Given the recent activity in the application-server market, and given the direction of the vendors whose products we tested, we expect to see the following trends played out in the near future:
>> Continued movement to e-business platforms. The recent evolution of
application servers beyond back-end application services will continue as
vendors attempt to broaden their offerings, differentiate themselves from
competitors and provide more compelling value propositions to buyers. This will
be demonstrated by convergence not only with the e-commerce or portal
technology but also with EAI (enterprise application integration) technology.
>> Increased support for J2EE -- without commoditization. Most of the products we
tested are already (or soon will be) compliant with the J2EE specification.
Although J2EE will continue to have industry support, it will not bring about
the commoditization of application servers. This is because products will
continue to use varying approaches for delivering their services and will
attempt to differentiate themselves from competitors through added capabilities
and innovative approaches. For example, loading objects is a straightforward
task, but many products do not optimize loading; instead, they make multiple
calls to a database to load each individual object in serial fashion. Sybase is
one vendor that has chosen to optimize the object-loading requirement by loading multiple objects simultaneously based on a single query, rather than executing a discrete query for every object.
>> Some (limited) embracing of other architectural models. While the Java world has gained the most mind share lately with J2EE, Microsoft's prevalence in the market will result in increased support for its .Net architecture. For instance, vendors including Borland and Macromedia (with ColdFusion) are building
solutions that are designed to leverage the Microsoft environment. While it
makes sense for vendors to cater to the huge market of customers that have
standardized on Microsoft platforms, this approach also means competing with
Microsoft, which offers such a wide variety of components that Microsoft shops
may find it tough to rationalize the use of a third-party application server.
But apart from J2EE and .Net, few other architecture standards will enjoy any
measure of widespread support. For example, efforts at advancing CORBA (Common
Object Request Broker Architecture) have become fractured in recent months, and
the approach is losing steam.
Ultimately, we expect plenty of changes in the application server space over the
next year or so. For organizations evaluating application servers for their
infrastructures, the key is to truly understand the architectures of the systems
they are considering and to investigate the strategic direction of the vendors.
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