As the Internet and enterprise wide distributed systems become more prevalent in business IT systems, numerous advanced COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) middleware technologies have appeared on the market. One such leading middleware technology type is Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology. At present, there is an abundance of J2EE application server implementations in the marketplace with almost no discerning differences. The different product vendors all claim to have implemented the highest performance and most scalable product. The challenge for the potential J2EE application server user is then in choosing the right product for their purpose. In order to select a J2EE application server from the confusing J2EE product market, lots of organizations defined their own test suite and carried out their evaluation of J2EE product using their benchmark applications. Unfortunately evaluating application servers is a costly exercise, and proprietary benchmarks and correspondi...