Open source app servers make headway

Enterprises shopping for a Java application server will soon have more reasons to look at open source software, with no less than three open source projects expected to be certified compatible with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s enterprise Java standard by the end of the year.

Geronimo, a project of the Apache Software Foundation, and Jonas, overseen by Europe's ObjectWeb consortium, both announced recently that they have begun testing their products against Sun's J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) 1.4 test suites. Geronimo said it hopes to be certified as J2EE-compliant by August, while Jonas is aiming for the second half of the year.

JBoss Inc., whose application server is already widely used, is being cagey about when it expects to complete Sun's compatibility tests, but the company is likely to announce certification as early as next month, according to John Rymer, a vice president and industry analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

While Geronimo is still quite immature -- the project was launched just nine months ago -- all three offerings aim to provide businesses with a low-cost alternative to commercial application servers from the likes of BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. At the very least, customers should be able to use the open source products as leverage to negotiate better pricing deals from their primary vendors, Rymer said.

"Open source application servers are a bona fide competitive force in the market for J2EE application servers," he wrote in a research note published last month.

J2EE certification is not a prerequisite for enterprise use, as shown by JBoss, which already has thousands of paying customers. But it can lend added credibility to open source projects, particularly for IT executives still skittish about the open source model. The specification also ensures a degree of interoperability between products from the various Java vendors. If a customer writes to one application server and decides later to switch to a different platform, if both are J2EE-certified, the amount of porting work should be relatively light.

That was important for travel company National Leisure Group Inc., which began developing a new application 18 months ago that lets consumers book flights, hotels and car rentals over the Web. There was no Java-certified open source application server available at the time, but the company picked JBoss partly because it knew it adhered closely to the J2EE standard, said Jamie Cash, director of technical architecture at NLG.

"We wanted to stay as close to the J2EE spec as we could, so if we had to do a last minute port it wouldn't be a huge amount of work," he said. J2EE certification will likely make other companies more comfortable using open source products, Cash said, "not so much down in the trenches, but at the boardroom level."

The rush of open-source Java projects isn't coincidental. Last year, Sun altered the licensing terms for its compatibility test suites, allowing open source software to become certified for the first time. It also provided free licenses for the test suites for nonprofit groups like the Apache Software Foundation and ObjectWeb. JBoss was required to pay for its test suites, leading to a lengthy dispute with Sun that has likely delayed its certification.