The Great Recession (Or Worse) Of 2009 is upon us, and the watchword throughout business is thrift. And you know what's expensive? Application servers! They cost a lot to buy from the big guns, and they need a lot of care and feeding. A lot of Java shops are trying to figure out how to get away from paying for beasts like Weblogic and the like to move onto something a little cheaper.

Over at JavaLobby, SpringSource's Filip Hanik has a longish piece on tc Server, his company's offering, which is billed as an enterprise version of Tomcat. The article is not so noteworthy for its conclusion (hey, the guy from SpringSource thinks you should use SpringSource's server!) but for the lead-up, which talks about the common developer experience of working with -- and loving -- Tomcat during the development process, only to be stymied by the need to move to something gnarlier and more expensive at deployment time. tc Server's pitch is that it makes that transition easier, which is an interesting one.

Sun of course has its own dog in this fight, the Glassfish server, which it's eager to get folks jazzed up about, and thus is working to create an application ecosystem for it. The battle between the two servers comes to the fore in the comments on that DZone piece (and you know there's nothing I love more than a good blog comment fight). Sun's even offering free training, in a first-hit's-free sense. Since Glassfish is open source and free to download, Sun really needs that revenue stream -- a situation fairly common to Sun products. At least the relationship between the revenue and the free product is a little more tangible in this case.