Progress Software Corp, a Bedford, Massachusetts-based supplier of application development tools and services, claims that the latest version of its Java application server oustrips its competitors in performance. In trials by Chicago-based industry analyst Doculabs Inc, Progress Apptivity 3.2 handled 5000 simultaneous users with a wait time of less than three seconds, more than double the number of users of Netscape’s Application Server 2.1, the nearest rival. For response timing tests on 2000 users, Apptivity was significantly faster than the competition, its speed of one second halving the response times of Netscape’s server and Sybase Enterprise Application Server 2.0.
Progress Apptivity 3.2 costs $10,000 per central processing unit, which can support between 50 and 300 users depending on the complexity of the application. Progress has about 600 worldwide customers for its Java application servers. Apptivity’s market focus is on Global 2000 companies which are developing web applications to access data in relational databases.
