I was lucky enough last week [22 March 2010] to moderate a panel at EclipseCon on the future of application servers. The panelists did a great job, but I thought were far too conservative in their views. I agree with them that many customers want evolutionary change from today to future app servers, but I see requirements driving app servers toward radical change. Inevitably.
The changes I see:
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Requirement
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Response
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Get more value from servers, get responsive, get agile and flexible
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Virtualized everything, dynamic provisioning, automated change management
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Govern rising application stack complexity
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Lean, fit to purpose app servers, profiles and other standard configurations, modeling and metadata-based development and deployment
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Provide “Internet scale”
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Scale-out app servers, data tiers, network capacity, modular/layered designs, stateless architectures
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