What are the advantages of Weblogic or Websphere over Glassfish or JBoss, since they may reach costs of millions of dollars?
Edit: Is there additional functionality? The all are Java EE Full Certified.
The question is about technology, not business or marketing. From the technological POV how are the servers different?
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Here’s a list (note that not all of the points may applay in every case):
- Better performance
- Better management/admin tools
- Better integration with various other products
- Better support – usually included in the license costs.
- Someone to blame when things go wrong
Note that you can get paid support for JBoss and Glassfish as well (in the latter case via a separate “Oracle GlassFish Server” edition).
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All the complaint servers (whether paid or unpaid) will have all the features that are mandated by the Java EE standards. I guess however there are areas where the paid servers may excel. For example the facility to provide efficient clustering and monitoring (plus obviously the support) is something that paid servers usually boast. I guess Application server clustering is not that is something used by all applications and different paid servers may have better offering in terms of extra tools.
The old adage “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” applies here.
Also, the open source salesmen can’t wine you, dine you and take you on paid vacations.
There is certainly no technical benefit at all to Websphere or Weblogic. It’s the perception that going with IBM or Oracle as your vendor is the safe choice.
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