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GCN Home > 08/07/06 issue

New wave

By S. Michael Gallagher, Special to GCN

Thanks to open standards, the market for application servers is a lot friendlier than it used to be

General-purpose application servers are the building blocks that make the current preferred paradigm for enterprise application development possible—connecting a Web browser-based client with enterprise databases and other business logic on the back end.

Most of the major packaged enterprise applications deployed today, from enterprise resource planning to human resource management, are built on the backs of application servers.

But despite the success of application server technology (and Java app servers in particular), they have suffered from a steep learning curve for developers and have come with management and interoperability problems.

Variations in the versions of standards supported by application server vendors have made it more difficult to easily move software built on one platform to another.

And the structural requirements for building applications often meant that developers spent nearly as much time setting up the framework for an application as they did writing code that actually did something.

Some of that has changed. Thanks to a new wave of open standards and the continuing pressure from customers and the open-source community, today’s application server market is a much friendlier place than it was a few years ago.

Picket fences

Where there were once solid walls hemming developers into a single set of products, the barriers between many application server vendors’ products are starting to seem more like picket fences.

There’s better interoperability between different vendors’ wares because of standards like the WS-* Web services specifications. And it’s getting easier to build and deploy applications on many application servers because of new and improved Java Enterprise Edition standards.

On top of that, the increasing interest in dynamic programming languages for Web applications—such as PHP, Python and Ruby—is driving app server vendors to open the doors to more ways to do development.

More news on related topics: Hardware, Software Applications



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