Hi,

this look like a very stupid question, but I have to justify the use of an application server for my company's project to come :

- We plan no EJB use
- We plan to use Spring, JTA (JOTM f.e.), Persistence (Hibernate), and WS calls (Axis)
It is possible to do the whole application into a webapp (a single war file).

Other constraints :
- the application will be hosted on our platforms for most of our customers, and we have to provide them with quality hosting (possibly some fault tolerance, secure certificate-based login, and maybe when we have lot of customers : load balancing - yet we still can run more than one server and dispatch a few customers per servers)
- sometimes a customer will want to host the application inhouse, in his own application server, so it is strictly forbidden to insert any code that is not J2EE portable, and it would be highly convenient to limit the number of configuration files dependant on deploy architecture.

I/ What does a full J2EE compliant Application Server would provide me with that Web Containers like Tomcat can't ?

II/ What does advantage JBoss would have over Jonas f.e. ? (for hosting all our customers who don't want to host themselves).

Your help is greatly appreciated. I feel like I need to use JBoss, I just fail to justify it :(