Hi Guys,

I would like to do some self-training on one of the two app servers (Weblogic 8 or Websphere) to gain some more hands on experience on J2EE.

Could you please let me know which one would be a better app server to do self-training on?

The main criteria for me are:
1) Penetration of product in Telecom or finance industry – approx. how many companies are adopting the product in North America?
2) Quality of documentation available with the trial versions – how easy is it to read the documentation and learn the ins and outs of the product?
3) Length of trial period – I think Weblogic has a 1 year trial license while Websphere has 6 months trial license. Is that right?
4) Quality of the IDE to build J2EE and application integration solutions.

Looking forward to your advice and experience on this.

Hello,

to "gain more hands-on experience with J2EE" you should try JBoss. It has an unlimited trial license :o) and you can use Eclipse with JBossIDE as IDE.

On http://www.jboss.org you can also find links to some documentation and some books (at least "Enterprise Java Beans, 3rd Edition" from O'Reilly) are extended with JBoss examples (there's a "JBoss Workbook") you can try.

A good start is the "Getting started" tutorial from JBoss Inc. itself.

Regards,

René

1) Penetration of product in Telecom or finance industry – approx. how many companies are adopting the product in North America?

If this is your main concern, you should go with Websphere. I am not sure about Telecom, but the Finance industry is overwhelmingly IBM-based.

2) Quality of documentation available with the trial versions – how easy is it to read the documentation and learn the ins and outs of the product?

3) Length of trial period – I think Weblogic has a 1 year trial license while Websphere has 6 months trial license. Is that right?

4) Quality of the IDE to build J2EE and application integration solutions.Looking forward to your advice and experience on this.

For all these factors, I feel that Weblogic wins out. It is a better and easier to use server environment and the trial license for developers is basically unlimited. I have not used their IDE, but WSAD is so bad that Weblogic Studio can't be any worse.

It isn't true that WSAD is bad. WSAD is a very good product with many futures. It's based on Eclipse. There are many plugins - wizards, views, etc.

WebSphere is a very good application server with documentation

You can see on http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/portals/Websphere
There is books about WebSphere.

Don't get me wrong. I love Eclipse, and think it is a great tool. I have had a lot of trouble with WSAD, though. It seems to have about twice the memory footprint of Eclipse, and a lot of its added futures (wizards, etc.) are flaky and hard to work with.

I much prefer the commandline-tool/simple-xml-config-file approach of Weblogic to the wizard-tool/incomprehensible-xmi-file approach of WSAD and Websphere. It is very hard to integrate a wizard into an automated build process.

JBoss is the right choice rather than Weblogic or WebSphere since JBoss is open source software.