“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

- with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.

There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.

The original report has this chart :

Update – Sunday 4/11/10

My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.

So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.

[As percentages of respondents - that's : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]

These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.

My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !

This week we GA’d JBoss EAP 5.0. As you’d expect from a new release there’s a long list of new features, capabilities and APIs and at some point I’ll talk about those some more. But the intention of this post is to give you an idea of some of the other less visible things that have happened with this release. EAP 5.0 marks a key milestone in the evolution of JBoss and demonstrates where we’re heading with the JBoss Platforms.

Performance

We set some pretty aggressive performance targets for this release. By comparison to JBoss EAP 4.3 we see an increase in peak throughput of about 20%, faster response times and more scalable HTTP connection handling. Performance is an ongoing activity and we’re continuing our investment in improving it in future releases. Performance at any cost is interesting to few outside of Formula 1 and Rocket Science and it isn’t a goal – we’re specifically interested in price / performance using a broad range of typical, real-life workloads.

Quality

Popular Open Source technologies (like JBoss AS – on which EAP is based) have always had the benefit of a large community who actively poke and prod. and push the software in different ways; who peer into the design and code and offer improvements.The result is some pretty decent, efficient and well polished code. But with the JBoss platforms we go one (or several steps) further. For EAP we had a long and active Early Access Program. It started back in April and is only now winding down as FCS customers complete their work. The diagram Below illustrates how we connect the AS and EAP lifecycle, the upstream (AS) GA essentially starts our EAP Early access program. This allows enterprise customers to start using a stable (though incomplete) release with the full backing of Red Hat Global Support.

Obviously the diagram is a massive oversimplification – EAP is more than AS – it is the integration point for Seam, RESTEasy, the installer, mod_cluster and the Apache Native components.

With every release we also enhance our QE coverage; in the case of this release there was a bigger focus on Performance, Stress and Longevity testing using larger and more complex topologies and a broader range of workloads.

Lifecycle

We’ve also refreshed and restated our product update and support policy for all JBoss platforms – the hope is that it’s more clear, better aligned with other products from Red Hat and puts even more distance between us and our Open Source competitors.

Ease of Use

A while back we kicked of an Internal initiative called “Andiamo” – I talked a little about it at JBoss World, and Mark wrote about it recently. While much of what we have planned around Operational and Development Ease of Use is planned for release beyond EAP 5.0, EAP 5.0 does lay the foundation for some of the things we need to achieve. The new Microcontainer provides us a very flexible and powerful toolbox that will allow us to build the middleware platform for the next decade. Specifically around ease of use, and as a taste of things to come we did provide a first cut of the new embedded console (it replaces the old JMX and Web Consoles). It has pretty limited functionality right now but I think it achieves the goal of making simple tasks simple to do.

What’s Next ?

The EAP Springtime Release (nominally EAP 5.1) is well underway and we’ll be pushing for even greater performance gains as well as defining the target platform for an upcoming Common Citeria (EAL 4+) certification.

We’re also underway with the EAP Lancer Release (nominally EAP 6.0) which will be the first major output of the Andiamo work as well as supporting the new Java EE 6 platform.

Onwards and Upwards.

JBoss World 2009 is just under 3 weeks away and it’s still not too late to register. GEICO CIO Jess Reed will be one of the keynotes this year underlining that JBoss World is a great place to come and learn how other organizations just like you have saved money and improved performance and stability by moving to JBoss and Red Hat.

“GEICO is the 3rd largest passenger auto-insurer in the US and provides coverage for 9 million policyholders.”

“Reed will highlight GEICO’s deployment of Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware and their use of open source middleware software for mission critical platforms”

You can even save money ($400) on saving money by registering before the event.

I’ll be at Red Hat Summit / JBoss World all week and have a couple of sessions talking about JBoss Enterprise App. Platform both present and future. If you’re around and want to chat – get in touch.

Open Choice isn’t some big, far-into-the-future vision thing it’s something we’re doing now. This year. Product-wise it consists of four offerings (where previously there was only one) and as we release them I’ll give you my perspective on why they’re important. Unfortunately I’m already a little behind – we’ve already delivered two products out of four and the third is in Alpha moving quickly towards Beta.

So let me use this post to talk about JBoss EWS 1.0 (Enterprise Web Server). EWS is basically a packaged, certified and tested bundle of Tomcat and Apache HTTP – the industry’s dominant Java web-container and Web Server respectively. We round out the bundle with mod_jk, APR and most importantly a management agent for JBoss ON. We currently support and certify on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Solaris with Windows coming next.

Providing JBoss ON management support is pretty important – it gives customer the ability to manage the application and web stacks easily and consistently using the same toolset. If you want to learn more – there is a free Webinar on July 14th at 2pm Eastern – more here.

The rationale for supporting Tomcat is that it is absolutely the dominant Java web-container and has become an important part of the corporate IT fabric. Tomcat has been popular for years but in the last two or three  I’ve seen it evolve into a much more strategic platform for IT. Many customer I speak with have defined two distinct tiers of functionality – essentially a full Java EE stack and a lighter-weight Tomcat platform. By supporting both the dominant Java EE implementation (JBoss EAP) and Tomcat, combined with the ability to manage from a single tool – I think we can do a much better job of satisfying a much broader customer base than our competition. Here’s an (albeit unscientific) chart from a recent survey that demonstrates this well :

It’s also interesting to note that from this survey JBoss’ deployment share is more than Websphere and Weblogic combined.

OK, so JBoss EWS 1.0 is out and we have customers deployed or deploying some pretty large, strategic apps. but I’m already thinking about the next version (code named Cavalier). Some initial ideas for Cavalier are :

• increasing platform support to include AIX, HP-UX and maybe other Linux flavours;
• alternative Connection Pool implementations for Tomcat;
• looking at a more recent version of Apache HTTPD;
• possibly supporting mod_cluster.
• soft-appliances to better support virtualized hosts.

Any other thoughts are always welcome – leave a comment or get in touch directly.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Or you may have seen this (exceptionally cool) video at one of our conferences :

Of course Gandhi wasn’t talking about JBoss or Red Hat or Open Source – but the quote is still very relevant to a company that has revolutionized the software industry. People and companies who once ignored or laughed at Linux, or JBoss’ original EJB server are now waking up to the reality that they are losing.

Given the recent presentations that JBoss’ only real competitors (IBM and Oracle) have been spreading around and the amount of work and energy they’re both expending to compete with JBoss – I think JBoss has reached a significant milestone – I think we’re at stage 3 of Gandhi’s steps to oppose the truth  – ” … then they fight you …”.

It’s flattering and inspiring to know that two companies who are literally hundreds of times the size of Red Hat are worried. Really worried. It also adds a huge amount of credibility to our business model and our technology.

What’s next ?

JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

A lot of interest in JBoss Enterprise Middleware is thanks to our proprietary competitors’ exorbitantly high license costs and completely disproportionate and poorly timed price hikes. While cost is certainly the main reason customers move – it’s not the reason they stay once they have made the move. According to recent surveys – Vendor Independence, Quality, Value and Innovation rank highly as reasons people prefer open source over the proprietary model. As IT organizations see their budgets shrink over the next couple of years migration to Open Source won’t just be for the technology savvy early adopters. As such – we need to be ready for what I think will be a much larger and quite possibly a mass migration.

Talking to some of our JBoss solution delivery partners and our own consulting groups it became obvious that there was a huge pool of knowledge, experience and expertise but no means to share the knowledge and learn from other’s hard-earned experience. We also found that many had developed solutions for assessing and automating application migration but none wanted the burden of maintaining those tools. Sounded like a perfect opportunity for a collaborative open source project and our partners unanimously agreed.

So today Red Hat and those same valued partners including Amentra, CityTech, Consilium 1, Exadel, Freedom OSS, RivetLogic, Unisys and Vizuri are launching the JBoss MASS project [press release]. Most if not all of the 12 project founders come from a consulting background and have real-life experience of managing complex migrations and without their willingness to work together this project couldn’t have started. The JBoss MASS project will act as an umbrella community for all things migration at JBoss but the immediate goals will be to build a knowledge base and assessment / automation tools to help people move quickly to JBoss App Server /  Enterprise App Platform from proprietary alternatives.

If you’re interested in joining us as an individual or corporation please get in touch, visit the JBoss MASS project page or swing by the design forum.

I didn’t get to go to Devoxx but I followed some of the tweets and live blogging – sounds like it was a fun show. As with many of these style of developer event there was the mandatory whiteboard poll which I actually find very useful. I’m not saying the results are completely representative or useful in isolation but they’re useful all the same. A public spirited fellow called Sven snapped pictures of the whiteboard poll and put them up on Picasa.

Slide 2 captured the votes for different jvm-based languages (except Java) and Scala / Groovy seem to be the most popular followed by “don’t care”. On the “Java Cool Wall 2008″ – it’s interesting to see Spring mid-table whereas Seam, EJB 3 / EJB 3.1 are way up at the cool end. The big surprise for me at least was JavaFX which is at the extreme cool end of the scale.

But what really brought a smile to my face was the App server vote. Geronimo got the lowest number of votes – which provides some backup for my gut feel – ie. few people are using it. And the biggest cause for mirth was the Websphere (Websfear) column – which actually got some votes – slightly more than WebLogic but you have to read the comments !! As reflected in the comments of a recent blog post – people seem to despise Websphere with a passion. What has IBM done to piss so many Java developers off ?

IBM’s WebSphere application server is now ten years old, and during that time, it has evolved and matured into what its users think of as the best application server anywhere, but most especially in the large enterprise market where IBM has traditionally had its home. Make no mistake about it, WebSphere is a powerhouse in many ways, and its users truly love this
product.

Fantastic – already written in press-ready language – could be lifted and dropped straight into a press release. So good – it could have been written by Websphere’s marketing team themselves !

OK, by now you think you’ve seen through by thinly veiled blast at EDC’s report. You think I’m bitter because JBoss came in 5th (out of eight). Right ?

Well hold on. Though I have some issues with the report which I’ll get to – JBoss actually did very well – after all we beat Weblogic – which is no small feat. And there are other bits of the report worth highlighting. Here’s one quote I like which enforces what many other analysts are saying about JBoss and something that differentiates us from our Open Source brethren :

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform competes with Oracle’s Application Server, WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere in the high-end market for large corporate applications. The recent acquisition of BEA by Oracle may provoke some consternation and uncertainty amongst the end users of both WebLogic and Oracle AS, which in turn provides an opportunity for both JBoss and IBM.

And another that demonstrates that JBoss is focussed on our customer’s highest priorities :

JBoss really shone in the areas of security where users gave it the best ratings of any product in the survey, compatibility with other software, and the very important value to cost ratio.

The second point is worth repeating, given the economic situation we find ourselves in – JBoss had the best value to cost ratio.

So I’m actually not bitter – if you’re the underdog competing with some significantly larger competitors – this kind of validation is golden and It shows that JBoss is till punching way above it’s weight. I’m not bitter but my spidey-senses are tingling; there’s something just not right about this report.

Methodoloy

I find EDC’s methodology odd. It’s not clear how many responses were received for each question or for each vendor. For example you would expect to see many responses for Windows Server 2003 vs something like NetWeaver (which isn’t quite as main stream) – the number of responses is significant both statistically and as a proxy for adoption / acceptance.

Bucks the general consensus

The results just don’t seem right. I’ve worked for 2 of the vendors on the list (previously Sun and currently Red Hat) and know the other vendors really well having been involved in this space for as long as anyone. Though I trust my instinct – that isn’t good enough so let’s compare some other data. Forrester recently released a report (also based on a user survey) covering some aspects of the EDC report.  In that report WAS 6 did significantly better than WAS 5  but generally scored lower than JBoss. For example :

The EDC report doesn’t correlate with the summary points of the recent Burton report on JBoss. Also it doesn’t correlate with our own (sponsored) satisfaction surveys (like this). I find it strange that WAS scores so well and Weblogic scores so badly – putting them in seventh plance out of eight just seems a little too extreme and a little to convenient. I’ve yet to personally meet a Websphere customer who says good things about WAS – maybe I only meet the customers who’ve already decided to move to JBoss ?

Third – I talk to customers every week and Red Hat’s sales team a couple of times a day and I just don’t see Geronimo mentioned at all – few if any user satisfaction surveys actually call out Geronimo – what was it about these respondents that give them an unrepresentative affinity towards Geronimo ? I just don’t understand why Geronimo is in the survey.

So a couple of request to EDC – 1. open up the unfettered results; 2. provide a little more detail on the methodology; and 3.  confirm that this was a purely independent survey that wasn’t paid for or unduly influenced by any of the vendors included in the survey.