Caution: this comparison is somewhat flippant. That is intentional. There are many factors that should influence your decision to spend (probably) at least $1m. This is what you get when you ask me to boil my thoughts down to a single page. The criticisms of BroadVision here are based on pre-6.0 releases.
- It's really an application rather than an application server: it does lots of things out of the box but isn't easy to customize / extend.
- Based on C++ and CORBA technology. Moving slowly to Java but still based on CORBA.
- Runs only on Solaris, HPUX and NT Server. Resource hungry. Admin intensive.
- Requires all pages served to be 'BV pages', i.e., hyperlinks must be rewritten to use BV code.
- Good for
- green field development of 'standard' web applications (e.g., online store, intranet/extranet).
- doesn't require highly-skilled programmers (uses JavaScript) for standard functionality.
- Bad for
- migration of existing static sites or anything 'unusual'
- requires highly-skilled (C++) programmers for anything custom.
- It's an application server: it doesn't do a great deal out of the box but it is designed to be customize and extended.
- Based entirely on Java and Java Beans. Brilliantly engineered to allow full access to all the internals of the system.
- Runs on almost anything that supports Java. Development can be done on relatively low-end NT Workstation for example.
- Can serve up static pages - sites can be converted from flat HTML to dynamic Java pages piecemeal. Understands META tags in HTML pages and can track user activity / target content based on them.
- Good for
- migration of existing static sites; development of custom web applications (or standard ones)
- 'hot' technology - easy to attract developers for Java work.
- Bad for
- not much.
If you have an absolutely standard green field web application to build and very tight deadlines (and deep pockets!), you might be better in the short term with BroadVision if you had to choose between just these two. Realistically, the choice should include other J2EE servers (JRun, WebLogic, WebSphere as well as various free offerings) and you should also look at ColdFusion - cheap, productive, tag-based and the new version will run on various J2EE servers.
