Web Application Servers for Manufacturing and Design
The Infrastructure for Collaborative Web Computing

The overwhelming market penetration of Web-based technology makes application servers critical components of the computing infrastructure, matching or exceeding the importance of mature operating systems and databases. Also, the rapid growth of the Web has challenged these Web-based applications to meet rising demands in scalability, reliability, and transaction support. Moreover, with their XML capabilities, Web-application servers are being used as application integrators. Their standard application deployment platform with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE specification supports this new utility. These Web application servers provide a platform to solve manufacturing customer problems in the areas such as application integration, application Web-enablement, and collaborative design and commerce.

As Web-application servers have taken off in the marketplace, a consensus has developed around the J2EE standard. The market is also consolidating around three dominant players, each of which offers a family of solutions: BEA Systems, IBM, and iPlanet. Each can legitimately claim leadership in some dimension. Until recently, these vendors rarely met head-to-head in the market, primarily selling into their strongholds and install bases. However, competition is heating up significantly as these vendors battle for dominance.

The DHBA study found that each major competitor leads in distinct markets as shown in Figure 1.

Manufacturing Solutions

Engineering Manufacturing and Design (EMD) customers have issues with respect to application integration, application Web-enablement, and collaborative design and commerce that Web application servers provide a platform to solve. Commercial transactions are usually lightweight, but occur in large volumes and require advanced transaction management capability. Web application servers support Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and transaction monitors to support these transactions. Engineering and design transactions present a sharp contrast as each individual transaction may be very large, containing an enormous amount of graphical and numerical data. However, the number of these transactions in process at any given time is small. Most of the leading design independent software vendors (ISVs) shy away from the more complex EJB component model and build their application using servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs). By doing this, customers need only purchase J2EE web container-based products that do not have to support EJB. Examples of these are WebSphere Standard Edition ($795), BEA WebLogic Express ($3,000), iPlanet Application Server Standard Edition ($2,995 per processor), or even the open source Apache/Tomcat (free) assuming it is supported by the ISV. In contrast, EJB web containers can cost anywhere from $7,000 per processor up to $40,000 per processor.

End users must consider their own environment carefully in evaluating available products. While vendors may trumpet their overall standings, no user actually installs the specific functional capabilities represented by an "average" or "overall" standing. A number of critical issues require particular attention:

• Application integration including the development of industry specific XML schemas
• Growth of service and scalability improvements
• Ease of implementation
• Security

This report is available to Sponsors of the collaborative Web Applications Infrastructures (WAI) program from D. H. Brown Associates, Inc. Those interested in receiving the full document (62 pages) detailing the tradeoffs of web applications servers, and/or joining these programs, should contact Ken Mewes, Vice President - Marketing, at kmewes@dhbrown.com or 914-937-4302, ext. 272.