Web Application Servers

     This is a list of various web application servers, i.e. frameworks for running web application programs. Various commercial engines supposedly provide a set of functionality which makes it easy to manage sessions, security, database access, and provide hooks into things like content management systems, etc. If you are building a large scale website that needs these things, it can supposedly be cost effective to use a commercial app server as opposed to using open source tools.

     On the other hand, I have not observed such benefits in the companies I have worked in. Teams working with free frameworks like Tomcat and JBoss were more-or-less as productive as those using expensive commercial packages. Below is a list of some choices along with my comments.

• Allaire's JRun
  This is a commercial J2EE package. It's primary feature is that it provides a user-friendly manager application which runs in a web browser that has a Windows-like interface for viewing and controlling web applications.
• ATG Dynamo
  Another commercial package, which has supposedly nice libraries to use for three-tier development (like the Relational Views and Connection Pooling). However, much of this is duplicated by open-source libraries.
• ColdFusion
  This is an older application server which has recently been remade (as "ColdFusion MX") into a J2EE server.
• EmbPerl
  A simple package for embedding Perl code into markup pages, this is a remarkably powerful approach.
• Enhydra
  This is an open-source J2EE engine which has a commercial version developed by Lutris Technologies.
• Jakarta Tomcat
  This is an open-source Java servlet engine, in fact it is the reference implementation for Sun's Java servlet and JSP specifications.
• JBoss
  This is an open-source app server with many plugins including HyperSonic DB, InstantDB, and the JMX HTML adaptor. You should consult the JBoss Online Manual for the production type configuration.
• PHP
  This is a widely-used scripting language designed to be embedded in HTML. It is most similar in syntax to Perl.
• Zope
  This is an open-source application server with a web interface.