My Challenge to You: Use JBoss for a day without Google

That's right, I challenge you to use JBoss for an entire day of heavy development/configuration without making use of Google at all. Unless you're an expert or you're not doing much JBoss specific work, I'll wager you're not going to be able to get much done once you run up against your first stack trace or come up with a perfectly reasonable question.

So what's the point of the bet? If you tried the same exercise with say, WebLogic, 9 times out of 10 you'd find you wouldn't have much trouble. Why? Well, let's do a quick comparison:

Official JBoss documentation count (on jboss.org) for JBoss WS (JBoss' horrible, horrible implementation of JAX-RPC 1.1 (JSR 101) that cobbles together not only Axis, but Sun's JWSDP (which is horrible in it's own poetic right)):

25 Wiki pages

Official WebLogic 8.1 Web Services documentation:

498 page PDF document

Let me say that again: JBoss gives you 25 wiki pages "for free", WebLogic gives you 498 solid pages. Are those wiki pages really "free" when you spend five times the amount of hours developing a JBoss service compared to a WebLogic service?

Here's the thing about JBoss: they ship an inferior product (yes, I know, it's free), they ship inferior documentation (no, of course not all the time, but far too often), and a lot (no, not all, but a lot) of their people are difficult to work with.

Marc Fleury said:

At Jboss we don't make any money besides service, there are no licenses to sell. Usually when software is sold, service is treated as an afterthought. This is not our case.

What's the problem with that? Well, you're not going to make nearly as much money on service if you provide the thorough documentation that people need to use your product up front. Does JBoss purposely provide sparse documentation to create more service contracts? I can't say for sure.

But what if Google weren't around?

Would people even be able to use JBoss?

Would you be able to figure out how to configure its instance of jUDDI (did you even know it shipped with that?)?

Would you be able to write a JAX-RPC 1.1 Web Service using document/literal encoding with attachments?

For your sake and mine, I hope Google doesn't go out of business anytime soon.