Andrig Miller first got excited about Java’s possibilities in March 1998, when Sun Microsystems released the initial version of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification. But it was more than four years before Miller, vice president of technical architecture for office product supplier Corporate Express, was ready to put an EJB application into production. When the company finally deployed its first EJB application, in December 2002, it was running on JBoss, an open-source application server that competes with platforms such as BEA Systems’ WebLogic and IBM’s WebSphere.

That first application tracks order status in a variety of legacy systems, handling as many as 75,000 transactions per hour, says Miller. Reliability and speed were essential considerations. "We got a lot of benefits from taking our time?for instance, the EJB 2.0 spec matured a lot," he says. JBoss improved too and added such enterprise-friendly features as support for clustered servers. Corporate Express, a $5 billion company, now has six EJB applications in production, all running on JBoss.

JBoss is just one of a wide array of open-source development tools that are slowly gaining acceptance among enterprise developers. Cost is often a primary driver. Miller estimates that his company has saved $6 million in the past three years by using JBoss and other open-source tools. As Marc Fleury, president and founder of the JBoss Group, puts it, "Most people understand free." (Even BEA understands: The company recently announced no-cost one-year developer licenses for WebLogic.)

Quality Code

Cost isn’t the only factor, however. Developers are attracted to open-source tools by their flexibility, the capability to customize the underlying code, their high quality, and the willingness of the open-source community to help with implementation and development problems. "Open-source projects in general seem to be pretty good at fulfilling developer needs quickly," notes Greg Hinkle, a technology specialist at IT consultancy Sapient. That’s not surprising, given that developers are the ones driving open-source projects.

But more and more, open-source tools are also fulfilling the CIO’s needs?especially as the tools become more competitive with commercial alternatives. For example, Miller’s team evaluated several commercial application servers, including WebLogic and WebSphere, but couldn’t find the combination of performance, support and development features that Corporate Express needed.

"Besides JBoss, we’ve adopted a lot of other open-source things since 2000," Miller says, noting the company’s use of Linux, Apache, OpenSSL, Tomcat (an Apache add-on for processing Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages), Jakarta Lucene (a text search engine) and Jakarta Jetspeed (an enterprise information portal). "The prime driver for us is not really the cost?though the cost savings have been very substantial?but the software quality."