This article is more than 1 year old

Can Sun's GlassFish turn on master Oracle?

More like IBM than you know

In Hand of Orlac, a plastic surgeon replaces the crushed hands of a pianist with those of an executed murder. What at first is a godsend for the ruined musician may in truth be an agent of its former owner's insidious will, compelling its inheritor to murder his own father.

We wonder if that works for corporations. Will the dissected bits and pieces of free-software loving Sun Microsystems - once they're grafted to the Oracle beast - drive the proprietary database giant into unusual acts of business?

There already exists one chimera out there: a creature named IBM, offering open- and closed-source products in its middleware range. It's notable that Oracle's management is comparing itself to IBM now that it owns Sun, saying it can out-IBM Big Blue.

But how well has IBM actually done from bringing open-source into the fold, and what's in store for Oracle?

Free, meet paid

IBM keeps both a proprietary and paid for and an open-source but free application servers in its ponderously expansive WebSphere brand.

WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is IBM's flagship application server. It was built using Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and XML, and it features top-end architecture features like clustering and massive amounts of scalability.

On the open and free side, IBM has WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) was built on a completely different code base yet is also a Java EE container. It's based on Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) Geronimo project and uses technology from the former Gluecode Software, which IBM bought in May 2005.

How does IBM reconcile these two and convince users to continue paying for one and not be tempted by the other?

IBM has positioned WAS CE to address departmental needs, while WAS proper is targeted enterprise customers requiring more performance and scale.

Over at Oracle, there also now exists two in-house application server products: WebLogic, a proprietary Java EE container the company bought with its $8.5bn acquisition of BEA Systems and that became Oracle's app server flag carrier, and Glassfish, also a Java EE platform and based on source code that was donated by Sun from its old proprietary product to the community.

GlassFish is free to download, while WebLogic starts at $10,000 per CPU for Standard Edition and hits $45,000 for the suite.

In the wake of Sun, Oracle has boasted it will be more like the IBM of the 1960s, when everything was integrated and simple. When it comes to application servers, Oracle is certainly starting to sound a lot like the IBM of the 2000s in the way it tries to position its two app servers.

GlassFish is being repositioned as something for lower-paying contracts and open-source purists, while WebLogic will be sold as Oracle's "strategic" application server for enterprise applications. It's a plan that mirrors IBM's WAS versus WAS CE.

Next page: WAS v WAS CE

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like