InformationWeek

IT groups that have struggled with building and supporting real business applications on the Web know what to look for in a Web application server. They want reliability, scalability, and simplified development and maintenance.

It used to be that building Web applications was nothing but a manual custom-programming effort. It was especially challenging to develop or integrate the kind of back-end services that Web applications require-things like load balancing, thread pooling, connection pooling, state and session management, and transaction monitoring. To top it off, good Web applications need to integrate with disparate back-end systems such as line-of-business systems, customer databases, and even legacy applications.

Meeting Customer Requirements
For requirements like these, Web application servers are the answer. The products available today provide about 75% of what customers want. Today's products provide graphical environments for development, making application building and maintenance far simpler than it used to be.

Most products also provide robust back-end servers that can be leveraged and reused in any Web application the server runs. Features like load balancing and failover are now fairly common in Web application platforms, as is back-end database access. And direct hooks to applications like ERP systems are becoming more and more common as well.

But IT groups need to look at more than just features and functions. A key consideration when evaluating Web application servers is the development skills and expertise that a given product requires.

Though today's products have made development easier, the process is by no means simple. Ideally, the product you choose will be able to leverage the development expertise and resources you already have in house-which might include skills in areas as diverse as Java programming, HTML publishing, CGI and Perl experience, or even Visual Basic expertise.

Many organizations will invest in new talent and new skills in order to build important transaction-intensive Web applications, but may be unwilling to do so for simpler inter-departmental applications on the company intranet. Some businesses may even wind up deploying Web application servers from different vendors to handle specific application types.

Another issue is integration and data access. Web application servers aren't designed to replace your existing systems, but to work with what you already have.