I have, in the last few years, been very supportive of IBM, in several ways. I think their approach to Linux and open source in general is quite good from a pragmatic point of view. Their new generation of software is much much better than the old stuff (I had the displeasure of using their old RS/6000 with AIX). I have suggested and helped to implement migrations from Oracle to DB/2. I also see their Service oriented approach as a intelligent move.
But, from a developers perspective its very difficult to like WebSphere. Its heavy, slow, sometimes I even question its reliability.
I also tend to like very tight circles of develop/test/develop/test/… I like to do a small change, call ant (or something similar, depending on the environment that I am supposed to work with) which will do for me a round of automated unit testing. As I am doing this all the time, I need fast deployment times, which is the opposite that I get from WebSphere.
Does anyone has suggestions on improving the deployment time? As I tend to use lots of application servers, I end up not specializing in any, thus I might be failing some obvious optimization step…
WebLogic seems, overall more development frendly. But JBoss is the clear winner on development friendliness (failing on the documentation part).
I am aware that, on production, the parameters of evaluation are very different, but my experience of continuously administrating a application server is very limited and I don’t have the level of maturity to comment on that.
But, going back to IBM, at least Eclipse saves the day.
Please share your thoughts
Filed in: Java
