Arun Gupta's Blog

Sun's "dramatically improved" app server

Here are some quotes from a recent report by Forrester Wave on the "Application Server Platforms"

Among major vendors, Sun Microsystems Inc., has dramatically improved its standing in this year's evaluation of applications servers for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) by Forrester Research Inc.

Sun trailed the field in Forrester's 2004 evaluation of application server platforms but emerged as a "strong performer" in this year's evaluation.

Sun's platform grew substantially with its acquisition of SeeBeyond, and the company has spent about a year integrating those products with its Java Enterprise System (ES) modules. The SeeBeyond products, now called the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS), provide very strong SOA, integration, and business process management (BPM) features relative to the competition.

The analyst firm rate Sun Web server and directory server on a par with what IBM and BEA offer in those categories.

The full report costs $379 but excerpts are available here.

If you want to download any of the above mentioned platforms, they are available at:

• GlassFish
• Java CAPS
• Sun Web Server
• Sun Directory Server

GlassFish V2 will be released final in the next few weeks. And the associated product, Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, will be released along with it as well.

Technorati: glassfish javacaps forrester

Comments

• And a quote that you chose to omit says

  In Forrester's evaluation, Sun's platform products are not yet at the level of the products from IBM and BEA, which have gone through "extreme battle testing." Forrester noted: "Sun is not yet a good choice for applications with extreme reliability, scalability, and complexity. Sun simply doesn't yet have the experience that IBM and BEA do with such requirements." Although the analyst firm did rate Sun Web server and directory server on a par with what IBM and BEA offer in those categories.
  

  Posted by: kirillcool on August 13, 2007 at 03:42 PM

• There is no download of Java CAPS at the provided URL.

  Posted by: claudio on August 13, 2007 at 05:01 PM

• hi arun,

  thanks for the JCAPS link. I tried to get hold of a download earlier. Hopefully, I will get hold of it.

  BTW, is there a good tutorial for JCAPS ?

  thank you,

  BR,
  ~A

  Posted by: anjanb2 on August 13, 2007 at 05:50 PM

• hi arun,

  I jumped the gun. No, there is no download at the linked site.

  Arun : Can you pls. post a download link ?

  Thank you,

  BR,
  ~A

  Posted by: anjanb2 on August 13, 2007 at 05:52 PM

• Hi Kirill - You are right, but note that Oracle's assessment (by Forrester) has a similar comment. AFAICS, it just means "there are more mission-critical deployments using BEA and IBM", which I think is a fair thing for an analyst to point out. - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on August 13, 2007 at 06:24 PM

• hi Eduardo,

  It is important for the customer to know what paces the previous versions of the project have gone through. It's almost like a person(with an M.I.T degree) with 10 years battle-field experience being compared with a hot-shot degree from MIT but not yet battle scarred.

  I'm sure that it takes time for the Glassfish developers at sun (I'm assuming that most of them are NOT solaris OS developers) to get that battle scarring experience.

  How much time it takes for Glassfish to get there is surely a question. But then again, not everybody needs the level of battle tested code that BEA has gone through.

  ARUN GUPTA : Can you pls. post a JCAPS download link ?

  Thank you,

  BR,
  ~A
  

  Posted by: anjanb2 on August 13, 2007 at 06:43 PM

• Hi Anjanb2 - As you probably know, GlassFish is a direct descendant of SJS AS, which comes all the way from the Netscape AppServer with infusions / improvements from the Java EE (nee J2EE) Reference Implementation. There are _very large_ customers out there deploying on this code base, in Telco, Financial, entertaining, etc. , and more on the way. WLS and WS have more deployed customers, but, based on the data I have insight into, that will change. - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on August 13, 2007 at 10:06 PM

• Here is the link to download:
  http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp?cat=Java%20%26%20Technologies&tab=3&subcat=Java

  Jack
  Audio Mastering

  Posted by: j_hell on August 14, 2007 at 12:51 AM

• Oh sorry. i jumped the gun. The link leads to the same page Arun had suggested for download. Sorry guys.

  
  Jack

  Audio Mastering

  Posted by: j_hell on August 14, 2007 at 12:55 AM

• I agree with you

  Posted by: gmayyyha on August 14, 2007 at 04:06 AM

• Forrester noted: "Sun is not yet a good choice for applications with extreme reliability, scalability, and complexity. Sun simply doesn't yet have the experience that IBM and BEA do with such requirements."
  No, of course not. Basically at this point that's what Sun lacks: time in the field.
  However, there are a boatload of applications that need to be simply reliable, scalable, and complex, rather than extreme reliability, scalability, and complexity.
  In those segments, the Sun servers may well be a good fit. While, for example, Glassfish may not have any direct experience in production deployments using clustering and such (being as v2 is yet to be released), many of the folks who implemented that had history implementing that functionality in Suns previous offerings. And while those offerings didn't have the market penetration of the BEA and IBM servers, they WERE being used by some folks, some where, doing "enterprisey" things.
  So, while this specific Glassfish implementation may be unproven, it's not as if the engineers are coming at this blind.
  Glassfish et al is moving along like a rocket, and is getting more and better exposure in the real world.

  Posted by: whartung on August 14, 2007 at 09:54 AM

• Hi whartung - the point i was trying to make is that there are large customers today running HA applications on the direct ancestors of glassfish: SJSAS 7.x and SJSAS 8.x. There are good and significant changes to GF but GF is, at heart, the follow-up to those releases. Saying that GF is totally unproven is like saying that WLS 11 is totally unproven forgetting about all the previous releases of WLS.

  Posted by: pelegri on August 14, 2007 at 10:32 AM

• Java CAPS was built and intended for implementing large enterprise integration and composite application solutions and as such the installer is tailored to enterprise level distributed installations. Those wanting to evaluate Sun's latest integration technologies should download and try binary builds from Project Open ESB at http://open-esb.org.

  Posted by: arungupta on August 14, 2007 at 05:40 PM

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