Alex Fletcher has a nice list of hypothetical new year’s resolutions for the open source community. I started thinking about his first resolution: “Enable ease of integration into enterprise stacks”.
This one is really important, and it’s something we heard from IT managers in customer research into open source options back in early 2005. Saving license fees only to have to spend on integration costs with my ‘legacy’ investments isn’t going to help drive open source adoption.
Today, open source projects need to integrate with related traditional commercial software already installed in the enterprise and with other related (leading) open source projects/products. Such decisions are often made by balancing time/resources with the number of potential customers using the product that is to be integrated with. The decision gets difficult when the open source project/vendor decides to offer a competing product to the one they’re considering integrating with.
I’m going to use the following products to help explain my case. I am not making a judgment of JBoss business practices. They are well within their rights & fiduciary duties to do what is necessary to drive Red Hat/JBoss revenue:
- JBoss Co.: The vendor deciding which 3rd party message queuing products will be integrated with their JBoss App Server product
- WebSphere MQ: The leading traditional message queuing product
- JBoss Messaging: An open source message queuing product from JBoss Co.
- AcitveMQ messaging: An open source message queuing product from a competitor
The “integrate with?” decision around a related, leading, traditional commercial product is often simple for an open source vendor. If the market is already dominated by a traditional software product, (WebSphere MQ), then you’d better make sure your open source product (JBoss App Server) plays nice with said product. JBoss Co. may want to compete against that related, leading, commercial product (WebSphere MQ) in the future as they build out an open source stack. But to begin with, JBoss has to respond to customer demand for WebSphere MQ support in order to drive the adoption of JBoss App Server. Once JBoss AS is a known entity by customers, then JBoss can offer their competing messaging product, JBoss Messaging, as they’ve done :-)
The “integrate with?” decision gets difficult for open source vendors when faced with integrating with a competing open source related product. Should JBoss Co. spend time/resources offering rock solid integration with ActiveMQ when JBoss Co. markets JBoss Messaging, a competitor to ActiveMQ? In this case, neither ActiveMQ nor JBoss Messaging have the customer base that the leading traditional commercial product (i.e. WebSphere MQ) does. So why would JBoss Co. want to help drive adoption of ActiveMQ? This scenario has played out several times already at JBoss, and other open source vendors are going to be faced with a similar situation.
It will be interesting to see how these “integrate with?” decisions play out in 2007. What’s good for the customer may not always win out in these decisions….(but one could argue that happens to the same degree with traditional commercial products). An open community with a plurality of vendors with competing & joint goals is one way of addressing this situation with the scales weighted towards “what’s good for the customer”.
01.10.07 at 5:00 pm
Yes, JBoss integrates with Websphere MQ/MQSeries. Have for a long time. Same with Active MQ, Swift MQ, Sonic MQ, etc…Most of the messaging product make sure to integrate with us as JBoss is in the top 3 in market share for app servers.
Also, the JCA specification is generally the preferred API for integrating a messaging product. I know active MQ and swift MQ integrate with us quite nicely as a RAR.
BTW, can I ask a favor? Would you please actually do a tiny bit of research before you write a blog? You’ve done this before when using JBoss as the “bad guy” in other blogs you wrote. Have some integrity man.
Bill
01.11.07 at 9:53 am
Bill, as you point out “most of the messaging products make sure to integrate with us as JBoss …”
My point is that JBoss Co. isn’t spending development resources to integrate with, for eg. ActiveMQ. The folks at LogicBlaze/ActiveMQ are doing that work (See here). Or see where the ActiveMQ link on this JBoss site points to.
Back to the post:
The “integrate with?” decision gets difficult for open source vendors when faced with integrating with a competing open source related product.
So, LogicBlaze/ActiveMQ has made the “integrate with” decision to integrate with JBoss AS, *not* the other way around as you’d have us believe.
If you say that JBoss Co. did spend development resources to make sure JBoss AS worked with WebSphere MQ, then I’d totally agree. But that makes sense as I explain in the post.
It’s the “integrate with” decision that JBoss Co. made/makes with respect to a competing and related open source product that the post is more interested in.
Dude, I didn’t make JBoss out to be the bad guy. I actually said that you’re well within your business rights to further your bottom line.
01.11.07 at 4:21 pm
Again you are wrong. We have spent developer resources to make sure that WS MQ, Active MQ, and Swift MQ integrated with JBoss AS because we have support customers that requested this a LONG TIME AGO. We usually give our customers what they ask for.
Messaging is a HORRIBLE example to make your point, because of JCA. JCA was developed so that neither the messaging or app-server vendor have to make the decision to “integrate with” the other, just integrating with the specification. Come up with a better example next time.
“The “integrate with?” decision gets difficult for open source vendors when faced with integrating with a competing open source related product.”
Please define “faced with”. That we’re not going to integrate with something if a paying customer asks for it? Let me ask you a question: Has the Geronimo project made a decision to “integrate with” JBoss TS? Given that JBoss TS (Arjuna) is really the only mature open source transaction manager on the planet that competes head to head with Tuxedo, Geronimo would be stupid to choose *not* to “integrate with” it.
But, using JBoss to make your point here is just another HORRIBLE example. Like Geronimo, JBoss is a Java EE implementation. This requires us to ship with a JMS implementation that passes the TCK. As with most successful commerical software companies and open source projects we prioritize based on customer/user demand and available resources. Flip this around. Is Geronimo going to spend more time and resource integrating with ActiveMQ rather than WS MQ or JBoss Messaging? Of course they are because they ship with ActiveMQ and run the TCK against ActiveMQ. Is Geronimo going to make sure they integrate with Websphere MQ? Of course they are. Users/customers demand it.
There are many projects we would like to do as a vendor, but don’t have time for. Since all you have to do is bring code and initiative to get JBoss committer status, there’s no reason an individual couldn’t implement the integration themselves and dump it on us.
For example, about a year and a half ago I had a bunch of ideas to integrate with Spring, but never had the time to do the work. Ales Justin, an independent at the time, heard me talk about these ideas at my 2005 Java One presentation. Emailed me, I scoped out what I wanted and how to do it. He did it. I gave him committer status. He committed it. We set up a wiki page and download page. I even used my contacts at JDJ to get an article published for him about it. He maintained the Spring/JBoss project for over a year and we eventually hired him.
“Dude, I didn’t make JBoss out to be the bad guy.”
Whatever…Mr. IBM employee and Geronimo committer. Your last two blogs basically stated that 1) JBoss isn’t true open source 2) JBoss won’t spend time to integrate with anybody. 3) JBoss is more focused on bottom line than users and customers. All of which are entirely false. I know that you are just evangelizing Geronimo and the Apache Way, but you are doing so at the expense of others.
01.12.07 at 11:48 am
Okay Bill, I guess I should just get used to being wrong in your eyes :-)
>”Whatever…Mr. IBM employee and Geronimo committer. ”
Yep, I’m an IBM employee, but hardly a Geronimo committer.
>”Your last two blogs basically stated that 1) JBoss isn’t true open source ”
Yep, because I believe community (with a plurality of individuals and companies) is a key aspect true open source as we’ve discussed over at the other post.
>”2) JBoss won’t spend time to integrate with anybody.”
Not at all. I said that you guys did integrate with WS MQ (b/c that is what your customers would ask for). But the decision to integrate with ActiveMQ becomes difficult because you have your own competing product and ActiveMQ doesn’t have the widespread use of WS MQ. Just do a search for ActiveMQ on your website and see where the links take you.
>”3) JBoss is more focused on bottom line than users and customers.”
I never said that. I do believe that JBoss Co. has made some decisions that go against your partners and customers best interests, but I never said that in the post. And I never said that other traditional & open source vendors don’t do the same.
I should have said: Of the fictional $10 spent (in developer time) to ensure that ActiveMQ integrates with JBoss AS, $7-$9 are spent by LogicBlaze/ActiveMQ and JBoss Co. spends $1-$3. I apologize for not being clear.
>”Messaging is a HORRIBLE example to make your point, because of JCA.”
True. Wasn’t “Write once run everywhere” another promise from Java/J2EE (along with flying cars – where are my flying cars?!?)? You’ve mentioned so far that:
1] “Most of the messaging product make sure to integrate with us as JBoss is in the top 3 in market share for app server”
2] “We have spent developer resources to make sure that WS MQ, Active MQ, and Swift MQ integrated with JBoss AS because we have support customers that requested this a LONG TIME AGO”
Unless I’m reading those statements incorrectly, you agree that the messaging vendors did work to ensure they’ll integrate with JBoss AS (i.e. someone is giving more in this relationship). And JBoss Co. had to do work to make sure JBoss AS would integrate with the messaging providers mentioned (i.e. even with JCA, my use of messaging isn’t such a bad example).
By “Faced with” I mean that in the scope of any project, you have a list of 43 things to do and enough time and resources to do 20 of them, so you have to make some tradeoffs and prioritization decisions.
Bill, the reason I didn’t use Geronimo is because I was talking about “integrate with” choices that open source VENDORS face. The “integrate with” choice an open source project faces is usually focused on who is going to do the work and testing?. Well, unless there is a 3rd party vendor in the open source project who has their own offering in the category of “integrate with” products. In the case of Geronimo and messaging, that would be LogicBlaze, which is why ActiveMQ is used. But just having a 3rd party behind an implementation or product doesn’t mean that’s the only one the project will use. For example, even though Geronimo is an Apache project, they still provide an option to use Tomcat or Jetty because there was someone willing to continue doing the Jetty work.
To your question about JBoss TS. Geronimo has their own transaction manager. I can’t speak to why. Could be license, or because Arjuna was a commercial product when the Geronimo community was deciding what to use. Maybe someone will get interested in JBoss TS and Geronimo together and do the work.
>”There are many projects we would like to do as a vendor, but don’t have time for. ”
Exactly, and my point is that that when you make such a decision, it’s going to be weighted towards spending resources to further your own products vs. a competitor’s product. This is NO DIFFERENT than in the traditional software world. Remember that the genesis of the post was responding to Alex’s hypothetical New Years Resolutions for Open Source which suggested that open source resolve to integrate with leading products.
Okay, I have to go to school.
ttyl
05.03.07 at 4:36 am
Could any one tell me how to integrate Jbsoss with webpshere MQ , any documents regarding the integration
05.04.07 at 3:16 pm
Manubi, you could try:
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=IntegrationWithWebSphereMQSeries