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Web Application Servers

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Executive Summary: Web Application Servers How We Evaluated Web App-Development Tools IBM WebSphere and Oracle Application Server

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Web Application Server Features

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InformationWeek, April 5, 1999 "More Than a Movement: Web Application Movement" InformationWeek, March 29, 1999 "Independent Visions: Web Application Platforms" Information Week, March 22, 1999 "Web Application Servers Are Here To Stay" Network Computing, Dec. 1, 1998 "Buyer's Guide: Web Middleware" Information Week, June 22, 1998 "Make the Web Work for You"

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Network Computing spent two months testing Web application servers from Apple Computer, Allaire, Bluestone Software, Pervasive, SilverStream Software and Vision Software. We also tested IBM's WebSphere and Oracle's OAS, which might suit IBM-centric or Oracle-centric environments, but aren't ready for the mainstream. (For more on these two products, go to www.networkcomputing.com/1011/1011r1side3.html.) Testing took place in conjunction with Doculabs in Chicago, but grading and test results were done independantly by Doculabs and Network Computing.

You may have expected to see a few other products on this list: At test time, Sun Microsystems had recently purchased NetDynamics and its Web application servers and declined to participate in our tests. And Netscape's Kiva had not had a major revision since Doculabs' previous test, which ran in our sister publication Information Week (see "Making the Web Work for You," at www.informationweek.com/688/88olweb.htm). Sybase's Enterprise Application Server, originally scheduled for our tests, wasn't ready in time.

Still, our tests provided a representative look at most of the best products in this market. All are solid, robust, enterprise-level Web application servers.

Now Serving... The Web application development tools we tested have made a welcome shift toward more integrated and elegant development environments. Your developers will spend most of their time with the IDE, and good tools and a clean, efficient process will pay for themselves a hundred times over in improved productivity and reduced development, deployment and maintenance costs. The best enterprise-class product is Apple's WebObjects, a true powerhouse with its elegant interface and architecture. It's well-designed from top to bottom, and full of useful architectural and design features that make it the best of breed in this fast-changing arena. Its IDE is clean and consistent, and encourages true code reuse and good object-oriented design.

Following closely on WebObjects' heels are Bluestone's Sapphire/Web 6.0 and SilverStream's Application Server 2. Their robustness, scalability, and solid enterprise-class features, such as LDAP and SCCAPI, plus good back-end data-source connectivity, but both well ahead of the pack. Each supports LDAP, SNMP, SCCAPI (Source Code Control API) and other standards.

All three leaders are excellent, scalable solutions for serving environments of any size, from departmental intranet applications to heavy-duty, high-transaction sites. As with any product at this level of functionality and complexity, all require a well-trained development team to make the most of their capabilities.

Allaire's ColdFusion was the strongest product we saw for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which need both an excellent and relatively easy-to-use IDE and quick Web-to-database capability in a page-based paradigm. ColdFusion is not as architecturally robust or full-featured as WebObjects or Sapphire/Web, but it has an excellent IDE and can't be beat for ease of use and rapid development. ColdFusion and Pervasive's Tango provide solid value, packing lots of functionality in a low-cost package. Tango was perhaps even easier to use than ColdFusion for bringing database information to the Web, but it trailed in standards support.

Finally, Vision Software's Jade 4.0/Business Logic Server is unique for its strong focus on true abstraction of business rules from program logic, a welcome trend we expect to gather momentum as basic application-server features become somewhat commoditized. Despite weaknesses in back-end integration and system-level services, it offers a very simple, easy-to-use set of tools for defining business rules, and it's great for rapid deployment.