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March 29, 1999

Independent Visions
Second of 3 Parts

Web application platforms from independent vendors, who defined the market, blaze the trail for functionality and give the field credibility

By Gautam Desai, Joe Fenner, Jeetu Patel, and Mark Schenecker of Doculabs

Related links:

App Server With Better Management

Sidebar: How We Evaluated The Tools

Enterprise Applications Resource Center

View the accompanying tables as PDF files. To view a PDF file, download the Adobe Acrobat Reader

iddle-tier Web application servers are the key to building and running real business applications over the World Wide Web. They tie together disparate back-end data sources and applications, and provide the reliability and performance that transaction-intensive Web applications require.

The challenge is in telling different approaches apart. There are more products in the Web application server market than ever before, and the vendors all tell a similar story: simplified application development along with robust services for reliability, scalability, and availability.

As mentioned in last week's article ("Web Application Servers Are Here To Stay," March 22, p. 65), the types of vendors offering Web application servers fall into three categories: independent vendors, major software and infrastructure vendors, and vendors of object-transaction management products. The independent vendors deserve credit for defining the market and creating innovative technology that helped give the market credibility.

In this article, we take closer a look at the Web application servers offered by a number of independent vendors: Allaire, Bluestone Software, Forté Software, Haht Software, Intertop, Pervasive Software, Progress Software, SilverStream Software, and Vision Software Tools. Next week, we'll look at products from the major infrastructure and software vendors, and from transaction-processing vendors.

ColdFusion 4.0
Allaire Corp., an early player in the Web software market, offers the ColdFusion server, which makes great sense for customers in Allaire's chosen market: Web developers with broad-based skill levels (a market in which it competes with products such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages). Allaire was founded in 1995, and has sold tens of thousands of development licenses to organizations worldwide, giving ColdFusion a respectable presence in today's Web development tools market.

For professional Web developers with essential programming skills, ColdFusion allows quick development of Web-based systems for applications such as electronic commerce, collaborative computing, interactive publishing, and business-process automation. Development is done using HTML and the tag-based ColdFusion Markup Language. This helps experienced HTML developers quickly build applications and move them into production.

The ColdFusion application server also has strengths, although it's not necessarily cut out for the ultra-high-end applications. But Allaire deserves credit for improving the server's load-balancing, scalability and failover support in the newest release, while keeping it open enough to integrate with existing systems.

ColdFusion enjoys tremendous third-party support and a strong development following in the independent software vendor community as well as the business IT world. ColdFusion user groups are widespread, as Allaire has sold packaged ColdFusion systems for vertical applications such as legal, financial, automotive, health care, manufacturing, E-commerce, workflow management, and document management. ColdFusion also has the support of more than 150 independent software vendors, and Allaire provides an application development kit makes it easier for these vendors to build and distribute ColdFusion applications.

Sapphire/Web 5.1/6.0
Bluestone Software Inc. continues to impress us with the flexibility and robustness of its application development environment. Though the 5.1 release was plenty powerful and robust, version 6.0 has made some significant strides that make it a worthy consideration for high-end Web applications.

Bluestone's Sapphire Web Application Server provides strong load-balancing and failover capabilities, and is among the first servers to provide support for Enterprise JavaBeans. The server's Sapphire Integration Modules allow organizations and independent software vendors alike to build systems that can leverage Bluestone's back-end services while integrating with back-end legacy as well as line-of-business applications. An addition to the server is an introductory-level Extensible Markup Language server to allow companies and their partners to exchange data using the open XML standard.

On the development side, Bluestone's integrated development environment is very flexible for building applications with server-side Java and client-side HTML. However, building sophisticated Java applications for the client side may require a third-party IDE.

In addition, Bluestone's IDE, while functional, is not very intuitive, requiring a fairly high level of developer skill. Finally, the product's interaction-based pricing model may deter some firms that are accustomed to paying for servers instead of paying based on the level of activity carried out within the application.