I have to agree with you here. I am working at a digital music company now. They are using Broadvision as their application server to an informix database backend.

There are probably 60 people working on this project and you are right, it is amazing how easily the work is distributed among different task forces here.We have content developers, database administrators, system performance evaluators, user assurance (QA) testers, and of course, flat file parser/generator Perl people like me.

The competitor app-server for Java is called Dynamo by Art Technology Group. One of its strong points is how it automatically profiles user browsing activity to allow people to get ideas of user system use.