Comparison of Open Source Application Servers

The role of application servers has grown significantly in IT architecture over the past few years as the cloud becomes the new frontier for application development–a frontier that offers more opportunity and challenges than the Web ever did. And while the Web space is not over and done, the client-server model has become very blurred. If clients are indeed everywhere–and there’s no reason to think they aren’t–then the place where the applications run suddenly becomes very un-localized. Application servers manage it all, but as the power division between client and server becomes ever more diffuse, the complexity of management becomes greater.