While attending JavaZone recently, I went to a talk by Neal Ford. To be honest, the talk was not something mind-blowing, many tools he showed were either outdated or not best of breed, but he stated a very important fact: application servers are meant to address resources scarcity by sharing resources, while those resources are no more scarce in this day and age. In fact, this completely matches my experience. Remember 10 years ago when we had to order hardware 6 months in advance?