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April 5, 1999

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More Than A Movement
Third of 3 Parts

continued...page 2 of 3

Related links:

Web Application Servers are Here To stay (part 1)

Independent Visions (part 2)

VIew the table "Things To Look For In Web Application Tools" as a PDF file. To view a PDF file, download the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Because of the timing of our testing, we did not have an opportunity to review the latest version of BEA's product, so it remains unclear at this time how the company intends to position the product, or what its development agenda is.

WebSphere 1.1
IBM, one of the biggest proponents of Java, is entering the Web application-server market full-force with WebSphere. IBM has taken several powerful but disjointed products and meshed them together into the WebSphere system. IBM's major goals with WebSphere are to simplify Web application development and provide a scalable, high-performance application-server platform. For the most part, WebSphere succeeds.

WebSphere development is primarily done in Java using Java Server Pages. The development tools are functional but could use improvement; the overall development environment needs to be tied more closely with the individual tools used to build an application. Applications are typically deployed as servlets, which can run on multiple platforms and Web servers. The server could use some improvement in scalability and fault tolerance, which should be addressed in the recent release of the WebSphere Performance Pack. A future version will support Enterprise JavaBeans.

One major question is how WebSphere fits in with Lotus Domino, and whether the two will ever be tightly integrated or will continue moving along parallel development paths. Whatever the strategy, IBM deserves credit for making significant inroads in the Web application-server market, particularly since it was late getting into the game.

Inprise Application Server 1.0
Rising from the ashes of Borland, Inprise has redefined itself as an enterprise vendor. Its acquisition of Visigenics provides a major presence in the object request broker market. And just as every major enterprise software vendor today needs a solid application-server offering, Inprise provides Inprise Application Server 1.0.

Building upon Visigenics' and Inprise's strengths in Corba infrastructures, the Inprise Application Server provides a robust product that's fast, scalable, and, above all, manageable. The system's failover capabilities were by far the most impressive of any product in our review; the product can graphically depict system dependencies and execute predefined scripts and routines in response to failure events. Everything from simple one-machine hot-swaps to multinode, multicluster failover is possible.

On the tools side, Inprise comes with JBuilder. Although development of Java front ends is simplified, that simplicity comes at the expense of HTML client development, because JBuilder does not have support for WYSIWIG editing. The entire development process requires developers with good Java programming skills and application architectures.

Overall, Inprise has an impressive offering. However, it is noteworthy that Inprise (by way of ORBs originally developed by Visigenics) is already found in many other competing Web application servers. It will be interesting to see how Inprise addresses this issue.

Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 With Windows NT Option Pack
Microsoft has done a great deal to turn its platform tools into Web application tools. Those tools are a moving target; with every new product release, operating system "Service Pack," and optional download, Microsoft tweaks its platform for Internet application deployment. In fact, Microsoft is in such rapid motion that its product changed over the course of this review.

For development, Microsoft offers Visual InterDev, which is ideal for companies that want to leverage the existing Visual Basic and COM skills of their experienced developers. The development tool provides one of the better database design aids around, and provides a number of helpful features in the areas of debugging and developer assistance, such as code-completion features.

For the server, Microsoft uses a combination of Windows NT, the Microsoft Internet Information Server Web server, and Windows NT options such as Microsoft Transaction Server and Microsoft Message Queuing. In addition, the solution heavily leverages Active Server Page technology, which is quickly gaining market acceptance.

When we last reviewed Microsoft's product, we had questions about dynamic load-balancing capabilities. Since then, Microsoft has added enhanced load-balancing capabilities to its Microsoft Transaction Server; because this happened during the course of this review, we did not have the opportunity to retest the product. Overall, Microsoft's tools are good. They make the most sense for organizations that have standardized on Microsoft technology; there is little support for development platforms other than Windows NT or 95.