Because of its open design, WebObjects has become something of a de facto standard for software vendors building vertical applications for sectors such as banking, retail and call tracking. In addition, WebObjects users have access to the largest third-party market of any application server. Although WebObjects demonstrated robust failover and load balancing in tests, its approach is now dated and proved slower, more resource-hungry and more vulnerable to failure than either the Netscape or the NetDynamics product. It was also harder to control how WebObjects used the resources of servers because it runs its own database and caching services inside each application process. This meant that each application process couldn't share resources such as database information or state information with others without explicit coding to make it happen.
Resource sharing is automatic with other products.
This configuration isn't as flexible as a completely open scheme, where any request can go to any server. WebObjects also uses random server selection on new client requests, a less accurate approach than the intelligent routing that Kiva Enterprise Server and NetDynamics do to find the least busy server in their clusters. Apple offers a free add-on kit for WebObjects that addresses some of the product's limitations by allowing WebObjects' processes to call threads and making it easier to share and permanently store state information on WebObjects' applications. 3.5 Apple's WebObjects provides a worthwhile upgrade to current customers, but the enhancements in this version likely won't persuade sites to switch from competing Web application servers.