Enterprise Web
by David F. Carr

Sometimes The Best Tool Is
The One That's Closest

When looking at Web development tools, it helps to remember that people choose tools for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the tool that happens to be handy.

For example, Progress Software recently introduced me to a division of Cigna Retirement and Investment Services--a subsidiary of the Cigna insurance company--that is using Progress' WebSpeed application server for a benefits administration application. The Cigna division is currently employing the server on a relatively small scale on its Hartford office intranet, but in 1999 the server is slated to go out to a nationwide network of brokers, who in turn will have the option of offering Web access to their customers.

WebSpeed is a perfectly good Web application server, but it's essentially a Web incarnation of the Progress 4GL development environment. The tools and the relational database Progress sells are most successful as technologies that independent software vendors embed in other products.

It turns out that the vendor Cigna originally selected was McCamish Systems, an ISV that had created a benefits administration system using client-server technology from Progress. Cigna began working with Progress tools to modify and maintain the client-server system. Later, when Cigna wanted to move to the Web, it decided to use WebSpeed.

David J. Choleva, director of systems for the Cigna unit, said he probably wouldn't have wound up with WebSpeed if he had started with a clean sheet and gone looking for the best application server. Of course, when you're Web-enabling an existing application, by definition, you're not starting from scratch.

"It turned out to have been a pretty good choice," Choleva said. "At this point, it meets our needs. Two years from now, it might be something different."

Choleva has some interest in moving to a Java development environment, although he's in no hurry. So it's good news to him that Progress has made a commitment to bridging between the application servers for WebSpeed and for Apptivity, a Java-based environment also from Progress.

Still, the competitive advantage Choleva hopes to gain doesn't come from choosing the most cutting-edge technology so much as from getting the application finished and out to customers. The developers I spoke with described the WebSpeed development environment as just fine--it's not spectacular, necessarily, but it gets the job done.

This strikes me as an important corollary to the predictions that the Web application server market will narrow down to five or six top vendors, mostly familiar names like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Progress's Apptivity gets lumped in with SilverStream as a class of productive development environments that are likely to survive, but not as central architectural components. WebSpeed doesn't even show up in a Java-centric, consensus view of the future.

On the other hand, Progress isn't usually listed as a major relational database vendor, either, even though the Gartner Group's Dataquest division ranked it as the leading embedded database vendor.

Similarly, I suspect that there are a lot of vendors whose names aren't necessarily mentioned in the same breath with Oracle whose Web application servers will enjoy some respectable success just by being the tool that happens to be handy.

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