J2EE application servers are an investment, some will say a big investment, but the definition of corporate application server development and deployment standards can help companies to better manage enterprisewide application delivery, increase corporate agility and lower overall application life-cycle costs by enabling server consolidation. The result is increased developer productivity, decreased time to market, and reduced application and technology sprawl by mandating application server standards and constraining platform proliferation. META Group researchers further find that during the next two years, open source application servers will gain market share in the J2EE market, and force further vendor consolidation. And by 2006, Linux will become the preferred platform for J2EE execution. Finally, they conclude that the J2EE application server software stack has solidified, with products becoming much more similar and migration of code between platforms becoming steadily easier. IBM and BEA will remain the leaders, with Oracle as the leading challenger at the enterprise level.
Read more at http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=24501 and at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040310/105849_1.html...