One of the most keenly anticipated keynote sessions at this year's Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston was the "App Server Shoot.-Out" Keynote Panel, moderated by Burton Group VP and Research Director Anne Thomas Manes, which was enjoyed by a very full keynote hall and filmed by SYS-CON.TV (http://sys-con.tv) in its entirety.

Unlike most events that focus on application servers, this panel was not dominated by the usual assortment of commercial J2EE vendors. This panel included representatives from the leading:

• Commercial J2EE application server (IBM WebSphere) 
• Open source J2EE application server (JBoss JEMS) 
• Commercial application package (SAP NetWeaver)
• Servlet/web services platform (Apache Tomcat / Axis)
• and Java alternatives (.NET, ColdFusion, and PHP/Perl/Python)

Panelists included Paul Fremantle, Senior Technical Staff at IBM; Marc Fluery, CEO and Founder of JBoss; Ivo Totev, Technical Evangelist at SAP; Davanum (Dims) Srinivas , the Apache Web Services project chairman and a member of the technical staff in the Office of the CTO at Computer Associates; Dino Chiesa, .NET Product Manager at Microsoft; Dave Gruber, Cold Fusion Product Manager at Macromedia; and Peter Yared, CEO and Founder of ActiveGrid.

Due to stage size and timing constraints, the panel could not accommodate all vendors that wanted to participate. Other vendors that were particularly eager to participate (and certainly would have added value to the discussion) include ObjectWeb, the first non-profit organization to achieve J2EE certification for the open source JOnAS application server, and OpenLink, which produces a language-independent application server called Virtuoso.

As moderator, Manes started off the conversation by allowing each panelist three minutes to talk up the features of their respective application platforms. What follows is a quick summary of their comments.

Marc Fluery informed the audience that JBoss "is free, and it doesn't suck." Peter Yared described ActiveGrid as an open source LAMP application server that scales from one to 1024 nodes, with a design center focused on web services and BPEL. Dino Chiesa touted the integrated "superplatform" features of .NET, including support for speech, web applications, business rules, process management, database, portal, and more. Ivo Totev talked about the blurring line between business applications and runtime infrastructure, and informed the audience that SAP plans to service-enable all SAP applications by 2007. Dave Gruber stressed the ease-of-use capabilities of Cold Fusion, as well as its new capabilities to support mobile devices. Paul Fremantle spoke about some of the new features in WebSphere 6.0, including high availability, "brilliant" tooling, a BPEL server, and a new pure Java JMS provider that's natively integrated with web services. Dims Srinivas spoke about Apache Axis, the most popular open source web services platform, which runs on any servlet engine or J2EE application server. The Axis project is also developing support for a number of web services extensions, including WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-ReliableMessaging.

View the 2005 App Server Shoot-Out In Full and Follow the Entire Discussion

Why Pay At All When Some App Servers Are Free? 

Following this brief introduction, Anne Manes launched into a free-for-all discussion by asking the commercial vendors to explain why customers should pay for an application server when so many products are available for free.

IBM's Fremantle asserted that people pay for value. In particular, they pay for integrated solutions that solve many problems, and they pay for very high quality of service. He also noted that commercial application server vendors are constantly fighting to stay ahead of the game in terms of the "free" features included in an application server. Macromedia's Gruber added that today people won't pay extra for features that they would have paid for just two years ago. Yared of ActiveGrid offered a counterpoint position that lots of folks don't necessarily need all the features that the "superplatform" vendors are stuffing into the platform, and a lightweight application server is "good enough."

Scripting Languages - Much Simpler Than Java?

At that point Yared diverted the conversation to one focused on language features. He claimed that scripting languages, such as PHP, Python, and Perl, are much simpler than Java. He also stated that, although scripting languages may not be appropriate for building an ERP application, they are appropriate for 99% of what most application developers build. Fleury jumped in by saying that PHP is a mess to maintain, citing his experience with Nuke (an open source portal application implemented in PHP). Chiesa defended PHP by saying that the problem with Nuke was "one of execution." Yared then brought the conversation back to his core thesis: application flow should be defined using declarative XML languages, such as BPEL, and each service should be developed using a language appropriate to the task.

At that point the discussion digressed into the relative merits of Java versus other languages in regards to scalability, high availability, simplicity, and productivity.

View the 2005 App Server Shoot-Out In Full and Follow the Entire Discussion

As expected, the J2EE vendors defended Java, while Yared, Chiesa, and Gruber touted the advantages of multi-language support. Fremantle and Flery stressed Java's ability to scale. Chiesa pointed out that the demand for massive scalability is overshadowed by the demand to get things done as quickly as possible. He also postulated that now that Intel has "won" the hardware architecture battle, the need for protection from vendor lock-in has faded, and multi-platform support is no longer a compelling feature. After beating this topic to death for a few minutes (and following some prodding by Srinivas) Manes managed to pull the conversation up out on this rat hole, and then proceeded to dive headlong into another one focused on interoperability issues.

Interop: Is "WS-Nothing" the Answer?

Although WS-I defines some excellent interoperability profiles, not everyone fully supports all features of the profiles (for example, .NET doesn't support RPC/literal or SOAP with Attachments), and many tools (such as Apache Axis) support RPC/encoded by default. And perhaps more important, WS-I hasn't yet profiled XML Schema or any SOAP extensions.

Srivanas wanted to know which specifications are most important. He also wanted some guidance in choosing between competing specifications, such as WS-Reliability vs WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Eventing vs WS-Notification. Fremantle noted that IBM gets the most requests for interoperable security, attachments, and reliable messaging. Totev pointed out that the real interoperability issue were related to schema semantics. He also stressed the need for a standard policy language.

Yared then suggested that developers should concentrate on "WS-Nothing." He pointed out that developers should not hardcode middleware extensions into the application, and instead they should rely on declarative policy. Developers should only concentrate on the message coming in and the message going out. Fremantle reinforced the point by saying that web services requires a paradigm shift in the way developers think of interacting with services. Fleury summed up the concept nicely by saying, "the message is the computer." Everyone agreed that there is an emerging programming model based on messages, message transformation, and message routing.

Marc Fleury: Looking Beyond SOAP/XML Messaging

Fleury then ventured into treacherous territory by suggesting that developers shouldn't assume that they will be using SOAP and XML for these messages.

He asserted that developers should use whatever protocol is appropriate for a given application, and that technologies such as JBI could make the infrastructure abstract. The other panelists pushed back pretty hard on this point. Fremantle was first to disagree with Marc- he asserted that messages will be transferred using XML and SOAP bodies, but what we really needed is a programming language that makes it easier to manipulate XML. (Yared pointed out that dynamic languages are great for manipulating XML.) 

Dino Chiesa: "XML Has Won"

Chiesa also jumped in and said that there wasn't any room for debate. He claimed that the war is over: XML has won. He admitted that applications don't necessarily have to use angle brackets, but the core data model must be based on the XML InfoSet. Fleury attempted to defend his turf by saying that the Infoset is an integration toolset, not a programming model, but the others brushed the argument aside. Yared finally summed up the issue by saying, "We've been arguing for so long, that basically the only way our products can talk to each other is by sending text files around."

With that final pithy statement, Anne Thomas Manes wrapped up the discussion and sent everyone on their way. 

View the 2005 App Server Shoot-Out In Full and Follow the Entire Discussion