In recent years, growing demand for infrastructure that can manage hundreds or thousands of applications, integrate them, perform load balancing, provide messaging services, and so on, has led to a fiercely competitive application server market.
One type of application server software revolves around Sun Microsystems' Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). BEA WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere are the two leading application server products for the development of enterprise Java applications. Other vendors such as Sun, Oracle, SAP, and Sybase also compete in this area.
The second category is the Microsoft Platform, which relies on Windows, .NET, COM+, and other technologies. While Microsoft does not have an application server per se, it provides features in its Windows Server editions that compete with the J2EE application servers.
We provide interoperability with applications written for both the J2EE and Microsoft application server platforms. This section describes integration with J2EE application server platforms. Working with .NET Assemblies describes how to integrate COBOL with .NET.