Hard to say... it was a comparatively darker time for information availability. Other odd, awkward, over-puffed products like ATG Dyanmo, Plumtree, Interwoven,

Hard to say... it was a comparatively darker time for information availability. Other odd, awkward, over-puffed products like ATG Dyanmo, Plumtree, Interwoven, etc., were killing it in the market too. I was really green in enterprise software then, and Websphere's suggestion of useful clustering, configuration management, managed pooling, etc., seemed tantalizing. (Look how long it takes to start up--it must be doing useful and complicated stuff!) That said, it didn't take all that long for Tomcat, JBoss, and others to eat its lunch on projects not rolling along on enormous sunk costs into IBM tech. I never actually dug into EJBs or wacky things like container-managed Javamail. Some colleagues did. They spent a lot of time struggling with the tooling. And now I'm just remembering VisualAge for Java. /shudder/