Fyi Linux Lover, the RH app server's an open-source Java application server built by the France-based consortium ObjectWeb, the consortium of open source developers founded in 2002 by France Telecom, Bull and INRIA. The organisation mentors a set of open source projects developed and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence.
In other words it's based on ObjectWeb's JOnAS code.

By October, Red Hat Application Server will also be J2EE certified - because JOnAS is expecting certification in October.

Didn't Red Hat just come out with Red Hat Application Server? What *is* it - did they acquire it or develop it? I know Japanese open source integrator Ten Art-ni supports it, but where did it come from??

Will Sun's newest app server, the J2EE SDK, be taking part? A binary version of the J2EE reference implementation, it's a proof of concept and example for implementations in the application server marketplace.

An important facet of the whole performance game is TCO - what do the vendors offer the total solution with application servers at?

Does the hardware come free with the server, or does the software come free? Or is it a subscription based model? Does the hardware and software come free, only an agreement to have Consulting Services need to be made?

These are some of the more important questions one needs to answer - so what if Appserver-A is 5% faster than Appserver-B??

I suppose it is somewhat interesting to see what the performance of these server is. I *yawn* suppose.
Look, the biggest problem with these servers isn''t raw performance. It''s that they are becoming increasingly unstable as more and more features are crammed in faster and faster to keep up with this kind of "do they have feature XXX" shootout. I can deal with 50% worse performance with double the boxes, which is barely a ripple in the budget. I can''t deal with systems that go out for days at a time, that can''t be tuned except by level-3 support people (in production), or with development "standards" that are obsolete six months later.

The "simulated network and hardware failures" is the most interesting part of this, but, I suspect, will also be the most glossed over. However, most of the failures these days aren''t at the network or machine level. It''s the app servers themselves failing. How will this "shootout" deal with that?

Update:

Pramati joins app-server shoot-out, confirms their participation.

[visit link]

If you really want to hold an application server shootout, bring in Macromedia''s ColdFusion MX server and New Atlanta's Blue Dragon products. They bring all the benefits and performance of J2EE, plus the rapid development benefits of CFML. Including .NET but excluding other, similar, Enterprise-class application servers does a disservice to those who are really interested in an objective comparison.

Answering Miguel:

Our XBanywhere server ([visit link]) runs under Tomcat on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. We created it using JBuilder and Intelli-J IDEA. While I will grant you that IDEA has some great re-factoring features, by-and-large the developer productivity I''ve experienced on the J2EE platform has only been a fraction of the productivity I''ve had under .NET. And VS.NET, unlike IDEA, doesn''t pause for 30 seconds every few minutes while the garbage collector runs. :-)

I wonder if Mr. Derek Ferguson ever tried other developer tool beside MS Visual Studio .Net? Did he runs ever a Web app. in Linux or Unix? Hi Mr. Derek Ferguson, please see BEA WebLogic Workshop, that's the integrated Service Environment tool that you looking for.

I know it won''t happen but it would be nice if the results of the shootout were published so the world would know. Folks on tight budgets that can''t attend will never know what happened. Too bad for the industry.

Anyone remebers which company won this year? I know one of the rules of the competition was the winner could not publicize the results

[visit link]

I remember these shoot-outs get very tense for the teams on stage but they also throw a lot of goodies to the audience. Gee the last shoot-out I went to was like the superbowl, I came home with 8 t-shirts!

This "app server shoot-out" reference from 1999 is interesting:

[visit link]

It requires a level playing field for all participating companies.