application servers are the one category of software product that seems to be on everyones mind these days. no longer is there any doubt in my mind that n-tier applications are the future. certain applications will benefit from a heavy-client architecture, such as desktop publishing, but most will have at least some portion of their logic running on the middle tier.
while data-intensive tasks will still run more efficiently in the database tier, key business rules and html-client generation will undoubtedly be handled by the application server. every major software vendor has thrown the proverbial hat into the app server ring. leaders are starting to emerge, but its important to note that the market penetration for application servers is still less than 10%.
we learned a valuable lesson counting votes in florida: its not smart to declare any winners until more precincts have turned in their totals. however, ibm is aggressively targeting the application server market with their websphere line of products, which is how i came to spend the past several weeks working with their websphere advanced server and websphere studio.
ibm websphere editions
ibm sells a fairly large number of technologies under the websphere marketing umbrella, which are bundled into three versions of the application server: standard edition: supports static html pages, servlets, javaserver pa... 下一页