Best practice - Migrating from Weblogic 5.1 to Jboss AS X.x

[shivaharikumar]

We have almost a decade old application that runs with JDK 1.3 uses J2EE1.2 spec on Weblogic 5.1. Now we wish you upgrade this to take part in real game, our Architects prefers Jboss AS over Weblogic and so we are going to migrate.

The two things which are confusing me is that,

1. We need to upgrade JDK 1.3 to JDK 1.5/1.6
2. Also we need to upgrade Weblogic 5.1 to JBoss AS of newer version.

Of these two which should be the first thing I should perform? Also I don't have any idea on minimum requirement of Java/JVM for every Jboss AS (I did extensive google search but leads to excessive hair loss). Will it be best to migrate the server first to any Jboss AS that supports JDK 1.3 and higher version? Since Weblogic 5.1 is not going to support any higher version of Java that 1.3.

Its best that an expert on both JBoss and Weblogic advise me on this, but I'll be happy and appreciate every input even if it say I have to figure this on my own.

In Wikipedia I found this link for weblogic which represents standard version supports of Weblogic, is there something like this for JBoss AS?

[sfcoy]

Does your application use BMP entity beans?

[wdfink]

Migration depends on your needs and how the application look like. So there is not the one and only way

As Stephen Coy  asked , you should  elaborate what you are using and whether you have a EE application compliant to the EE spec or lot of Weblogic tweaks.

From the final result the best will be a EE6 or EE7 application without lot of XML stuff and based on Java 7 as Java6 is out of maintenance.

If you do such migration it depends on the application and resources whether you can do a one-shot migration or not.

[jaikiran]

Here the JBoss Java version matrix https://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossVsJavaJDKVersionMatrix

It however doesn't have info about AS 7.x and WildFly 8.x (JBoss AS has been renamed to WildFly). AS 7.x requires Java 6 whereas WildFly 8 requires Java 7.