Web/E-business /

Web app servers bulk up on new features

The trick is to match platforms and products with your specific e-business goals.

By John Cox
Network World, 09/25/00

If you want your customers to transact business on your Web site, you need to build the site on a sure foundation, and that means a Web application server.

There are between 20 and 30 Web application servers on the market, each with varying approaches for object component support, distributed computing, speed and ease of deployment. Therefore, it's become increasingly important to closely match these capabilities with your business goals.

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Generally, application servers interact with back-end databases and applications to serve up HTML pages, but they differ by deployment speed, support for component models, programming standards and database interfaces. Some handle fast-growing traffic loads, crashes and security.

Application server software lets you write your application as a set of software components, like Enterprise JavaBeans or ActiveX controls, and load these on the application server. The components use the features, or services, of the application server, such as accessing back-end databases, controlling transactions to those databases, interacting with the front-end Web server and even balancing the workload over several copies of the application server. What your site needs depends on what you're trying to do.

Market leaders

A recent Giga Information Group study predicts that the market leaders for 2000 that support the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification will be IBM and BEA Systems, followed by ART Technology Group, iPlanet, Allaire, Sybase and SilverStream Software.

Despite all sharing support for J2EE, these companies' products are difficult to categorize. Nearly all run on various Unix operating systems or Windows NT and 2000. All are phasing in the J2EE APIs for writing Java applications. Most include a feature that lets them work with software components written to Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Some include a bridge feature that lets them also work with components written to Microsoft's alternative component standard, Component Object Model (COM)+.

Microsoft is positioning the data center version of Windows 2000 Server, with its built-in transaction and messaging services, and the newly announced .Net technologies, as the application server for COM+ applications. Typically, users opt for either the Java or Microsoft platform.

Aside from component models and standards support, products vary by the vendor's focus and the nature of the business problem you're trying to solve.

Here are some of the servers that we reviewed:

Iplanet aims its iPlanet Application Server 6.0 at network and application service providers and very large enterprises.
Allaire's JRun Server, by contrast, targets midsize deployments and software vendors that want to embed the application server in their own offerings.
BEA's WebLogic or IBM's WebSphere would be contenders if your problem is large numbers of consumers buying on your Web site or you expect very high and fast growth.
If your business relies on the Oracle database, you'll likely consider Oracle's Internet Application Server, with its built-in Apache Web server.

Competing COM+ and Java standards

The fast growth in the application server market has resulted in a spirited horse race between Java and Microsoft platforms, says Michael Gilpin, vice president at technology research firm Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass.

"A year ago, application servers were considered bleeding edge," says Gilpin "Now, though not yet truly mainstream, they're much closer to being so." Gilpin attributes this largely to the rapid adoption of component models and the maturation of transaction processing and reliability features.

He estimates Microsoft is taking about 35% to 40% of the overall application server market for e-commerce infrastructure, though less on the high end, where enterprise customers typically use Unix servers or a mix of NT and Unix.

Microsoft is clearly emerging as a viable alternative to Unix for large, complex e-commerce applications, according to analysts.

"Users should be very much aware that there is a powerful alternative from Microsoft, and it's a lower-cost path," says William Zachman, an analyst at META Group in Stamford, Conn.

Zachman is referring to the traditionally lower cost of NT coupled with Intel-based computers, compared with Sun Solaris on a Sun SPARC-based server, for example. Another cost factor is that Microsoft has added features to Win 2000 and NT that, in the Java world, are typically separate products, such as application-to-application messaging and transaction processing. Consequently, straight price comparisons between a Java and a Microsoft deployment are difficult.

Cost aside, support for Java APIs has taken the lead. Sun's release of the J2EE specification and its widespread adoption by the application server vendors has sent demand soaring among corporate developers.

IPlanet E-Commerce Solutions was the first to win Sun certification for including the J2EE APIs into its iPlanet Application Server 6.0. IPlanet did additional work to deal with several complex issues not covered by the J2EE specification, says Sanjay Sarathy, director of product marketing for iPlanet. For example, J2EE provides no information about what should happen if an Enterprise JavaBean should stop working. The iPlanet engineers created a technique to switch traffic to another copy of a failed Enterprise JavaBean. They also created a way to balance Web traffic accessing Java server pages on the application server, Sarathy says.

Application server features

While J2EE support is becoming standard, vendors take a variety of approaches to deal with basic distributed computing problems such as running applications on multiple application servers, server failover and balancing traffic load.

Tantalus Communications, an e-commerce site builder headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, routinely uses Oracle Internet Application Server, with its J2EE support and attendant Oracle 8i database as the foundation for its projects because the server can easily handle higher workloads, says Tantalus Technical Architect Jeff Grant.

When you identify a few heavily used application components that create a bottleneck, instead of moving the entire application and application server to a new, larger and costlier computer, you can copy the affected components and run them with a copy of the application server.

Besides object component support and distributed computing approaches, speed and ease of deployment are increasingly important, Giga's Gilpin says.

In June, IBM announced its plans for Websphere to incorporate the IBM MQSeries messaging middleware for linking with enterprise applications. More integration features are planned, including support for new devices and personalized presentation.

In May, SilverStream Software announced its Application Server 3.0 now ships with a copy of Cerebellum's data integration software. So combined with the SilverStream development tools, a range of enterprise data sources can be tied into Web applications.

Robert Shimp, Oracle's senior director of Internet platform marketing, says auction services, typically found in add-on products, will soon be built into Oracle's application server.

But beware, while some vendors are adding new features such as caching mechanisms for better application performance, your business goals and applications may not require that added capability.

For example, Tantalus programmers are enthusiastic about the Oracle 8i Cache feature recently added to the Internet Application Server. Now, data from corporate databases can be stored closer to the application server for faster response, Grant says. But there's a trade-off. "The cache as a basic concept is great," he says. "But it's still in its infancy. We don't have yet the level of control [over the caching] that we want."

Evaluating your need for features is important. For Air2Web, a wireless application service provider that offers services that allow wireless devices to interact with corporate data, full support for the Java specification and ease of deployment were the two criteria that led to Air2Web's selection of BEA Systems' WebLogic application server.

"Then it was a matter of evaluating specific features and deciding which ones you can live without," says Dale Gonzalez, vice president of wireless devices at Air2Web.

With the race to add new features to application servers, Gilpin says vendors will license products or buy other companies to create a portfolio of functionality. Effective integration among portfolio components becomes more important, ensuring that add-on components closely integrate, he says.

So as vendors churn up the application server market with new server programs and third-party applications, aside from ensuring effective third-party integration, you will need to carefully evaluate your need for application server capabilities to select the best software to address the business problem you're trying to solve.

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Contact Senior Editor John Cox