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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

How We Tested Application Servers

To evaluate application servers, we invited more than a dozen application-server vendors -- including the market leaders -- to take part in a two-day, hands-on assessment of their products at the Doculabs' facility in Chicago. We looked at 11 products from the vendors that accepted our invitation.

We started each evaluation by asking the company representatives to provide background information on their organizations: positioning, value proposition, product architecture and functionality. We followed this working session with a hands-on evaluation in our labs.

Our test scenario was based on an e-commerce application for Nile.com, a fictional online retailer. The vendors developed portions of the sample application in advance, and our analyst team completed other portions of the application in our labs (including the shopping-cart and order-entry functionality). The hands-on lab assessment gave us a chance to exercise each product's features, functions, major capabilities and ease of administration and development.

The lab testing also let us evaluate each product against our predefined criteria for application servers, which include dozens of line-item criteria in high-level categories, such as performance and reliability, security, integration, administration, development, and Java-standards compliance (see "Evaluation Criteria" below). These criteria are among the important capabilities that our end-user customers require in an application server.

Note that this evaluation did not include a performance test. While we examined features that contribute to performance (such as load-balancing, caching and database-connection approaches), we did not conduct any performance benchmarking as part of the assessment.