In the last 5 years, server side application server technology became very popular. The two most popular, .NET and J2EE have a large mindshare in the commercial world. Application servers have raised the productivity of server side web developers. In this paper we give a short overview of the his- tory of application servers, and try to answer the question: what options or fea- tures would raise the productivity even more? While building commercial web- sites at  , we found out that that a combined web-based development environment and persistent runtime environment raised our productivity, even compared to .NET or J2EE environments. In this paper we describe such a sys- tem built at  , which we called a WRDE (Web-based Runtime and Devel- opment Environment), and show the strength and weaknesses of this approach.
['Martijn van Berkum', 'Sjaak Brinkkemper', 'Arthur V. Corrêa Meyer']
A Combined Runtime Environment and Web-Based Development Environment for Web Application Engineering