HELP! Consultants want to use WebLogic but we (IT) want to u
Our IT department (I and one other Manager) would like to host an application developed by an outsourced consultancy that is allegedly J2EE compliant on JBOSS rather than WebLogic as they recommend. They recently contacted us with a list of reasons JBOSS can't be used. Could someone please help us in ascertaining the veracity of these claims so we can make a better (informed) decision?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Let me know if there is a better forum to post this message to!
William M. Wise
Manager, Information Systems
Cell Signaling Technology, Inc.
http://www.cellsignal.com
1. JBoss does not support auto generation of Primary Key Field for EJB create methods.
While entering a "new data row" in any one of the tables, we need to provide a "primary key column" value (of Database Table), to each of the used create method of EJB . Presently, we have to simply map the primary key column(of EJB) with Database Sequence Name. Weblogic handles this issue.
But now as JBoss does not support this feature, we need to change all create methods of each EJB. Each EJB has on an average 3 create methods.
2. EJB-QL, for JBoss does not support, "like" and "order by" expressions.
We call EJB's finder methods to locate a specific row(s) of data in the table. For these locate methods, we use "like" and "order by" expressions. But these are NOT directly supported by JBoss. We need to remove all such code, from each & every EJB. We have extensively used this feature on "Find Window" of the Curation System. We need to remove this code & develop new code / logic. Not using "order by" in the same way as we are using with Weblogic. We have used this feature on "Curation System Queues" & "Home pages". We have also used this feature in other places in the system.
As JBoss does not support EJB-QL's "order by", we need to remove all such code, from each & every EJB. Then we need to use JBoss-QL for this feature. But JBuilder is NOT tightly integrated with JBoss, we can not use JBuilder for this. After building the EJB jar, we need to open the jar, update the "EJB Descriptor" manually and re-pack the EJB jar.
We have to do this for each & every Create & Finder method. On an average we have 3 create & 4 finder methods for each EJB. And all most more than 90 % of Curation System & Home pages, are using EJBs.
3. JBoss does NOT support CLOB data type for EJBs. We are storing article/abstracts as CLOB data type in the DB since the size of an abstract can be more than 4k characters. We will have to update the related code/module.
4. JBoss requires considerable tuning to optimize performance. There are no sophisticated tools to do this and will have to be done manually. Weblogic tools are readily available because of it's maturity. Considerable time will have to be spent testing the entire application.
This work is going to take a team of 7 people (6 developers and 1 biologist) working for 3 weeks including testing after deployment. Our price for this work will be $21,000 ($1,000/man week). WebLogic costs $10,000/CPU, the server we are using has 2 CPUs. The application server with clustering costs $17,000/CPU which we may have to switch to as traffic increases. We anticipate the current architecture being able to handle 100 concurrent users reliably.
We suggest using the current application server to introduce the database to customers and the market. We can switch application servers when JBoss introduces a newer version.