As an open source product (”owned” by Red Hat) JBoss is a robust application server. From a pure product purchase standpoint, it is clearly much less expensive than having WebSphere development and runtime environments. So why not switch?

I’ve been working with both and there is a clear difference in development and implementation philosophies. IBM’s Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software is the development IDE IBM sell’s for developers to write applications for the WebSphere runtime environment. It is regarded by most as expensive, but it also comes with a full set of features from security to a bundled web services implementation and access to IBM’s extensive business component library. Many features are implemented through wizards using code generator plug-ins to the Eclipse platform. The generated code can be complex, but it is robust and works but not necessarily designed to be tinkered with.

The WebSphere application server likewise has a full set of features including an automated deployment manager and extensive administrative tools. It even includes a stripped down version of Eclipse to run some of the same code generators found in the Rational Application Developer products.

JBoss, on the other hand, has no real interactive development environment, but MyEclipse offers one choice that has a lot of support for JBoss and is very reasonable priced. While MyEclipse has some excellent features supporting development for JBoss, there are many choices of components available to use for things such as web services that require much more hand coding and configuration relative to IBM. IBM gives you a few options for doing things and a few ways of doing things providing a very structured and highly standardized environment. With JBoss, any standards-oriented company will have to regular meet to define standards around such things as security, resources and web service configuration.

Standards are important to support automation for things such as build and deploy and companies weighing JBoss and WebSphere as choices for their application server will have to weigh the additional man hours required to support JBoss against the features and price of WebSphere.