INTRODUCTION Corporations are involved in different types of e-business applications varying from a simple application, for selling one or a few products through the Internet, to complex applications, consisting of supply-chain management and purchasing of supplies from other businesses. In the complex e-business environment, they are facing new challenges, such as managing a high volume of transactions, rapid applications development and modifications up front, making use of existing resources, and application integration with business partners. The key to meet these challenges is to change business models. The corporations have turned to multi-tier client/server (c/s) systems using component model standards. Multi-tier c/s system in the e-business environment consists of physically, the web server, application server and data server, and logically, presentation logic, business logic and data logic. To glue together these tiers, a component-oriented middleware technology which supports enterprise application development is commonly used at present. There are three standards for implementing component-oriented middleware. They are Microsoft's COM+ (Component Object Model +), Sun's EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) and Object Management Group's CCM (CORBA Component Model). Vendors build application servers according to the component model specifications. At present, there are no application servers available according to CCM specifications. Microsoft's Windows 2000 servers use COM+ standards. There are many EJB application servers, such as IBM's WebSphere, BEA's WebLogic, Oracle's application server, etc. Application servers, built according to the component model specification, enable developers to concentrate on programming the business logic. They do not have to write the "plumbing code" (Suresh Raj, p. 3) for such features like security, resource pooling, persistence, transactional integrity, and database connections, which will be provided by the application servers. The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of COM+ and EJB application servers for complex e-business enterprise applications.
