A different view of the BEA acquisition

After Oracle announced its acquisition of BEA, one view was already making the rounds. The deal effectively spelled the end of J2EE as an open platform, where standards had allowed middleware vendors to compete naturally. That’s the position GigaSpaces took in its open letter to BEA WebLogic customers.

Perhaps more importantly, this acquisition is the final nail in the coffin of what was the motivation for J2EE in the first place: to have an open standard that allows easily switching from one vendor’s product to another. The reality is that there are now two mega-vendors, Oracle and IBM, each with what is essentially their proprietary, bloated middleware stack, which requires complex integration of multiple components (and surely Oracle or IBM professional services will be happy to perform this work — for a fee).

I also recommend reading what GigaSpaces CTO Nati Shalom had to say about it. Oracle aquisition of BEA — The kiss of death for the “open” J2EE App Server. Once you get past the marketing, since GigaSpaces has its own interests to defend in both the letter and Shalom’s post, there are some good points worth thinking about. One is whether we actually need application servers.

But who needs J2EE application servers anyway?

We can’t ignore the fact that this acquisition comes at a very interesting time. A time in which people are actually moving away from J2EE application servers, so an investment in an application server that is already mature and has a hard time to keep up with market trends as is more of an investment in the *past* and is going to further slow down any new development.

What do J2EE application servers give us over something like Tomcat? Beyond standards such as EJB and JPA, there are the enterprise features, including scalability and failover. Do we need an expensive application server to get those features? I don’t think we do. In his article Is it a Tomcat, or the Elephant in the Room?, Rod Johnson writes the following.

An interesting force is that the highest performing grid/clustering solutions are not the app servers themselves, but specialist solutions such as GigaSpaces, Oracle Coherence and IBM ObjectGrid. There is no reason that HA features need to be associated with Java EE servers.

To sum up, most application servers offer programming models defined by standards that are already dated and struggle to keep up. Specialist products do a much better job of delivering those much-touted enterprise features. In that case, for most applications, the application server adds no value.