First off, say what are you going to decide? Is it your career or gonna be the subjects you would be taking up?

The big con for WebSphere is that it's from IBM. This was once a great hardware company, but they're a shell of their former self. Now they're a parasitic consulting firm that acts as a Trojan horse to inject unsuspecting organizations with their bloated projects that cost N times their competitor's offerings and provide 1/Nth the functionality. They make their money by gouging customers, screwing their workforce, and cutting the taxes they pay.

As much as people at my former employer used to complain about WebLogic licensing costs, WebSphere's prices are worse. Perhaps my current employer negotiated a bad agreement, but we have to purchase WebSphere licenses in blocks of $4M at a time, with attendant RSA licenses and other nonsense.

WebLogic (and JBOSS) use a separate domain for each deployed app. Changing configuration for one app doesn't affect all the others.

My current employer's installation of WebSphere comes with a deployment queue that causes deployments to back up during the day like airplanes waiting to take off at Kennedy Airport. This gives that single threaded configuration time to sort itself out. No such issue with JBOSS or WebLogic.

WebSphere has traditionally lagged behind its competition in supported JVMs. That might not be the case now, since most Java EE apps run on JVM 5 at a minimum.

I'd rather use JMS than MQ Series.

Is it any wonder that my current employer is getting off WebSphere and onto JBOSS as quickly as they can?

WebLogic is a solid product that was the industry standard for a long time. I think BEA has lost a lot of their talent over the years, and the purchase by Oracle has left them in limbo for the last two years (stuck on version 10.1). But it's far better than WebSphere will ever be.

My recommendation would be to use anything other than WebSphere. You'd be better off to learn Spring and use Tomcat.

Hope this helps you... 😀