Geronimo lineup

Who is interested in Geronimo? Obviously a lot of people, I don't know too many people actually using it apart from using it as maven dependencies for the J2EE API's.

I attended Bruce Snyders presentation on ServiceMix and found that one interesting because I have been reading up on Mule a little bit so I attended to get a comparison. I am currently also working on a project where we are on a good way to actually implement small parts of an ESB so the topic is really interesting. With that said, I am not necessarily an advocate of adding a dependency to a third party library just because it contains an out of the box implementation of something I can do with 10 lines of javacode.
Managing 100 different and possible incompatibilities might be just much of a nightmare as writing the 1000 lines of code that those frameworks help me to replace.

The panel lineup of the Geronimo Panel Discussion are:

• Bruce Snyder
• Matt Hogstrom
• James Strachan
• Aaron Mulder
• David Jencks

panel is moderated by Ted Neward, a great speaker in my opinion. First thing discussed is the role of OSGI and XBean and how Geronimo is may be used to complement each other.
although OSGI is not supported in Geronimo, one of the reasons is complexity the panel claims.


Why should we select a commercial vendor instead of going for an Open Source alternative, and actually end up paying for a J2EE server, here are some of the points from the panel:

• Commercial vendors often provides entire suites of products that may complement the J2EE server
• Support and product roadmaps
• Performance and scalability
• Wheter the product has ben subject to rigorous testing (is this a way of saying that the testsuite accompanying Geronimo could be improved?)
• Service pack/fixpack approach, most commercial vendors provide support for incremental updates
  

There are a couple fo guys from IBM up on the panel, and they are currently debating how developing and embracing Geronimo may affect Websphere and vice versa. An IBM representative says that they will try to get to a point where changes are merged and updated bidirecionally. Nothing is said related to if they want to estabilsh a common codebase for Geronimo and Webshere.