to us about our problems, but when can changes make it in? Maybe 2005? And then our customers won't want to jump on the new versions immediately, so I'm looking at having some of the usability issues we've raised addressed and usable by me in 2006? Fun.

I'll go back to trying to convince everyone that we should just dump EJBs altogether and develop in Resin.

Posted by Jason Carreira on December 30, 2003 at 12:30 PM MST #

At least you're whining about a release from some product other than Struts! :-) Craig

Posted by Craig McClanahan on December 30, 2003 at 11:33 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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