There’s a nice discussion over at slashdot spurred by the defection of Don Ferguson, the man behind WebSphere, to Microsoft. The discussion can be summed up by the following:

  1. what kind of person leaves IBM to go to the evil empire?
  2. IBM management is out of touch and IBM is a sinking ship (I know that you only hear the squeaky wheel, but the level of ire still concerns me - though I stand by the prediction that 2007 will be a great year for IBM)
  3. Websphere is terrible and clunky
  4. The last few versions of Websphere have been nice (though it’s a framework.. not really an app)

I thought these comments were noteworthy:

Aa pro-WebSphere Poster

Let me tell you two things:

1) Big companies needs big support. Who will guarantee their servers will be up’n'running 24×7? Who will pay the fines if a failure stops the big company from operating for, say, 3 hours? That’s the IBM’s market. IBM is big enough (and have people enough) to support this kind of
company.

2) In my experience as a Java developer, I can say WebSphere is one of the fastest application servers in the market. Even faster when running in real servers (not that cheap toys [serverpronto.com]). JBoss (opensource) is really good, but isn’t enough for some companies. The difference between JBoss and WebSphere is that JBoss is made for developers (it’s easy to install/configure) and WebSphere is made for performance. It’s not a trivial task to install/configure, but once configured, it is fast as hell :-)

Do you need middleware

Well.. ..I am not going to shill for IBM, because really, I’ve worked with the hairy mess that is WebSphere, and it’s like everything from IBM - a lifestyle choice. You don’t just recommend it like you would Zope or FoR.

But in the end you buy software in this class for a few key reasons:

1. Ability to interface directly with many platforms. (see #2)

2. The ability to write software that runs on many platforms. And I don’t mean Linux or Windows when I say platforms, I mean like mainframe, mini, datacenter, server, etc.

3. The ability to write really big systems.

When I mean really big, I am saying, you know like supporting an e-commerce website with 80,000 http request per second. They are rare, but they are out there. Although the core of the product is IBM HTTP Server, which is a fork of Apache, the key is in the tuning.

Here is the test I recommend when people ask me about it: can you run a query against your live database to determine orders/transactions placed today?

If you can, than don’t worry about Websphere or middleware at all. You are fine. Your site or app is still “small” (not a pejorative).
If you can’t, than it means you probably have a big system. And maybe you need middleware.

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