Why are Application Server licenses used instead of Development Application Server licenses?

For each Server Express Development license, five special Application Server licenses are installed automatically. These are named "Development Application Server Licenses" (Development AS Licenses). They will appear in the "apptrack" utility with the designation " **DEVELOPER USAGE". These Developer AS Licenses are separate from the normal Application Server licenses required to run deployed applications. Developer AS Licenses are provided for 'Testing Purposes', not for deployment usage.

When Application Server and Development AS licenses are both present, generally speaking Development AS licenses are consumed first, and Application Server licenses are consumed afterwards. But sometimes customers notice Application Server licenses being consumed first and Development AS licenses not being used at all. What might explain this?

As alluded to above, the Developer AS Licenses are provided for testing purposes. As a result, they can only be used when the Server Express development product has been installed on your UNIX system. If Server Express is not installed, then the Developer AS Licenses will not be used under any circumstances. 

For those cases where you have both the Server Express development and the Server Express Application Server products installed on the same UNIX server, which Application Server licenses get used and when will be determined by the contents of the COBDIR environment variable setting.

Application Server licenses are associated with a particular COBDIR (a location on disk where Server Express Application Server is installed), whereas Development AS licenses are not associated with a particular COBDIR. Generally speaking, in a system where both Server Express and Server Express Application Server are both installed; Development AS licenses should be consumed first. However, there is a certain type of COBDIR that will not use Development AS licenses under any circumstance - an Application Server COBDIR. This means the kind of COBDIR:

• That in the main installation menu was referred to as "Application Server for Server Express" instead of just "Server Express".
• That does not include development tools; for example does not contain these files:

  $COBDIR/bin/anim $COBDIR/bin/sde
  $COBDIR/bin/dfed $COBDIR/bin/tbox

We can expect such a COBDIR to entirely skip using Development AS licenses, and proceed to using the Application Server licenses (if any) with which it has been associated.

Reference Knowledge Base Document #18952