This post is going to sound bias and opinionated, for that I will apologize up front and ask that you overlook that and get to the content of the question. I am working in a RAD/RUP WebSphere shop (RAD 7, WAS6.1) and I'm finding that I'm spending a lot of time being a System Administrator for WebSphere as opposed to being a productive developer, writing J2EE applications and deploying with confidence. I understand that IBM would like to promote a "click-and-run" environment, but I'm not finding anything (from portlets, to MDBs, to standard JSP/Struts applications) that run in this fashion. It seems that I need to know the complete ins and outs of the WebSphere platform to get anything to run. Heaven forbid if I need to create a new application! I need to almost entirely build a new WebSphere server environment. Fortunately, I can shoehorn it into RAD so I can deploy as intended. The bottom line is this seems like a lot more work than it is worth. Working with either JBoss (4.x) or WebLogic (8 or 9.X) was never this challenging. If I had a web application, it was drop a WAR file here and call it good. Server starts up, application is available, nice and simple. With WebSphere, it doesn't appear that simple. Deployment from RAD is a mystery. Spring makes the unsettling statement "Magic in Step 2", WebSphere/RAD would appear to be pure magic and I'm having a hard time deciphering where/why things fail. There's a lot of trial, error, try something else, and keep going until the spirits of WebSphere are satisfied that I'm finally at the end of my wits. They all have a good laugh and let me finally deploy my app, so I can test my changes. My question is, are people really productive in this environment? How did you go from floundering because you're not an IBM certified engineer to a productive developer? If you have any resources that will somehow help this all make sense, please post them and I'll be more than happy to review. I will admit, [most likely] 80% of my problem is because I'm not that familiar with WebSphere, I'm willing to learn. I just don't remember it taking this long to come up to speed with JBoss or WebLogic.

Paul, Me too have the same problem with IBM WebSphere products line...Just to brief have all SUN certifications and can say know what some developer need to know to develope deploy and debug J2EE applications. But all my skills are useless when it comes to Websphere and debugging something like deployment failure of Enterprise beans are next to nightmare where as JBoss/Weblogic I never spent more than the time someone will need to debug something.. Well IBM may come up with some out of box for this, Have you tried their DB2 database it is definitely good to manage install and work and very few problems on the go .....