Migrating Weblogic to JBoss (2)

Hmmm, I may have spoken a tad early.

The XSLT scripts I found only translate the very basic deployment descriptor elements. The remaining elements are usually of the vendor-specific performance optimisation type which often don't have a 1-1 equivalent, if they have one at all.

The JBoss community forums are very quiet on these fronts. Perhaps there is a conspiracy to drive me to JBoss.com's migration programme...

Grumble.

Read More

JBoss

I have in the past worked on Websphere and now Weblogic JEE application servers and fortunately never had to port between the two. Just porting from one version of a product to the next is difficult enough, never mind a cross product port! I have found Weblogic to be a fine product, certainly much easier to learn and use than Websphere, but its not cheap, and one of our prospective clients has raised the question of running on JBoss which is of cours open source.

“No problem!” our sales people cry and I wince. JEE is a fine thing in theory and certainly gives you a hope of porting whereas .NET gives you no such hope at all, but the problem is in those little extras that the vendors give you for competition's sake.

So I worry about those JEE implementation variations, some obvious like the Weblogic deployment specific files, some more subtle, like the way CMP works, and I worry about whether JBoss' messaging and clustering will be as tidy as Weblogic's.

So I've downloaded JBoss and will be giving it a go. Hopefully there are some migration guides and even tools out there to simplify my task, but I'm expecting tears and further hair loss.

What's worse is that I'm dying to get rid of all our EJBs, introduce Spring and Hibernate, and run in a servlet container rather than full a blown application server. That would certainly be much more portable, since with Spring you are essentially taking your application container with you. Of course then you are tied into Spring...

Read More