HP Announces Free J2EE-compliant Version of its Application Server
Following up on yesterday's article on changes in the application server market, we learned that Hewlett-Packard Middleware recently announced a "zero cost" J2EE-compliant version of its Hewlett-Packard Application Server. HP-AS is the next generation of the Bluestone Application Server, which HP got control of when it took over Bluestone Software in January 2001.
Prior to its acquisition by HP, Bluestone had a very good reputation locally. It had cut its teeth in the consulting services business and was known later as a pillar of New Jersey trade groups for technology companies and software development companies. The product now known as HP-AS was developed as a platform for implementing scalable web applications at their consulting division. It has always had a long feature set, but third-party developers sometimes criticized it for having weak documentation.
It will be interesting to see how HP has improved the product since they took over the company. And, now that they have a no cost version, it should be much easier to evaluate. In our experience, very few commercial application server vendors provide true J2EE compliance at the no cost price point, if they offer such a price point at all.