Many companies are contemplating to use AppServer, but are deadly afraid of doing so. Here are some thoughts about how to make developing and maintaining AppServer applications easy and very feasible.
There are three main issues I encountered over the years:
I used to think, that the top-main issue that AppServer novices run into is the amount of time it takes to get a program working, if the back-end is on the AppServer, which the front-end is using to access data.
One of the important things in software development is to do unit testing - that is a set of tests the programmer can do on a piece of code to be assured it is most likely working the way one wants it to.
Surprisingly it is rare to find unit test code as part of a source code file. If it is created at all (horror), it is usually tucked away on some developers disk someplace or simply thrown away!
What I have found helpful for myself as well as others working the same code, is to place a comment at the end of the program with the unit test code.