The availability of an increasing number of high-quality, open source application infrastructures that can deliver clear business advantages explains why open source technology is now a popular choice among IT professionals. There are many exceptionally efficient and full-featured, open source equivalents to almost every commercial solution.
So how do you choose among various—and often similar-open source application infrastructures—especially when recent open source technology acquisitions and company mergers are making your choices even more difficult? Your decision must be based on more than product capabilities and features.
Before making your selection, step back and look at your company's long term goal for integrating the open source solution you are developing into your corporate environment—and ask yourself the following questions:
- After you complete your software using this development tool, how difficult will it be to integrate your final OSS product into your corporate environment?
- Can you be absolutely certain that what you produced won't become an IT integration or maintenance nightmare down the road—resulting in substantial integration and hardware costs?
- Will there be adequate support and timely bug fixes for your choice of OSS should problems arise?
- Does your OSS selection put your organization at risk? (i.e. is it fully supported by the open source community, and is it at risk of disappearing or changing if the vendor should go out of business or be acquired or the community be disrupted?)
- What is the complexity or level of sophistication of your application? Does it require tools that have gone through rigorous testing or will incorporate middleware, extensive management, governance requirements, and/or administrative services?
- Do you need a flexible infrastructure with a small footprint or do you need to support your application on Windows and/or other platforms or operating systems in addition to Linux?
Your selection of the right open source development and deployment environment depends on how you answered these questions. If all you require is an application server and Linux or you did not anticipate there would be any problems when you answered questions 1 through 4, then you can use almost any OSS alternative. On the other hand, if your application is complex, compute-intensive, sophisticated, very large, or must conform to strict SOA structures, governance criteria such as Sarbanes-Oxley, etc., then you should consider using a commercial product such as IBM WebSphere Application Server.
However, if you were unsure about your answers to questions 1 though 4 and/or you answered yes to question 6, or your company already has a sizeable investment in IBM technology, then IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) is ideally suited for your development needs.
Features and Advantages of WAS CE
WAS CE is a J2EE 1.4 compatible application server that incorporates the Apache Geronimo code base, with best of breed open source technologies in an easily installable configuration. The WAS CE is a free, pre-integrated, modular alternative to commercial development tools. It was designed to be customized to fit your project requirements and business needs. You can extend WAS CE's capabilities by adding custom code or features—or by removing any unnecessary components to reduce the overall size. You can also enable and disable specific components of WAS CE at run time to improve performance.
WAS CE features a lightweight footprint. WAS CE server minimum configuration is under 40 MB. See specific download details here. WAS CE has no upfront costs, and shares many of the same features and capabilities of the commercial WAS products. It pre-integrates Apache Tomcat and extends it with many of the features and services you're likely to require. Many of these services are implemented through best-of-breed open source projects, including Apache Tomcat (JSP and servlets), ActiveMQ (JMS), OpenEJB (EJBs), and Apache Axis (Web services). WAS CE blends these open source with commercial attributes including testing across multiple platforms, documentation, and world-class technical support.
WAS CE is backed by IBM, based on Apache Geronimo, with the enthusiastic support of the open source community. This technology represents a large scale investment in terms of engineering time and proven J2EE and open source technology contributions. WAS CE is a high-quality product that gives you access to IBM's comprehensive, proven portfolio of support, services, and WebSphere middleware products.
More importantly, this combined commitment by IBM and the open source community virtually eliminates the risk of using WAS CE to your organization. IBM's support team maintains WAS CE, supplying the latest updates and patches as required. To help ensure that all the WAS CE components work together, IBM continually tests and tracks the interdependencies between different components. With this level of IBM commitment you can be assured that there will be adequate support and timely bug fixes for any problem that arises in WAS CE.
Furthermore, whenever you are ready, a clear upgrade path already exists to more advanced IBM products and functionality. This means you should anticipate no significant integration or management problems or additional costs associated with integrating your open source software solution with your other IBM corporate tools or applications.
WAS CE unifies all applications running on the platform under a shared, standards-based security framework that is based on Java Authorization Contract for Containers (JACC). By centralizing user management, WAS CE makes it easy to set up and maintain separate user-management systems for your applications.
The latest version of WAS CE contains new Web-tier clustering and load balancing capabilities, along with directory-based hot and remote deployment options. There is also enhanced Eclipse plug-in tooling and a new administrative console. The WAS CE Eclipse plug-in provides a simple development environment for creating, deploying, and debugging your applications in the Eclipse framework. The J2EE profile ensures that these applications are easily portable across the WebSphere Application Server portfolio.
Since most open source development tasks don't need a full scale database, the WAS CE download includes Cloudscape, a small footprint database with full transactional capability that was derived from the Apache Derby database. Cloudscape is fully integrated into WAS CE. It is ideally suited for Web-based and embedded applications. If you need to access to an external database, WAS CE has drivers for DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL.
When you use WAS CE, you don't have to be concerned about outstanding contracts and license obligations of recently acquired technology that might impact your code or business. You also don't have to worry about being restrained from making changes to code or being forced to relinquish that changed code back to the open source community. You can make unlimited copies of the software for internal use. You can also obtain and make modifications to any open-source components, and use those modified components with your internal use of WAS CE.
Finally, before selecting your next open source application infrastructure, you would be wise to remember that the costs associated with open source development are measured by more than the price of the technology. You must also factor in the costs associated with the ability to get upgrades, maintenance, technical support, as well as integrating your final open source application with your other corporate applications. WAS CE gives you that level of reassurance along with the flexibility to create applications that can easily be ported to many other platforms or operating systems in addition to Linux.
With this in mind, your safest and most cost-effective decision might just be WAS CE for your next development project.
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