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Thursday April 29, 2004

Weather.com: WebSphere to Tomcat and Oracle to MySQL

At my current client we're going to migrate our application from Tomcat to WebSphere 5 in May. I'm dreading the move and really don't see the point, but alas - the client is always right. However, since my client reads this website, I thought maybe they'd be interested to see that Weather.com recently migrated from WebSphere to Tomcat.

"It was hard to run WebSphere and an IDE [integrated development environment] because of all the resources WebSphere took," recalls Jeff Cunningham, who leads the Internet application development team at Weather.com. "You had to run an instance of DB2 on your machine because WebSphere stored its configurations in DB2, so you had to have all that overhead. It was just really slow. I just started using Tomcat for development because it was so much faster."

The article goes on to say that they evaluated other app servers as well, but chose Tomcat because of the team's preference. They also discovered that Tomcat served up pages significantly faster than WebSphere.

Weather.com is also working on swapping out its Oracle database for the open-source MySQL.
...
"Now when I talk to senior management about moving from Oracle to MySQL they don't ask me, 'Are you sure?'" he says. "They ask me, 'When?'"

It's a great time to be an Open Source Consultant. ;-)

Posted in Java at Apr 29 2004, 11:05:57 AM MDT 16 Comments
Comments:

Not to disparrage Tomcat, because I do think it's great. But the whole "You had to run an instance of DB2 on your machine because WebSphere stored its configurations in DB2" thing hasn't been true since WebSphere 3.5. Since 4.0 WSAD came with a "single-server" edition that didn't require DB2. Also, why the hell can't you run Tomcat locally and WebSphere in test and production? That's what this whole J2EE thing is all about right? One spec, multiple implementations!

Posted by Jason Jones on April 29, 2004 at 12:51 PM MDT #

<em>> Since 4.0 WSAD came with a "single-server" edition that didn't require DB2.</em>

Good to know, thanks for the info.

<em>> Also, why the hell can't you run Tomcat locally and WebSphere in test and production?</em>

I absolutely agree. Currently, I switch b/w using MySQL on my PowerBook to DB2/DB2400 on Windows. Hibernate has made that very easy. Now if I can only figure out how to easily switch b/w app servers. Tomcat is easy b/c you can deploy a context.xml and JARs to the appropriate place and be done. No need to touch any files in Tomcat. As of 3.0.7, it looks like Resin makes it this simple too. How about WebSphere - can I just copy an XML file and JARs to a particular location and be done with deploying my app? Or possibly use something similar to Tomcat's Ant Tasks?

This is the major thing I'd like to see in J2EE 1.5 - the ability to specify a common XML file and bundle the JARs (i.e. for connection pooling) in the WAR.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 29, 2004 at 01:00 PM MDT #

Hahahahahaha! Oh, you poor, naive man... Are you coming to TSSS? I've got a whole big section on switching from WebLogic to WebSphere and the pain... oh the pain... of doing so... No, it's not so simple to redeploy. It's not simple at all to script and automate WAS 5... Maybe it's easier with WSAD, but we're not using it.

Posted by Jason Carreira on April 29, 2004 at 01:20 PM MDT #

<em>> Are you coming to TSSS?</em>

Nope - that's Mother's Day weekend and my mom is coming into town. <em>Doh!</em> It sounds like a good time, but I don't know if I could handle all that boozing and gambling - er... I mean <em>learning</em>.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 29, 2004 at 01:41 PM MDT #

>How about WebSphere - can I just copy an XML file and JARs to a particular location and be done with deploying my app
With WSAD, deploying to local is easy, in that you never do it. WSAD detects when you've made changes and WebSphere automagically sees the changes. If you make changes that require a context restart it does that for you to. Without WSAD? Not sure...

>I've got a whole big section on switching from WebLogic to WebSphere and the pain... oh the pain
That's not really what were talking about here. My point was not that you could switch between using WebSphere locally and Tomcat locally easily (which I don't think is true), but that you should be able to use Tomcat locally and WebSphere in test/QA/production/etc..

Posted by Jason Jones on April 29, 2004 at 02:11 PM MDT #

I work with Websphere 5 (WAS5) and Oracle (incidentally on AIX) daily and its really quite a powerful combination. Its not hard at all to port over servlet/jsp based app quickly to websphere from tomcat. I can run all my webapps developed in WAS5 inside of Tomcat just as easily as I can WAS5. Though as Jason mentioned deploying in WAS5 is not as easy as dropping an ear or war in a directory. Unfortunately you either have to go through the web admin console or script it. Truthfully, I think a lot of people just like Tomcat and MySQL because they're free and start up quickly and therefore think these products are better than something that costs money and starts up slower which is really not the case (@see perl/php/etc. vs Java).

Posted by Andre Mermegas on April 29, 2004 at 02:41 PM MDT #

We work with WSAD 5.1.1 on our desktops, testing against our own local copy of WAS 4.0.7 and a shared Oracle 8i dbase. Resource consumption is huge (1Gb internal memory on each machine). At home, I still use WSAD 5.1.1. because it beats the hell out of Eclipse (and I get it for free ;)), but using Tomcat really rocks. But then again, where whould you deploy your EJB's.... Whatever the circumstances, I think test/production should be as close as possible to the development environment.

Posted by Jaap on April 29, 2004 at 07:33 PM MDT #

At our company, we've been developing on Tomcat and deploying into test/production on Websphere 4 for 3 years. We've had very few problems. We're beginning to switch to Tomcat/JBoss because Websphere costs too much. Wish us luck. :)

Posted by No one on April 29, 2004 at 08:57 PM MDT #

I guess u all lack experience on J2EE and kinds of servers. If u can switch from Websphere to Tomcat and from Oracle to MySQL, then u didn't need any of them. Tomcat is a bad J2EE container, and MySQL is not a real, transactionnal database. So ... wrong initial choice.

Posted by experience on April 30, 2004 at 10:28 AM MDT #

I guess then that you have very limited experience and exposure. MySQL is a real transaction database, and tomcat is not a J2EE container, its a Servlet container.

Posted by John on April 30, 2004 at 11:33 AM MDT #

Can we call this thread - who's got a bigger stick ?

Posted by Greg Bloodworth on April 30, 2004 at 03:41 PM MDT #

I am coincidentally moving what I have developed on Tomcat to Websphere for my client and would be very interested in hearing about any issues anyone has experiences. The only to issues I have run into are:

1. Websphere 5.1 ships with a very old version of JDOM. I am using IBatis (with Spring ORM) for persistence and I was getting "Invalid argument call" whenever my DAOs were being accessed in the application. I tried setting my application classpath to "PARENT LAST" thinking that would use my application's JDOM jar but that did not work. I ultimately solved the problem by replacing the JDOM jar in my WAS lib directory and restarting the whole server.

2. If you are using scriplets (I know, I know, but I can seem to get indexed forms working the way I want to in Struts without using them), you have to escape the double quotes. I am not sure if this is because I am using them within a Struts tag (i.e.<html:text property="<%= "insurance[" + pageContext.getAttribute("i") + "].company" %>" or just whenever you have to use a scriplet. The above had to be changed to <html:text property="<%= \"insurance[\" + pageContext.getAttribute(\"i\") + \"].company\" %>" in order to work in Websphere.

That's all for now.

Posted by Dave Keller on May 12, 2004 at 05:51 AM MDT #

Posted by 69.193.88.30 on November 03, 2004 at 02:57 AM MST #

Posted by 69.193.101.102 on November 03, 2004 at 03:11 AM MST #

Posted by 69.193.101.102 on November 11, 2004 at 06:54 PM MST #

Posted by 69.42.81.244 on December 07, 2004 at 11:24 PM MST #

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