Lean, Mean Enterprise Power
By Michiel de Bruijn
The world might be short on many things, but application servers that comply with Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
specification definitely aren't on that list.
In fact, it seems that just about every vendor that wants to play in the Java tool space is also trying to push its own application
server.
Allaire, probably best known for its ColdFusion Web development and
deployment tool, recently joined the fray
with an updated version of JRun Server. Until its June '99 acquisition by Allaire, JRun was a Live Software product. The new 3.0 version also takes advantage of the
technology Allaire acquired from Valto Systems in January of this year. (JRun 3.0 is the official upgrade for previous users of Valto's Ejipt.)
JRun's feature list looks fairly typical for any J2EE product: Java Server Pages/Servlet support (JSP 1.1 and Servlet API 2.2),
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB 1.1), Messaging Server (JMS 1.0), and Transaction Server
(JTA 1.0). Its marketing material doesn't
offer any revolutionary insight on what the product does, either, sticking with the
familiar claims of facilitating e-commerce.
Still, JRun is an unusual product in many ways. First, there's its price. The Enterprise edition per-CPU cost—under $5000—is
significantly lower than what most other major vendors charge, and organizations that need only JSP and servlet support for the time being can go with the lower-cost Professional edition.
