Discounted desktop computer

We don't know what we did, but IBM--we're sorry, we really are. There must be some ghastly offence Rethink IT's provided the world's funniest computer TV ad maker. This can be the only reason the company point-blank refused to talk to us for this month's overview of the application server universe.

Now that struck us as a bit odd. It was only in October that the company officially unveiled WebSphere 6, the latest rev of its app server software, due for customer release by the year end, and which is said to include a bunch of neat new features such as better recoverability, failover, drag-and-drop application development interface and all sorts of other things that you'd think it'd be dying to tell the world about.

Especially to the data center audience of this publication, who have after all been waiting two years for the release 6 upgrade to the IBM app server functionality. But a gentleman called Bob Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere Infrastructure Software, gave instructions to his publicists that the company was not to co-operate with us in the production of this article.

So, next time you see Bob, you'll have to ask him the questions we wanted to ask him on your behalf. You can say sorry from the Rethink IT team--did we forget to send a card, Bob? Meantime, we thought it'd be interesting to review, in Big Blue's absence, what's happening out there in the app server world.

DEFINITIONS

A good place to start, of course, is with definitions. What is an app server? Cast your mind back to the days of CICS and transaction monitors like Tuxedo. We needed things like that in the host and Unix environments to act as accelerators to help applications focus on their main job--encapsulating business logic, data and functionality--and let the operating system do what it did best--run the hardware and synchronise the system processes. The chugging through of transactions got left to these systems, enabling us to abstract out a lot of the plumbing so that we didn't end up with spaghetti code that tried to both make a business process happen and make the machine act as efficiently as it could.

Well, er, actually we didn't of course, or we wouldn't have had Y2K. Forget that embarrassing bit and fast forward to the explosion of the web in the late 1990s. As an industry, we soon decided that the best way to run web-based systems was to do a second spin on transaction monitors, web application servers, that managed access to resources (servers) by apps and also took care of necessary but fiddly stuff like memory management, multi-threading and what have you. Using an application server makes it much easier to build and support distributed applications, which in a net context is pretty much a given.

The result was the usual feeding frenzy of start-ups trying to build the world's best app server mousetrap, most of whom have now disappeared (anyone remember Keva Software or Net Dynamics, for instance?). But the technology, let alone the basic need, was solid enough, and through consolidation and absorption there are now just a few big names in the field. But there is a growing interest in an open source model alternative, all based on growing acceptance of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) as a standard platform for web-based computing.

Thus some market watchers say the main app server players are IBM (with WebSphere 6, natch), BEA Systems (with WebLogic Server in particular) and JBoss (the JBoss AS), making a strong entry from the open source world. Others would include Oracle (with 10g Application Server), SAP has its own web app server, Sun is hardly to be discounted, and Red Hat moved into this market in August making another Linux/open source contender. It must be added that Microsoft is a player with its own .Net equivalent app server technology, but that's less clear cut as a lot of its functionality is in the operating system component, and hence is not strictly speaking adhering to the app server model.

Like Bill cares, right? But if you're into the .Net framework you're less likely to be interested in a third party app server solution anyway. So we thought a good cross-section of the app server world for our investigation of this technology and market would be to include IBM, JBoss and another J2EE app server fan. We spoke to Sun, which seems logical, even though some carping types say it's not such a relevant player market-wise, but it's close enough to all things to J2EE to be worth listening to. We also got a catch up with Red Hat in order to give our look some Linux perspective.

We chose not to talk to BEA this time. That's partly because analyst organisations like Meta Group and Gartner have been raising concerns about the company's stability, claiming its app server product is starting to be seen as a commodity and it is losing ground to both IBM and JBoss. Lest we end up having another inadvertent feud with those guys, let us immediately add that the company reported healthy enough second quarter figures in August, and that its chairman and CEO, Alfred Chuang, said people who worried about his company being in jeopardy were "silly". And even its rivals concede that the company gets a revenue stream of around $250m from maintenance contracts for its app server business, which is hardly going to go away overnight. So we should be safe!

JBOSS

Let's start with JBoss. If there's any one organization that thinks it's at the apex of the open source application server wave, say hello to our friends at plucky little JBoss. Styling itself as no less than "the professional open source company", the company claims that its app server has been downloaded over five million times in the past 12 months, and in a study by BZ Research, use of the JBoss AS doubled from 13.9% in 2002 to 26.9% in 2003, with the "highest rate of market share growth among all app servers". The company has links with Computer Associates, HP, Novell and Unisys, all of whom resell its software, and the company, with twin headquarters in Switzerland and Atlanta, Georgia, claims to have been profitable since 2000 (it was set up in 1999).

"Open source is rapidly moving beyond Linux and the operating system into middleware. We're focused on building an entire open source middleware stack with JBoss AS as the foundation," says its chairman and CEO Marc Fleury. The company also says as there are so few companies with enough critical mass to sell app servers effectively to the enterprise, it's well placed to take advantage of the growing standardisation of app server technology around J2EE.

To that end, in September the firm launched version 4.0 of its core product, the JBoss Application Server, a release most observers credit with a range of truly enterprise-class features and functions. These include full support for J2EE version 1.4 (the latest rev of J2EE; JBoss is right to crow it has the first app server to be so qualified, but then not a lot of sites are actually using 1.4 in anger yet, so that's a mixed blessing), including the latest twist out of that whole camp, a thing called Aspect Orientation. Roughly speaking, Aspect Orientation is used to separate out logging, authentication and transaction integrity even further from the application, which delivers obviously on the base premise of application server philosophy--bracket out as much of you can of what's unique about this application so that the engine to run it doesn't need to be entwined in any spaghetti code functionality. Note that release 4.0 doesn't include a separate but useful side product, JBossCache, a system for locking, replication and transaction management of Java objects.

"2005 is going to be an interesting year for IBM and a tough one for BEA in this market," its European general manager Sasha Labourey told Rethink IT. "Now that Sun's made it easier to get J2EE certification, there's great opportunity for new players like us to be taken very seriously in the enterprise." The JBoss logic is that suppliers like IBM and Oracle will continue to add in proprietary niceties to their app servers that will be of interest to some customers, but that there's great opportunity to get a lot of what you need from the maturing J2EE spec. This does indeed seem to make sense to some customers (see user case study box on National Leisure Group (NLG), one of the US'S largest online and offline leisure travel companies, which is a keen JBoss AS user).