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F E A T U R E

Web Application Servers Come of Age

July 23, 2001
By Gautam Desai, Eric Sanchez and Joe Fenner

Executive Summary

Application Servers

Application servers are strategic components for any IT infrastructure. They provide a run-time environment and back-end services that give applications the scalability, reliability and performance most enterprises require.

Today's application-server market and the e-commerce market are beginning to converge; a number of vendors are now offering a single platform that includes the underlying application server along with e-commerce and e-business functionality. While some application-server vendors still offer their own development tools, many bundle leading third-party tools in their solutions and can support applications that have been built in other development environments. This approach gives organizations new flexibility for building applications and lets them continue to use development tools that are already deployed and for which they already have expertise.

Most of the application servers we evaluated are (or soon will be) compliant with the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) specification. This means that applications built according to the specification can be deployed on any J2EE-compliant application server. However, the J2EE trend is not causing true commoditization of application-server features; on the contrary, while J2EE application servers may offer similar feature sets, the way in which the features are created and used can vary greatly from server to server.

IBM's WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition 3.5 and Macromedia's ColdFusion 4.5.1 Enterprise both earned our Editor's Choice award. For the enterprise, IBM provides a solid Java-based solution that is part of a strong product family for handling a range of e-business needs. For the midmarket, ColdFusion is appealing because of its straightforward design and its tag-based extensible CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language), which enhances developer productivity.