Enhydra will let you maintain state via SessionData objects. We could fairly easily create and modify shopping carts and other state-keeping applications. However, Enhydra doesn't support Enterprise JavaBeans at all. Lutris recommends running Enhydra in conjunction with Bull Software's Open Source JoNAS for EJB functionality; while that combination might be all right for prototyping, it's not sufficient for large-scale enterprise use. Lutris is working on an Enterprise JavaBeans implementation but it isn't near completion.

Enhydra can separate an application's presentation layer from the business logic through a Lutris-designed technology called XMLC. This handy tool converts XML pages into Java classes that represent the page in the Document Object Model, and is a much more elegant solution than Java Server Pages for generating dynamic content. For enterprise use, however, we would rather see a working EJB container. Still, if you intend to use your Java application server to handle your presentation layer as well as to manage servlets, XMLC is worth exploring.

Enhydra's documentation also falls short--especially its tutorials and sample code. Lutris is working to remedy the problem. On the other hand, Enhydra is an open-source product, so you can add features yourself, an option no other package we tested offers. In keeping with Enhydra's open-source nature, improvements and new features come from real-world, grassroots requirements, which should make its evolution close to user needs.

If you are planning to investigate use of a Java application server or want a server you can modify in-house, Enhydra will work as long as you don't need robust Enterprise JavaBeans support. It lacks the polish and completeness of commercial products, but it's a promising start for a fairly powerful and sometimes very innovative option--and it won't cost you a dime.

InfoSpinner ForeSite 3.0.2
If some of the other products we tested could be likened to automatic espresso machines, InfoSpinner's ForeSite would be a hand-cranked coffee grinder. If all you need to do is grind a lot of different kinds of beans, ForeSite may be for you. But if you want to make something palatable, look elsewhere.

ForeSite barely met our test criteria. Although it may be well-suited to integrating host-based data systems into Java environments, it won't make your life much easier as an application server. It has some of the essential capabilities, but little in the way of mature tools to help develop, deploy, or manage enterprise Java deployments. Its HTML page development tool reflects a 3270 screen-based model. That perspective pulls a lot of weight in a host environment, but less so in the networking environment. It's also the only product we tested that has little cross-platform capability. Though it can integrate with a Web server running under Solaris, NT, HP-UX, or AIX (we used NES 4.0), the main ForeSite modules run under Windows exclusively.

ForeSite provides a variety of adequate system-level services, but it serves more as an integration tool between back-end data sources and Java apps than a full-fledged Java application server, especially taking manageability into account. As InfoSpinner states, "The ForeSite Application Server was designed from its inception to be an integration vehicle for otherwise nonintegrated enterprise systems."

The architecture is based on System Integration Modules, which can effectively encapsulate a wide variety of data sources, from host terminal-based VT, 3270 and 5250, to Component Object Model, ActiveX objects and application service provider Java classes and methods, to ODBC (though disappointingly, no native database drivers are supported), to products such as MQSeries and CICS. No Enterprise JavaBeans support is included. ForeSite installs the 1.1.6 Java Virtual Machine, but InfoSpinner says it should be able to support others, and the 1.2.2 JDK worked fine when we installed it.

A ForeSite module called the Dispatcher watches the HTTP port and, based on the URL requested, either passes it onto the Web server or does server-level load balancing by passing it to the least-used ForeSite server based on measured load. ForeSite does connection and database connection pooling and some caching as well.

But we were surprised that connection pooling is supported only if you use ODBC drivers. If you do any JDBC access from within a servlet, it is independent of the application server and nothing is pooled.

We tried to implement only servlet integration. ForeSite does not support a standard servlet environment. You cannot use standard JSDK sessions and, as with Novera, you must use vendor-specific classes to implement them. This is a side effect of ForeSite's method of caching, which is based on URLs. ForeSite does include an XML parser and it can produce composite XML documents.

All of ForeSite's documentation was on the CD, but it was neither especially complete nor easy to follow. In some instances it was terrible, and we found it nearly impossible to proceed with what was provided. As no-frills as ForeSite seems, it is absolutely not a tool for novices, and there's a significant learning curve--more involved than needed.

If you aren't comfortable mucking around in the guts of the system and hand-tooling Java code, ForeSite won't be any more appealing to you than WebLogic. ForeSite is fast, and it appears scalable, but it's a bare-bones product and, at $29,995 for version 3.0.2, it's a bit pricey.

Richard Hoffman is technology editor at Network Computing. He can be reached at rhoffman@nwc.com. Anthony Frey is president of Request/Response LLC, a consulting company specializing in enterprise network solutions. He can be reached at anthony@requestresponse.com.

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