Given unlimited money and time and asked to develop a J2EE based application, which app server will you choose?

What will be your approach in developing the app?

Constraints:
1) You need to connect to a legacy system.
2) You need to scalable.

JBoss.

As good as I'm sure JBoss is, it is largely unproven in the enterprise. WebLogic has the biggest market share, probably because it is usually far more up to speed with the specs and is already being used in many live systems and so is a proven product.

Of course, if this doesn't work for you, you can just try one of the other app servers, because you have unlimited time and money.

With unlimited time AND money, try them all and choose the one you like best :)

I've personally worked on iPlanet, Orion and SilverStream (now Novel eXtend).
I like SilverStream and Orion, iPlanet I didn't care for much.

Stay away from WebSphere, even IBM techs recommended us against it when we mentioned we'd want J2EE compliance (though this was some years ago and things may have improved) plus WebSphere is bloated...

WebSphere is also usually way behind the times. Just look at the tmie between WebLogic supporting full EJB 2.0 and WebSphere catching up.

I read an article interview a top IBM J2EE exec in JDJ. He mentioned that the reason why IBM is behind the latest standards in J2EE is that they try to make the product stable/robust for the customers before they bring in new items.

Any thoughts on "You need to connect to a legacy system." ???

How will you guys plan to do it?

Keep the discusssion going....

If you need to connect to a legacy system, I believe JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) would be the obvious choice to implement. Please visit the following website if you want to learn more about it.

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/connector/