Six months have since gone by and we thought the time was right to fill you in on the latest happenings in the application server market. Last autumn, we presented the new shape of this market and its related market potential. Over the past year, J2EE has become a standard that has been adopted by most application server vendors. As a result, the factors that once differentiated the various application servers are fading away. In a way, J2EE has raised the stakes.
Competition is no longer fierce at a low technical level, but at a high solution level.
Basically, application servers are made up of core services and extended services. The table below explains these categories in greater detail. In addition to the services above, application servers need development tools in order to boost productivity. However, there are other options. For instance, there are still many scripting techniques such as ASP, CFML, PHP and Perl out there.