How much does WebObjects cost to deploy?

This article is not going to argue that WebObjects isn't expensive to deploy; all serious web applications are expensive to deploy. Instead, the purpose of this article is to discuss ALL the costs of deploying a site in WebObjects and compare those costs to other parts of the system. A secondary purpose is to illustrate how to scale a WebObjects server based on demand, and available resources.

WebObjects is one section of pipe in a long pipeline. That pipeline includes your connection to the internet, your web server, the web-server to WebObjects adaptor, the Enterprise Objects Framework, the adaptor between EOF and your database, and your database. All of these sections of the pipeline will be affected by your hardware: How much RAM do you have? How fast is your disk drive? How much CPU? What is your network topology? Most people who have deployed large WebObjects sites have found that WebObjects was the cheapest component. One site spent $1,000,000 on RAM; compared to that, the $100,000 they spent for two WO licenses was nothing.

For illustration, I'm going to consider two web applications: a commerce site, and a corporate information site. The idea is that we'll take these two applications and scale them up through the stratosphere so that you can see that at some point the cost of WebObjects is meaningless; its generally drowned out by the cost of the back end, that is, the databases.

For me, one of the best things about WebObjects is that the new transaction per minute licensing scheme makes WO one of the cheapest, and most scalable solutions going.

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