A Combined Runtime Environment and Web-Based Development Environment for Web Application Engineering

In the last 5 years, server side application server technology became very popular. The two most popular, .NET and J2EE have a large mindshare in the commercial world. Application servers have raised the productivity of server side web developers. In this paper we give a short overview of the history of application servers, and try to answer the question: what options or features would raise the productivity even more? While building commercial websites at , we found out that that a combined web-based development environment and persistent runtime environment raised our productivity, even compared to .NET or J2EE environments. In this paper we describe such a system built at , which we called a WRDE (Web-based Runtime and Development Environment), and show the strength and weaknesses of this approach.