InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 30, 1998
Custom Apps Favored Over JavaBy Rich Levin
ome IS teams have chosen canned solutions to gain added server-side capabilities that native Java lacks. Others have built their own enterprise infrastructures rather than lock in to any one vendor's proprietary Java solution. But more than a few who have evaluated the state of Java on the server today have decided to take a pass, and go instead with proven multitier solutions from established enterprise vendors. The reason: performance.
"We don't consider Java a performance leader," says Dave Brewer, chief technology officer of Home Account Network Inc. in Charleston, S.C. "It's not a technology that's going to deliver the speed or performance of a native application. Unfortunately, the promises being made for future Java compilers running as fast as native code is a physical impossibility. I don't know how you're ever going to have interpreted code run faster than compiled code."
Brewer's IT development team built its Internet consumer banking application suite using Java clients, but went with the Forté Application Environment from Forté Software Inc. in Oakland, Calif., for all server-side execution logic. FAE°ree; is an object-oriented, native-code, rapid application development platform for building, deploying, and managing distributed applications.
The custom app is slated to be deployed this quarter by First Tennessee National Corp., in Memphis, the state's largest bank holding company, and could see extremely high user loa ds. "We may need to support 50,000 Web users concurrently at one time," Brewer says.
The app uses Java on the client to provide local processing on the desktop, but scalability is achieved through native code performance on multiple server-side platforms. "Java can supplant native code in a lot of areas, like pointer management, garbage collection, and reuse through portability," says Brewer, "but it's not going to beat native code for performance."
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Illustration by Matt Foster
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