The SPECjAppServer2004 application is an industry benchmark for testing Java Enterprise Edition applications. It's designed around an application that has features in five domains. From the design document:
The five SPECjAppServer2004 domains modeled are : Dealer, Manufacturing, Supplier, Customer, and Corporate. The Dealer domain encompasses the user interface components of a Web-based application used to access the services provided by the other domains (i.e., Manufacturing, Supplier, Customer and Corporate), which can be considered "business domains." In a company of the size being modeled, it is assumed that each business domain, has separate databases and applications. Most likely, they are implemented on separate computing hardware also. There are producer-consumer relationships between domains in the company and to outside suppliers and customers as well. For historical reasons, each business domain may have distinct entity IDs (i.e., the customer ID used in the customer domain may be different from the ID used for that same customer in the Supplier domain). It is for this reason that global customer or supplier databases are likely to exist in the Corporate domain, with accompanying applications.With three server nodes and one database instance, it scored 266 JOPS (jAppServer Operations Per Second), calculated as Dealer Transactions/sec + Workorders/sec. (For reference, the SPECjAppServer2004 FAQ mentions the application being run on 1.6GHz laptop with a 30GB HD, with 512MB RAM, and while the DB isn't specified, it attained a score of 2.) While this is the lowest score reported, comparing the configuration to the other submitted scores and factoring in the costs of software licensing, this score is quite good.
Note, also, that the nature of the application tested is "large," and not the most popular application of Java, Enterprise Edition; most applications developed tend to be much lighter and therefore might generate far different transaction patterns and stress points. Another factor is that the SPECjAppServer2004 application is designed to work with J2EE 1.3, not J2EE 1.4 or JEE 5, so some of the solutions might be considered "archaic" by the current specifications.
It might be interesting to see if there is potential in creating a standard "typical" JEE application, to generate transaction comparisons for non-Fortune 500 applications.