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June 22, 1998

Make The Web Work For You

Doculabs tests nine Web application development tools to see which one is best for your business

Second in a two-part series

By Jeetu Patel, Jack Porter, and Joe Fenner of Doculabs

he tools for building and running business applications over the Web are here. Last week, we took a look at the important characteristics that transaction-oriented business applications require if you're going to run them over the Web.

Specifically, Web application environments must scale to support highly variable transaction throughput from potentially thousands of users, with the ability to dynamically scale up when needed. They must be reliable and fault-tolerant, providing round-the-clock availability and transaction integrity. They must also be able to tie into your existing infrastructure, which might include customer databases, legacy applications, and enterprise resource planning systems. Development and maintenance must be quick and easy, as business demands may require you to change applications on the fly.

This week, we take a closer look at the nine products we tested. They're all similar in that they provide a development environment for building applications, along with an application server for running and managing the applications. But different products are designed for different classes of applications, so it's important to understand how each tool is best applied. Each product has key strengths (which are discussed in greater depth in Doculabs' technical reference set on Web application development). Some tools are designed for high-end applications with high transaction volumes that need core enterprise services.

Some tools are designed for high-end applications with high transaction volumes that need key business enterprise services. These tools include products from Netscape Communications, NetDynamics, Bluestone Software, and WebLogic. These vendors are focusing on creating application environments that are highly reliable, scalable, and available--but you'll need high-priced object-oriented developers to build your applications. Microsoft is also trying to enter this market, but its product still lacks some features such as dynamic load balancing for high-volume application support. (We'll know for sure when we finish our formal performance testing later this summer.)

Other tools are designed to leverage HTML development and any existing skills you may have in that area. Tools from EveryWare and Allaire are in this category. If you want to build HTML-based applications quickly, and you don't have a lot of object-oriented development talent in-house, these tools make a good fit.

Still other tools are designed to leverage existing development skills with tools such as Visual Basic. In this camp, Microsoft and Haht Software provide good solutions. The development metaphors their products use are very similar to Visual Basic, which makes them easy for VB programmers to learn.

For building rich collaborative applications that merge structured and unstructured data, look at SilverStream Software's offering. In a nonprogrammatic fashion, developers can quickly build applications that make use of structured data from databases as well as unstructured data such as word processing documents or HTML pages.

Cold Fusion Server 3.1
Allaire's Cold Fusion Server 3.1 is aimed at professional Web developers who want to do application development in areas such as electronic commerce, collaborative computing, interactive publishing, and business-process automation. The product consists of an application-development environment and an application server.

The types of applications developed by Cold Fusion can be fairly sophisticated, and the HTML page metaphor will be easy for Webmasters and HTML experts to understand. But there's a trade-off: As applications get more complex, the number of pages that must be maintained can grow unwieldy.

Cold Fusion extends HTML though the definition and use of a proprietary tag language called the Cold Fusion Markup Language, similar to Microsoft's Active Server Page technology. Applications created using Cold Fusion consist of documents that look similar to HTML, with the addition of CFML tags, which are interpreted by the Cold Fusion server before they are returned to the client browser as HTML.

Cold Fusion's development environment is based on the HomeSite HTML editor, which is built for rapid development. The tool provides productivity-enhancing features such as color coding, code hints, code completion, tag completion, two-way tag editors, and link validation. However, it lacks integrated debugging capabilities.

The development environment leverages any existing HTML programming skills your organization may have. The editor includes drag-and-drop tag support for HTML, DHTML, CFML, ASP, JavaScript, and miscellaneous HTML extensions, which may or may not be supported by all browsers. Users can also develop their own palettes of custom tags. Cold Fusion provides a Source Code Control API (SCCAPI) to integrate with source-control software, such as Microsoft Visual Source Safe or Intersolv's PVCS.