"Middleware Technology Evaluation Series: Evaluating J2EE Application Servers," Paul Brebner, Shiping Chen, Ian Gorton, Jeffrey Gosper, Lei Hu, Anna Liu, Doug Palmer, Shuping Ran (Abstract)

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J2EE-based application servers are increasingly becoming the engine rooms of Web-enabled applications. They provide the scalable, high-performance Java infrastructure for processing many simultaneous requests from users for Internet application services. They also offer a consistent design and deployment model, and various software components that aim to greatly ease the development of complex Internet-based applications.

Numerous product vendors offer technologies that support the various components of the J2EE specification. These technologies have been designed, developed and in some cases have evolved in very different ways, and there is a large range in quality of the features and tools that the various products support.

This crowded product marketplace creates a challenge for IT departments who have to evaluate and select an application server that is sufficient for their needs. All business applications are different in some ways, and there is rarely, if ever, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ product match. Different J2EE products have different sets of strengths and weaknesses and costs, and consequently will be better suited to some types of applications than others.

The difficulty for IT departments is in understanding these strengths and weaknesses early in the development cycle for a project, and choosing an appropriate technology. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, and the risks and costs associated with selecting an inappropriate technology are high.

This report aims to help reduce the risks and costs of J2EE application server selection. It provides the most detailed analysis, evaluation and comparison published on six leading application server technologies, from IBM, Fujitsu, SilverStream, BEA, Borland and the open source JBoss product.

We have worked extensively with these products by building test applications to help us understand what they are capable of. Based on this analysis, the report compares the products in qualitative terms through a detailed feature set comparison, and in quantitative terms through performance and stress testing of an application tested on each product in an identical deployment environment. This provides us with the critical ability to directly compare the performance of the Application Servers alone, unlike the other recent J2EE benchmark, ECPerf1, which may be run on completely different test environments, and is therefore open to varying interpretations. The focus of the quantitative comparisons is the J2EE EJB container, which forms the core component of most application server deployments.

The products were evaluated qualitatively against 6 overall categories: J2EE Support, EJB Support, J2EE Services, Development and Deployment, System Management, and Scalability and Availability. A coarse grain summary of the overall results is shown below, and the detailed results and evaluation criteria are presented in the main body of the report. Overall, all the products provide a good level of support for base J2EE features, and with the increasing maturity of J2EE Application Servers we notice a convergence of features supported.

- "Middleware Technology Evaluation Series: Evaluating J2EE Application Servers," Paul Brebner, Shiping Chen, Ian Gorton, Jeffrey Gosper, Lei Hu, Anna Liu, Doug Palmer, Shuping Ran, Commonwealth, Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) http://www1.cmis.csiro.au/test/index.htm

Directory: http://www.larryblakeley.com/Articles/application_services/

File Name: J2EE21.pdf

Post Date: March 9, 2005 at 7:35 AM CST; 1335 GMT