Java Power Play
Java, less than two years old, is ready to go where it has never been before: the server. But have IT concerns been addressed?By Clinton Wilder , Andy Patrizio , and Rich Levin
Issue date: March 31, 1997
Java has reached a turning point. Less than two years old, the programming language is moving from being an unproven but promising technology to becoming a reliable tool for bu ilding business-critical enterprise applications.
This week, Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft unit will help make the decision to use Java even easier for corporate developers. Sun will announce plans to take the technology where it has never been before: the server. JavaSoft's Java Platform for the Enterprise will lead a blitz of announcements aimed to alleviate corporate IT's most pressing concerns about the red-hot but still nascent language-security, stability, transaction support, and true cross-platform portability. IBM is preparing to make a similar move before year's end.
The Java momentum is startling. More than 25,000 developers are expected to attend neighboring trade shows-JavaOne and Software Development '97-in San Francisco this week. At SD '97 alone, more than 40 Java products will be introduced, compared with just one-Symantec Corp.'s Visual CafŽ for Java-at the same show last year.
Window For Java
Even Microsoft plans to make a Java power play. Chairman Bill Gates will focu
s on Microsoft's efforts to "make Java real in the enterprise" in his keynote speech on April 2 at SD '97, says a Microsoft spokeswoman. According to one source close to the company, Microsoft is working to encapsulate key portions of the Windows 95 and NT application programming interface as Java class libraries. This would make Windows programs written in C++, Visual Basic, or other Windows development environments more easily portable to Java. It's not known when this technology will be announced, and Microsoft declined comment.
Java is winning praise from corporate users as a solid platform for a broad spectrum of enterprise applications. "We've been looking at it for more than a year, and now we feel that the security and other holes that were there have been filled," says Karen Lekowski, corporate Webmaster at Deere & Co. in Moline, Ill. The farm- and industrial-equipment maker is considering using Java to rebuild current HTML interfaces on extranet applications that let Deere dealers order part s, check order status, and schedule maintenance.
Lombard Brokerage Inc. uses Java to deliver graphical stock performance updates and trading capability to its traders' desktops. "Our financial services business is very dynamic, very analytical, and very transaction oriented," says John MacIlwaine, president of Bay One Technologies Group, Lombard's San Francisco IT arm. "All these things lend themselves to Java. It is now poised for everyone to use it."
Other new fans of Java's cross-platform portability and dazzling speed of development include J.P. Morgan & Co. It recently went live with a core-business Java application called Emerging Markets Debt Option Pricing System, a program that delivers real-time updates about the financial institution's derivative products to the Web browsers of its sales representatives and clients worldwide. Development time? Just two months.
"That sort of time frame is unheard of in a traditional environment," says Steven Boal, VP of emerging-market derivatives technology at J.P. Morgan in New York.
But as seductive as that sounds, many companies are still hesitant to embrace a platform that's less than two years old-and consultants think they're right. Says John Rymer, a VP at industry research firm Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass., "There's a difference between announcing a set of directions and delivering mature, robust, quality products that implement those directions. It just takes time."
Indeed, there are still some concerns about Java's portability, particularly on the client side. Analysts argue that there's often inconsistent performance of Java applets on different platforms. "There are certain functions in the Java Virtual Machine that Sun leaves up to individual developers, such as the multithreading model," says J.P. Morgenthal, an independent analyst in Hewlett, N.Y. "That means application performance can vary from one platform to another."
Security Concerns
Security is still a concern for some users as well. "There i
s no way I will allow Java into our environment until there's a way to secure the desktop," says Drew Moen, technical services manager at Transkrit Corp., a Roanoke, Va., maker of business forms.
But version 1.1 of the Java Developers' Kit, which was released in December and includes Netscape Communications' Secure Sockets Layer encryption as part of the language, has given users such as Lombard more confidence in developing and deploying Java applications outside firewall-protected intranets onto customer desktops.
At JavaOne and SD '97, Java inventor Sun, industry heavyweights such as Oracle and IBM, and an army of smaller third-party Java developers will take steps toward filling Java's gaps. Java Platform for the Enterprise, which JavaSoft plans to ship by year's end, is a combination of APIs, tools, and specifications that are designed to ease development of server-side transaction-based applications. "Right now, people use Java components to build a desktop application, but the server software world has been aching for a cross-platform technology," says Jon Kannegaard, VP of software at JavaSoft in Cupertino, Calif.
Transaction Boost
At the core of Java Platform for the Enterprise is Enterprise JavaBeans, an architecture specification that handles interaction between JavaBeans and back-end services, such as database connectivity, network directory services, and transaction services.
The new JavaSoft products could help bolster a Java-based transaction-system development effort under way at Fannie Mae in Washington, the nation's largest home mortgage broker. "Nobody's really tried it yet, but we're optimistic," admits Carol Teasley, VP of object technology. "Sun has been more than willing to work on what we regard as a shortcoming to Java, and we think Java shows clear promise to us to be able to handle transaction processes."
JavaOne will also see increased activity in Java database application development. IBM, JavaSoft, Oracle, and Tandem Computers will present a draft sp ecification for J/SQL, a version of the database industry standard Structured Query Language that's embedded in Java. Steve Levine, director of product marketing with Oracle's server technologies division, says J/SQL will let database developers working with Java write shorter programs and do error checking earlier in the development process.
Java's versatility is a big reason so many competing enterprise-software vendors are flocking to support and enrich it. IBM says it is investing $200 million a year in Java development. Every one of IBM's software groups has major projects centered on around Java. "We want Java access from everything to everything we do," says Alfred Spector, IBM's general manager of transaction systems.
At the JavaOne conference, IBM will release Bean Machine, which has been available in beta under the name Applet Author. Bean Machine lets nonprogrammers take pieces of Java code and turn them into Bean objects, which can then be embedded in a Web page. IBM will also release a J ava version of its VisualAge development toolset, which fully utilizes the Beans component model, letting developers create and use Beans in the VisualAge environment ( IW, March 24, p. 87 ).
Like Sun, IBM later this year will roll out tools that will let developers build server-side applications or "servlets," says John Swainson, IBM's general manager of application development solutions.
Other products that will debut at this week's shows include Sybase's Jaguar Component Transaction Server ( see story , p. 73). ObjectSpace Inc. in Dallas will announce Voyager, a pure Java ORB (object request broker) that lets developers use Java's standard object messaging syntax to create autonomous agents. These agents can automatically travel throughout a distributed network, performing tasks such as updating information on multiple clients and servers. Also, Soffront Software Inc. in Milpitas, Calif., will announce TrackJava, an extension of its Tra ck bug-tracking and defect-management tool that monitors and documents team-oriented software development, and helps IT managers identify weaknesses in large-scale development projects.
New Challenges
The rash of new products is good news for corporate IT developers-but it brings new challenges, too. "We had to spend a lot of time doing market research because all the widgets and components come on the market so quickly," says Andrew Mantis, director of expense-management products at American Express Co. in New York. By year's end, American Express plans to deliver a Java version of its Expense Manager suite of applications that it supplies to its Corporate Card customers to manage expense reports on their intranets. But Mantis says Java's cross-platform advantage makes it well worth the effort.
The fact that Java is now supported by 18 major platforms willsustain its momentum at companies such as J.P. Morgan, which runs Unix, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and Macintosh clients across its globa l enterprise. That support, and the speed of development enabled by Java, should send it flowing into more business applications in the coming months. "Ours is a very dynamic business," says Morgan VP Boal, "and you can't fit a dynamic business into a static development model anymore."
With additional reporting by John Foley , Marianne Kolbasuk McGee , Tom Stein , and Mary Hayes
Want to talk more about Java? Join in on our chat
http://www.informationweek.com
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
