SAP licenses NetWeaver to developers

I found this nice article which says that SAP netweaver can be now used by individuals:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/10/03/sap_netweaver_developer_license/

As I had experience working the the SAP netweaver J2EE Engine - AS (Application Server), I can tell you about my impressions.

The disadvantages are:

• It take a lot of time to startup the server and to deploy applications (depend on the application size)
• There are a lot of missing infrastructures which exists in other application servers (such as inline scheduler, cluster singleton, hot deployment) and many open source frameworks wouldn't work properly with the server.
• All the infrastructures in the server a propriety of SAP (Logging, Security etc')
• Except SDN there isn't huge community which can help with the development, Other J2EE Engines like JBoss has a lot of forums with questions and answers inside them.

The advantages are:

• There is a good administrator GUI to manage the server.
• It is possible to deploy several applications with references between them
• There is a good JCA, JCO, Web Services infrastructure to connect to the ABAP world.

Again this list are from my personal experience.

J2EE Rapid Development

Developing in J2EE environment should be fast and rapid, I have been working with all this J2Ee Servers - WebSphere, WebLogic, Netweaver, JBoss. All this application servers except JBoss take a lot of time to finish their startup, some of them take few minutes and some more then 10 minuets, this is pretty frustrating making some small change in the code and then wait more then 10 minutes for the server to start and then to wait some more minutes for the deploy to finish.

In JBoss it is pretty fast it take about one minute for the startup to finish, and about two minutes for the deploy to finish, This may save a lot of time to develop in J2EE Environment,

Not to mention the great feature of hot-deployment in which the code inside the method can be change without the need to restart the application server.

Many development managers doesn't take in consideration this thing when choosing application server, In my opinion this can save a lot of time and improve the development speed.