Screaming Penguin

In a study that again makes you say, duh. Gartner has proclaimed the painfully obvious in a finely bound and illustrated "study" (yeah, the gartner distaste is evident, I know.) The conclusion of the study is that companies have overspent over 1 billion dollars since 1998 and will overspend an estimated 2-3 billion more by 2003, all on application servers. While the term "application server" applies to more than just Java app servers (but is not really defined in the article, remaining as nebulous as possible), that appears to be a large part of the problem (and is generally what I think of when someone says, application server.) Many companies are overbuying supposedly robust and supported java app servers simply to run JSP's and or servlets. Most of these app servers are geared more towards EJB stuff and of course are not required just to run a servlet. This is all too obvious information as far as I am concerned (which is how gartner makes a living) but I suppose it is good that somebody is saying it in an official capacity. The commercial app servers work quite well (Weblogic, Silverstream, Webshpere, JRUN, iPlanet, etc) but arent really necessary. If you want to spend mega money, then by all means. However the likes of Tomcat, JBoss, Jonas, EnHydra, etc can handle the same tasks and loads (arguably the cluster capabilities vary, but for tens of thousands of dollars per CPU you can figure out another way to cluster that will invariably be better than the commercial app servers, IMHO.) Also of note is that many of the "commercial" app servers costing thousands come full of open source components. Weblogic 6, for example, now has an XML parser and XSL translation capabilities "built in." Yeah, it comes with Xerces and Xalan! I am not saying that every commercial product is worthless, not at all. However app servers are now free and open source. An anology could be made to apache a few years ago. How many people today BUY the webserver software used in serious web applications or sites? You dont buy it, you download apache. Application servers are going the same route, download Tomcat and spend your money elsewhere (on a good developer to build your app!)   Gartner Study on App Servers: NWFusion