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These eight products have the same label, but different features and abilities
The term Web application server is being tossed about by marketers looking for an advantage in the hotly contested development market. But you'll find few consistencies among the many products being sold as app servers.
Some of these products are just object servers with support for HTTP. Others focus on serving database-enabled dynamic HTML Web pages. Still others are really application development and deployment environments that support a browser as a primary or a secondary client.
This roundup of Web application servers will highlight the differences between some of the leading products. I looked at five characteristics: manageability, usability, scalability, fault-tolerance, and support for industry standards.
With a Web application server, as with any server component, manageability and usability are important to ensure that deploying and managing content or components doesn't require coding gymnastics. Scalability and fault tolerance are important for sites that plan to grow or that require high availability.
Before buying a Web application server, you'll want to figure out the answers to a few questions. What are you trying to accomplish? Will you have 20 users or 20,000? Will your users complain if your server is down for more than a few minutes a week? How many developers will interact with the server? Will your choice require you to use a particular Web server, which might limit future development or deployment choices? How does the vendor's pricing model impact your budget?
This review includes Web application servers from Allaire, Apple Computer, Bluestone Software, IBM, NetDynamics, Netscape, Oracle, and Sybase. Other companies, including Forte, SilverStream, and WebLogic, make Web application servers, so you may want to expand your search beyond those in this article.
Sapphire/Web 5.1
Sapphire/Web from Bluestone Software is actually several products: a Web application server called Sapphire/Universal Business Server, the Sapphire/Developer integrated development environment, the Sapphire/ Application Manager architecture-- management facility, and the Sapphire/Enterprise Deployment Kit.
Data sources are natively integrated using Sapphire Integration Modules that plug into Developer and UBS. SIMs provide a consistent application interface for accessing transaction systems such as CICS; object systems like COM, Corba, Enterprise JavaBeans; and databases and data modeling tools. Sapphire/ EDK includes an API to create your own SIM....