Could some one invite Apple. I think it would be a perfect oportunity for WebObjects to show off

I am sure Apple would be more than happy to go toe-to-toe with all the vendors listed... WebObjects is more than a match for them, costs $700, runs on Windoze, OS X, Solaris and Linux, and, oh yeah, invented the web application category. Thank you NeXT.
http://www.apple.com/webobjects

An important facet of the whole performance game is TCO - what do the vendors offer the total solution with application servers at?

Does the hardware come free with the server, or does the software come free? Or is it a subscription based model?
Does the hardware and software come free, only an agreement to have Consulting Services need to be made?

These are some of the more important questions one needs to answer - so what if Appserver-A is 5% faster than Appserver-B??

I suppose it is somewhat interesting to see what the performance of these server is. I *yawn* suppose.

Look, the biggest problem with these servers isn''t raw performance. It''s that they are becoming increasingly unstable as more and more features are crammed in faster and faster to keep up with this kind of "do they have feature XXX" shootout. I can deal with 50% worse performance with double the boxes, which is barely a ripple in the budget. I can''t deal with systems that go out for days at a time, that can''t be tuned except by level-3 support people (in production), or with development "standards" that are obsolete six months later.

The "simulated network and hardware failures" is the most interesting part of this, but, I suspect, will also be the most glossed over. However, most of the failures these days aren''t at the network or machine level. It''s the app servers themselves failing. How will this "shootout" deal with that?

Update:

Pramati joins app-server shoot-out, confirms their participation.

http://www.pramati.com/index.jsp

If you really want to hold an application server shootout, bring in Macromedia''s ColdFusion MX server and New Atlanta''s Blue Dragon products. They bring all the benefits and performance of J2EE, plus the rapid development benefits of CFML. Including .NET but excluding other, similar, Enterprise-class application servers does a disservice to those who are really interested in an objective comparison.

Answering Miguel:

Our XBanywhere server (http://www.XB.com) runs under Tomcat on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. We created it using JBuilder and Intelli-J IDEA. While I will grant you that IDEA has some great re-factoring features, by-and-large the developer productivity I''ve experienced on the J2EE platform has only been a fraction of the productivity I''ve had under .NET. And VS.NET, unlike IDEA, doesn''t pause for 30 seconds every few minutes while the garbage collector runs. :-)

Answering John McKay:

Minutes after the press announcement of our invitation yesterday, Oracle and IBM teams contacted us for immediate details. We are in the process of formally inviting all companies mentioned in this release.

"in hopes to force the vendors to sign up as sponsors?!?!"

I don''t recall any mention of "sponsorship" in the invitation. You don''t need to subscribe to a magazine to send an article proposal, you don''t need to advertise to nominate your product in readers'' choise awards, or sponsor the show to participate at the shoot-out, you just need an invitation in this case. (I believe most of these companies have been participating at the Edge show for years anyway.)

If you are in one of the invited teams and don''t have the travel budget, we can even organize a fund raiser for you. :-) If any team declines our invitation, we don''t think the reason will be "no money for travel."

I know it won''t happen but it would be nice if the results of the shootout were published so the world would know. Folks on tight budgets that can''t attend will never know what happened. Too bad for the industry.

I wonder if Mr. Derek Ferguson ever tried other developer tool beside MS Visual Studio .Net?
Did he runs ever a Web app. in Linux or Unix?
Hi Mr. Derek Ferguson, please see BEA WebLogic Workshop, that´s the integrated Service Environment tool that you looking for.

Did they even notify any of these companies before announcing this? Or is this just a surprise broadside in hopes to force the vendors to sign up as sponsors?!?!

Anyone remebers which company won this year? I know one of the rules of the competition was the winner could not publicize the results

http://www.sys-con.com/2001/PR/code.cfm?page=06242002

I remember these shoot-outs get very tense for the teams on stage but they also throw a lot of goodies to the audience. Gee the last shoot-out I went to was like the superbowl, I came home with 8 t-shirts!

This "app server shoot-out" reference from 1999 is interesting:

http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Editorial/AppServerShootout.html

It requires a level playing field for all participating companies.

I am guessing the SYS-CON Media invitation will be treated as spam. If I were one of the listed companies I would not waste money amusing the publishers of this rag.