"The industry's continued emphasis on application integration, particularly with legacy systems, has really helped drive application servers into the heart of the enterprise," said Grisha Davida, president of SYS-CON Events, the event's producer. "Developers and IT managers alike are always asking exactly how the different application servers stack up. They want to know which ones support the latest WS-I specifications, which ones have the best performance, and -perhaps most importantly- which ones allow their developers to be the most productive. We will have vendor representatives from all the leading application server companies, including the emergent open source ones like JBoss and JOnAS."

Invited shootout participants include BEA (WebLogic), Borland (Borland Enterprise Server), IBM (WebSphere), JBoss (JBoss Application Server), JOnAS (Java Open Application Server), Macromedia (JRun), Microsoft (IIS / ASP.NET), Oracle (Oracle Application Server 10g), Orion (Orion Application Server), Sun (Sun Java System Application Server), and Sybase (EAServer).

"I predict a bloodbath," said Derek Ferguson, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's .NET Developer's Journal. "Once the J2EE developers see how much more productive they can be on the .NET platform, I am sure they will all decide to run their next application on Microsoft's platform!"

"Performance is what matters," responded Ajit Sagar, founding editor of SYS-CON's XML Journal and J2EE industry expert, on behalf of the editorial board of JDJ. "The developer productivity benefits are largely the same from one application server to the next, they are all just software containers tricked out with all the tedious application plumbing no one wants to write plus a runtime environment that enables components to be used by multiple applications."

The occasion will be a unique opportunity to learn first hand and on-site which app servers support the latest WS-I standards and how they compare in terms of how many transactions they can handle, how many lines of code they require, how they react to simulated network and hardware failures, and a whole range of other metrics.

"Even though Microsoft, IBM, and BEA have the lion's share of the market there are many viable app-server alternatives that offer excellent performance and ROI metrics for specific situations. As application servers are not a one-size-fits-all proposition, you will be in a position to find out at the Boston show which application server fits your specific performance and ROI metrics best," explained Davida.

The live shootout will be held on Friday, November 18 at 12 noon EST as a SYS-CON.TV pay-per-view event and registrations for this event opened earlier this week. SYS-CON will announce the confirmed participants of its second annual app server shoot-out. The live pay-per-view event will take place at the television studios in New York City's Rockefeller Center.

The first event was presented during SYS-CON's Web Services Edge Conference & Expo.