Caught the new announcement on TSS about IBM’s newest line of WebSphere products. The comments at least at this point are pretty scary. They’re about 75% negative, mostly that RAD is a junk IDE, Websphere has a horrible deploy that takes forever, and all their products dump out useless error messages. The few positive posts are mostly from IBM employees. (2 of the 3 actual positive comments are from IBM staffers as of 9/17.)
I’ve been avoiding dealing with our WebSphere tools since we made a purchase a few months back. My plan was if we needed to we’d open up RAD for doing some portal integration or BPEL work, but pretty much stick with IDEA otherwise. I probably naively assumed that we could deploy to WebSphere as easily as we hot deploy to JBoss 4. Maybe this is all FUD, but I fear not.