Thursday, January 28, 2010

Replacing Weblogic with Glassfish

At work we're working on a rather big Java integration project. It consist of several applications, some exposing services over REST, others consuming REST services (JSF, Spring WebFlow).

In our development environment we run jetty and/or tomcat. Someone decided that we had to use Weblogic in Test- and Production-environment.

Here is a list of some of the problems Weblogic caused us:
  • It starts up/restarts extremely slow
  • The admin console is really slow
  • It takes forever to deploy to it
  • we had problems getting multiple datasources to different DB2-environments (OS390, AS400, Windows) to work at the same time.
  • Our applications ran slower than expected
  • We experienced strange problems related to ajax and richfaces which where impossible to trace down, since the problems where different on different Weblogic instances.
Today we managed to persuade our project leader that we should replace Weblogic with Glassfish v2.

Now everything is running much faster without problems on Glassfish in our Test environment. I really like what I have seen of Glassfish so far.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulations!

So what will you do when you reach the production stage?
Does anyone at the given service provider know anything about Glassfish?

moax said...

They know about Tomcat and supports it in its production environment, So I bet that when we say "you have to support GlassFish" they will..

Anyway, what is there to support as long as they can deploy to it, make sure the service runs and keep the electricity flowing ;)

Unknown said...

I guess you have to write a setup and deployment guide.

As you may remember I had to do something similar when they were setting up Weblogic in the test/pre-production environment. So I guess a another piece of server software will not make any difference..

Good luck!

moax said...

wrote some of the deployment guide today..

but the hole deployment process becomes much more easy due to mvn assembly and a deployscript

We have introduced a project named "project-stack" which contains all the apps in appropriate version.

works nice