Recession - Perfect Times For EJBs - The Support Issue
EJB 3.0 are part of the majority of the mainstream application servers. Although EJB 3.0 are already very effient, lean and can be hardly further simplified - this is actually not the issue. You can save more and more money in the maintenance phase of an application. Although the economy tends to move in the direction of opensource application servers, serious applications always run on officially supported (opensource) application servers.
No one dares, mostly because of political reasons, to run critical software on unsupported platforms, regardles how good the own IT-department really is. ...and you have to spend some money on it. In general you get the support for EJBs included - it comes "out of the box". If you, on the other hand, deploying frameworks like Guice, Hivemind, Nanocontainer, Spring or even Seam (not on JBoss), you will have to think about the support for those frameworks as well. Such a mix is always challenging - at least the reproduction for a support case. In long term the cheapest possible solution will be the use of plain Java EE 5 containers, or a full stack alternatives like e.g. a transactional OSGI container or SpringSource dmServer. Running a full Java EE stack and an alternative on one box is just too expensive to be officially supported...
Hi Adam,
I would like to add that another argument of running critical software on supported application servers using popular frameworks is that the resource pool of developers will be high thus assuring that there will be enough developers out there that can maintain the application.
Maintenance cost is always greater than development cost, but without enough developer pool then maintenance cost would skyrocket.
Regards.
Posted by Jerwin Louise V. Uy on March 27, 2009 at 05:28 PM CET #
@Jerwin,
exacltly - just think about Cobol :-)
regards,
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on March 27, 2009 at 05:37 PM CET #
It this your experience, that serious applications are running on supported application servers? Mine is different! I am sometimes really astonished about companies who run really important applications (infrastructure services) on applications servers which are about 3-4 years old without any support - they just downloaded the community edition.
Posted by Cyrill Rüttimann on March 27, 2009 at 10:16 PM CET #
@Cyrill,
it highly depends on the company size. If a company has a dedicated operations department - it mainly runs supported software. Sometimes it goes even further, so that we had to ensure, that the environment (OS, JDK etc) meets the requirements of the particular application server vendor...
But if the software is really crucial, or the project really expensive, managers tend to enforce official support - mainly because of political / warranty reasons...
regards,
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on March 27, 2009 at 10:29 PM CET #
Hi Adam
Fully agree with you so that's why we are using plain JEE5 container and fully tested (by ourselves) libraries for our major development.
Posted by Kenneth on March 29, 2009 at 12:06 PM CEST #
@Kenneth,
and what your experience so far with Java EE 5?
thanks for your feedback,
adam
Posted by Adam Bien on March 29, 2009 at 01:16 PM CEST #