InformationWeek

Without a lot of fanfare, "J2EE has emerged as the platform of choice at this point," says Max Grasso, chief technology officer of Netnumina Solutions Corp., a Boston developer of custom applications for both international companies and startup dot-coms. The sudden popularity of Java 2 Enterprise Edition is because of the infrastructure it provides for building enterprise solutions fast. "With J2EE, we don't have to worry about the database or security or things like that. In the past, we had to wrestle with those kinds of details from the start," Grasso says.

In addition to providing an efficient programming language, Java 2 Enterprise Edition gives users an entire standardized development and deployment infrastructure, something IT has long needed. "IT organizations have spent years rushing to build individual solutions to meet pressing priorities without taking the time to build an application architecture," says Evan Quinn, a senior analyst at Hurwitz Group. "J2EE, however, allows an IT organization to almost back into an architecture. After a few years of building J2EE applications, they will automatically get the things an architecture provides, such as interoperability and portability."

For IT managers, the emergence of Java 2 Enterprise Edition promises a fast way to build server-side applications by creating functionality in the form of Enterprise JavaBeans and running them on a J2EE-compliant application server. J2EE takes care of much of the underlying plumbing for such activities as transaction handling, database connectivity, host integration, and messaging. J2EE, in effect, promises to do for distributed server-side computing what Microsoft's ActiveX and Component Object Model did for Windows-based desktop computing, which is to provide a widely accepted, standardized development platform.

But such distributed, component-based application development remains a formidable challenge, especially when the goal is to build sophisticated, highly scalable E-business systems. J2EE still requires Java programming and all the advanced technical design, development, and integration skills required to build complex production applications.

Java 2 and J2EE are a far cry from the Java that managers encountered even two or three years ago, after its introduction in 1995. Initially, Java was viewed as a programming language that would finally bring application portability to the desktop. Writing in Java, IT organizations could write an application once and it would run on any system that had a Java virtual machine--which quickly became virtually every machine. Java and its write-once, run-anywhere portability promised to break the Microsoft lock on the desktop.

It quickly became apparent that Java wasn't about to overthrow Microsoft on the desktop. Java applets, the key to rich desktop functionality, were cumbersome and slow to download. Java itself performed poorly; the early Java virtual machines were not optimized for top performance, and the user desktops did not offer the kind of CPU horsepower that's commonplace on business desktops today. And Java's write-once, run-anywhere claim turned out to be riddled with exceptions.

But Java was young technology back then; it needed time to mature. Meanwhile, the hoopla around Java died down as IT turned its attention to other more pressing issues, such as the year 2000 problem.

With the Y2K effort completed, IT has found itself in a race to the Internet and E-business. The quickest way to turn out critical, distributed Web applications is component-based development and n-tier deployment utilizing a battery of application servers. These servers acted as both the mechanism to dish up the new generation of applications and the middleware to connect the front end with a company's legacy back-end production systems, a heterogeneous mix of incompatible technologies.

When application developers looked around for the technology to build this new class of applications, it found slim pickings. There was Microsoft with ActiveX components, COM and COM+, and its DNA framework, but "these were still only Windows," Quinn says. The new enterprise E-business environment, however, is as multiplatform as one can get.

Corba had emerged as an industry component standard promulgated by the Object Management Group, but it failed to keep pace with the Internet and the rush to E-business. Instead, Corba found itself deployed mainly in mainframe environments as a way to wrap legacy code for use as components. Java 2 Enterprise Edition provides for interoperability with Corba through Java interface definition language, a Corba IDL-to-Java compiler.

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