[NTLUG:Discuss] Transport tool - opinions

[Chris Cox]

Stephen Davidson wrote:
...
> 
> And for stability, if Visa's primary Credit Card Processing Transaction 
> Center is not mission critical enough for you, I am not sure what would 
> be.  Both Visa and AA use Java (in both cases, actually Weblogic and 
> their JRockit JVM) to process all of their transactions.  They have been 
> doing this for quite a few years now.

As a former BEA-ite... I can vouch for Weblogic.  Easy to scale.  Just
add a machine, define it to the system and presto.. instant scalability
without massive reconfigs or downtime.  You can even reserve processing
power specifically for your "preferred" customers.  It's pretty cool
stuff... if you like Java.

About the worst part about Java is the footprint in small instances.
However, this goes away quickly as it scales up.  Pretty cool.
Weblogic is the only (AFAIK) platform supporting high-speed session
failover in an EJB clustered config.  However, 95% of apps really
don't need clustered EJBs.  Other system use expensive RDBMS's
to store the required session data for failover... BEA uses
a very quick, though slightly imperfect, design pattern for this.
The imperfection is that failover is based on 3 systems minimum.
Which is probably a reasonable scenario (well most will have
more than 3 servers).