Does Anyone use JBoss in Production

[David Kerber]

Hello All,
Does anyone out there use JBoss in production? I've heard many great
things about it but never met anyone personally who uses it in production.
If you do use it, what are some of it's strenghs/weaknesses. How easy are
things like deployment and clustering?

Thanks,

dave

[Ahmed Tantan]

Dave,

Yes, we do. we have been using it for more than 3 years now. We have not had the need to use it in a cluster but our experience so far has been very positive.

Keep in mind that we only deployed statless session beans and few MDBs.

No entity beans, no statefull session beans, no transaction management, no declartive authentication.

I hope this helps.
 

[shen...@gmail.com]

Dave,

I have seen people use JBoss in production. It has come a long way.
Here are some strength and weaknesses IMHO:

Strengths:
It's free to deploy as many as you want
It's fairly easy to get it up and running
It usually supports the bleeding edge specifications
JBoss works well with other open source technologies like Tomcat,
Jetty, MySQL, Hibernate, Seam, etc.

Weaknesses:
To cluster the JBoss app server is no easy feat. documenation lacks
substance
No support except for JBoss Consulting and development community
Lack of a good Admin console, this is a big issue for me, I'd like to
see the configuration and runtime information in an easier manner,
viewing MBeans is not my idea of a complete management console
the LGPL license could be an issue when dealing with state and
governmental agencies. There's something in the GNU license that
states against governmental use.
JBoss Support List price is similar to those of IBM, BEA and Oracle
Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, is no longer at JBoss with RedHat
purchasing them out
Recently acquired Arjuna for its Tx Manager, Transaction cannot span
JVMs (Tx context only propagated within VM)
Incapable of automated recovery for XA transactions after a server
crash, and how widely is Arjuna TM used for Mission-Critical
applications? :)
JBoss JMS *replaced* in release 4.2, 5, I don't know how it compares
JBoss 5 finally moving to HTTP Primary/Secondary Replication, AFAIK No
special support for DR/HA architectures
Inefficient resource management (sockets, threads, etc.)
Lots of open ports - 1098:JNDI, 1099:JNDI, 4444:RMI, 4445:RMI,
8009:AJP, 8080:Web, 8083:HTTPClassLoader, 8093:JMS
Sockets left open after application processing complete, brittle under
high loads
Serious issues in app deployment showing race conditions where two
nodes could deploy things in different orders based on farm
deployments to different nodes "at the same time"

As you can tell, I'm sort of Anti-JBoss for an enterprise-ready
environment. For a small mom & pops shop, it's sufficient. :)

Btw, disclosure, I work for BEA Systems, and I do run JBoss with
Tomcat and Apache at my home in my basement on a Intel Pentium II
machine. :)

Regards,
Sheng