Reshaping the Application Server Market Page 4

Conclusion

As providers of the technical infrastructure needed to build applications, application server vendors could be considered the real losers in the thriving Internet economy. Newcomers to this market have quite a hard time. Indeed, the market leaders have already been identified (i.e., BEA, IBM, SUN and Microsoft); a few gumption-filled challengers have stormed the front (Bluestone, SilverStream, Allaire, and the like); and some standard OSS application servers such as Enhydra have made the community stand up and take notice.

All things aside, one big issue still needs to be addressed: application server productivity. If we compare the productivity of today’s Web application development tools with the rich client/server tools we had (and still have), there is still a lot of room for improvement.