WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
JBoss EAP is lightweight and doesn't really consumes much physical resources. It's high performing and suites well for high transaction Java enterprise applications. The out of box performance settings are not really great and you will have to configure the settings to suite your environment to leverage it's full benefits.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
Jboss EAP is easy to deploy and configure. This lead to lower cost and faster delivery.
Even though we have large number of machines running JBoss, we have only two Jboss Administrators. It doesn't requires too much administration and maintenance on daily basis and reduces number of administrators required for large implementations.
