Whenever an organization thinks about building and deploying a J2EE application, they think scalability and reliability. How can my Web site stay up 24/7? Will my infrastructure be able to handle the traffic? How can I ensure that I don't lose any transactions or data? How do I manage large server farms?

To answer these questions, many Java architects look to their application server's clustering features. This article looks at the kinds of features needed to develop robust J2EE applications and how JBoss 3.0, an open source J2EE application server, can be the solution of choice.