Blogger Chris Hardin has written up a post about the breakdown of time wasted while using WAS and RAD, a brutal loss of at least two hours while predicting much more (with a lot of "oftens" and stuff.) It makes you wonder: what would the breakdown be with other products?

No one ever calculates the lost productivity when the consider IBM products and really no one looks at the amount of money spent either. There are plenty of open source solutions that are faster, easier to configure and support is a Google away. ...

I wrote this little tidbit after two days of trying to figure out why RAD keeps wrecking a classpath that is in a project that I am checking out, resulting in failure to run a project. I'd go into details, but you'd just ignore it anyway, a lot like most folks who know what they are doing ignore IBM...

Interesting! Some observations: when I was stuck in WAS hell, I definitely saw some of the same problems, so this post resonated with me.

Plus, where's Geronimo in this? What if someone took a writeup of any tool or combination of tools, and did some basic tracking of how much time was wasted with that tool or set of tools - if we could make it an accurate survey, think of what we could find to fix :)

Having used IBM products over the years, wasting 2-3 hrs a day due to WAS + RAD seems to be the norm. That's from first hand experience at 2 different places. Other friends have reported similar experience. It's not scientific, but it does appear to be a common pain point.

I work for a large hospitality company. We use WebSphere on the server-side to support the customer-facing web applications for sales and payment processing. In my case, I'm using Rational Software Architect (basically Rational Application Developer with modeling capabilities).

In my case, I have not had any of the problems the original poster complained about.

We have the WebSphere environment managed with WebSphere ND. We are able to install and propogate on the server farm a new EAR file in less than five minutes. I worked with the operations team to create Jython scripts allowing installs and updates to be as simple as executing a single command on the command line.

I am able to launch RSA 7.5 on my laptop (a dual core centrino) in about two minutes. This includes opening about 20 projects in the primary workspace.

Of course, tools as complex as WebSphere and Rational products are very easy to misuse and thus suffer great performance problems. However, at my company, my team encourages spending time to learn the tools -- taking the necessary courses and following the advice in the Redbooks. As a result, we know how to tune the product, modify the eclipse.ini file, change the capabilities and which components are started by default, etc. It takes time to learn to use complex tools. But, once we learned the tool, we are not spending time cursing it.

Reminds me of the complaints against JPA. When developers misuse JPA, the resulting programs are awful and very slow. Then the developer curses JPA. But, the problem is not JPA, the problem was the developer used the wrong mental model when creating the Entities.

@Michael, you find 2 minutes of starting RSA pleasing? It's great to read that you enjoy working with IBM WebSphere and RSA. But how is it possible to compare working with RSA/WebSphere with a framework like JPA? I enjoyed reading the IBM waste article because I can relate to it very much. RSA is a great example of how to make a great foundation, Eclipse, very complex, slow and frustrating.

This is a shameless plug, but MyEclipse Blue Edition was produced to solve these very problems. With fast start-up times, hot-sync deploy and seamless work with WAS (including support for RAD projects), it might be worth a look for some of you struggling with this. It's a full-on RAD and RSA replacement without any loss of legacy projects.

http://www.myeclipseide.com/blue.php

Some very large companies are switching from RAD to Blue to take advantage.

Food for thought...

Jens, Genuitec

Anyone that has worked with a Rad/IBM Portal development environment can easily say that 2 hours per day is wasted.  Often attempting to figure out issues that a simple server restart will take care of ... but why?  If find it disturbing that server restarts will cure problems.  At some point you need to ask yourself as a developer, am I hired to figure out tuning/configuration issues on my local development environment or was I hired to develop solutions to business problems.  It's clear to me that RAD and portal requires me to do both.

I waste 2-3hrs a day of my time fighting with RSA / WAS.  Our development team have been using and upgrading them since 2005 when a bunch of managers and architects fell in love with the slick slide packs that were presented to us by a bunch of IBM sales guys that came to our company.

The original managers and architects who made the decision for the developers to adopt RSA/WAS have long moved on, and we the developers are stuck with it.  The suits and non-hands-on developers never get to see the result of their poor decision making.

WAS on my RSA IDE spew up OutOfMemory at least 3 times a week.

I have 16 modules in my workspace and the slightest change to the codebase would trigger lots of validation and would take about 1 minute to compile, build and deploy, so we ended up turning off most validators features of the IDE.

Just so the IDE would behave itself, I have to start and re-start WAS on the IDE 20 times a day.  Each restart takes about 2 minutes.  That's 40 minutes of my life in a day that I will never get back.

The answer for me is none, really.

The key seems to be getting to know your environment.  I can sympathize with the point that it shouldn't be necessary -- however, there's a difference between the product not working well because it's not properly tuned and the product not being tunable.

The answer for me is none, really.

The key seems to be getting to know your environment.  I can sympathize with the point that it shouldn't be necessary -- however, there's a difference between the product not working well because it's not properly tuned and the product not being tunable.

Not tunable label applies nicely to clearcase over WAN. Unless the company has fat pipe, having several dozen clearcase users during normal working hours often cripples clearcase server. Clearcase is very chatty and takes minutes to do check-ins compared to seconds for Subversion or GIT.

I could never get past the architecture of ClearCase, so I've never advocated for it and have never been forced to use it. 

I'm interested in seeing more about Rational Team Concert and Build Forge, but I don't know if it'll pan out.

and please dont forget clearcase, clearquest, and build forge.  same story of ibm sales impressing the management, and developers stuck with the decision.  And now they cant/wont move to other system because of all the infrastructure/investment.

We're using both products; RAD and WAS. WAS startup time is too long(1-2 minutes) and need to be improved. I searched for tuning this problem but couldn't fix it. Although we are using WAS as a servlet-JSP engine, it starts many services at the start time. What is needed is a SOA architecture that provide us to enable or disable these services while improving startup time. On the other hand, RAD and WAS development environment is very successful if you're deploying on WAS servers.

Try the Websphere plugin for Eclipse

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/websphere/wasdev/V8.5

http://marketplace.eclipse.org/node/131344