October 4, 1999

App Servers Branch Out

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E-commerce shifts developers' focus to customization

By Lenny Liebmann

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eb-server development used to be a fairly simple proposition: If you built in some decent content authoring and management capabilities, threw in other basic functions such as File Transfer Protocol, and maybe added a bit of extra value with a few back-end integration utilities, the product was ready to go.

But the rules of the game have changed. E-commerce pushed Web development into hyperdrive. To engage customers and deliver real business value, Web developers must build in transaction processing, links to enterprise apps, and even online integration with outside business partners.

The result? Today's most advanced Web application servers look more like full-blown development environments than prepackaged site templates. These next-generation server products take care of a wide range of low-level application "plumbing" tasks, such as database connectivity and object management. This lets developers focus on the more strategic challenges of creating competitively differentiated sites.

"Today's Web businesses are so complex that you really need a programming language to express the rules," says Jason Mondberg, co-founder and chief technology officer at Sparks.com, a San Francisco greeting-card and gift site. "Out-of-the-box software just can't provide that flexibility."

Mondberg also says that even when off-the-shelf Web-server vendors offer customization tools, they put developers in an awkward position. "You still end up spending a lot of time doing customization when you're working with off-the-shelf solutions," he says. "But you're trying to use the vendor's proprietary customization tools instead of really doing programming." The result is that customization capabilities can be limited, and Web-development staffers must learn vendor-specific tools instead of working with more widely used languages such as Java and C++.

From Mondberg's point of view, this doesn't make good business sense. "If you get an out-of-the-box Web server all tied up in a bow, that bow ties you to the vendor," he says. "That's just not acceptable for a company like ours."

Mondberg's Web server of choice is WebLogic from BEA Systems Inc. WebLogic offers a framework for Mondberg and his team to deploy object-oriented apps based on industry standards such as Corba and Enterprise JavaBeans, and integrate those apps with other enterprise resources.

What WebLogic doesn't do is give him content templates or ready-made Java servlets that don't interest him. "Out of the box, it can serve a Web page and that's about it," he says. "But it has all kinds of capabilities like failover and database pooling that I don't want to have to write from scratch."

In addition to tapping into internal IT resources, Mondberg says such programmable object-oriented Web servers will also play a role in helping companies share back-end systems over the Internet. "Let's say you have an address book and someone wants to use it for something they're doing on their site," he says. "They need to change the look and feel of that data to match their site, but still leverage all of your back-end technology. We're doing deals like that already using Java on the WebLogic server."

continued...page 2, 3, 4

Photo of Mondberg by Alan Blaustein

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