InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Bekins Worldwide Solutions Inc., a Hillside, Ill., moving company, turned to the Web to deliver self-service applications to its employees, agents, and customers. But it was hindered by an extensive set of legacy systems--an IBM mainframe, tons of IMS data, 3270 screens, and Cobol code everywhere. It looked like an E-business version of Mission Impossible at first, but with the help of an application server, in just three months Bekins developers turned out their first Web application, a self-service shipment-tracking application. "Without the application server, we wouldn't even have attempted a lot of what we did," says Randy Mowen, Bekins' director of data management.

The application server is becoming the star of E-business. Once regarded simply as a piece of middleware in dicey n-tier client-server application deployment schemes, the app server has quickly evolved into a key element of the E-business infrastructure. It takes requests from the Web server, runs the business logic, and provides connectivity to the entire range of back-end systems.

The proverbial jack-of-all-trades, the application server not only delivers middleware and enterprise application integration (EAI) functions but also can handle security, component brokering, and a host of other capabilities. For application programmers, it has emerged as the platform for E-business development with a full complement of application development tools and automatic code-generating capabilities.

With E-business and application servers, technology managers are being forced to revisit many of the development and deployment decisions they had previously resolved in the client-server world. They again have to choose development and deployment environments, middleware, tools, standards, and more. The selection of an application server can have far-reaching implications for the organization in terms of application-development speed, application performance and scalability, legacy systems integration, EAI, and staff training.

"Last year, the application server was seen as providing infrastructure for Web applications. Now, it has become an entire framework with things like ready-to-use commerce components," says Jean-Christophe Cimetière, CEO of analyst firm Techmetrix Research.

Vendors have been racing to enhance and extend the functionality of application servers in hopes of elevating their place in the technology food chain. As basic middleware, the application server is a low-value item. As infrastructure, it is more valuable--and as an E-business framework, it has greater value still. But at the top of the technology food chain are E-business solutions--ready-to-run high-level applications and pieces of applications--and that is the goal application server vendors are striving to reach. Once there, application servers will compete with emerging packaged E-business solutions; in some cases, they already are.

"Everybody wants to become a solution provider because solutions help users implement E-business fast," Cimetière says, and fast E-business is where the money is. With time-to-market resounding as the battle cry for E-business and first-mover advantage the desperately sought Holy Grail, solutions that can deliver speedy E-business applications stand to capture the biggest bucks.

The application server also holds the key to the company's E-business architecture, a major lever in a vendor's quest to control the customer account in the open-systems world. In the race to build E-business applications, companies don't have the time to slowly and deliberately hammer out an E-business application architecture. But through their selection of the application server, companies can get most of a ready-made architecture, including middleware, infrastructure, a framework, a set of standards, application development tools, and prebuilt components.

Today's application server performs in five major areas: business logic processing, automation of low-level plumbing and core processing, middleware, application development, and prebuilt components.

Business logic processing consists of hosting and running application logic components, increasingly in the form of JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans. The latest versions of the popular application servers are quickly standardizing on Java 2 Enterprise Edition, which provides an entire, portable component framework.

Food.com switched from an older application server running C components to the latest Bluestone Software Inc. application server running Java 2 Enterprise Edition, XML, and Java Server Pages."It gave us the ability to build the business logic as reusable components," says Rob Mayfield, chief architect at the San Francisco company. Developers were able to build the food-service E-business site simply by "dropping components on a page," he says. The developers made extensive use of tag libraries, which are prebuilt snippets of Java code that can be inserted into HTML pages to create Java Server Pages.

The automation of low-level plumbing and core processing is another area in which application developers get a big boost. The application server automatically generates networking and communications code and code for state management, transaction handling, session pooling, security, and other core functions. Some developers estimate that this assistance eliminates as much as 70% of the coding in an application.

"We needed to build our application in 100 days, so we needed some accelerators," says Stephen Worden, chief technology officer at Planalytics Inc. in Wayne, Pa., a company that applies long-range weather forecasting technology to business planning. Planalytics built two weather sites, Planalytics .com for natural gas purchasers and Weatherplanner.com. The low-level code generation performed by the company's Bluestone Sapphire application server helped it meet the short deadline. "We didn't have to write any Java Database Connectivity. We just fire off calls to the database. In the past, a Java programmer would have had to write it all by hand," Worden says.

The application server's middleware functions connect the E-business application with the company's back-end systems, legacy applications, and the systems and applications of various partners and third parties. Taking on enterprise application integration challenges, application servers, especially those supporting Java 2 Enterprise Edition, provide database connectivity through JDBC; messaging middleware through Java Messaging Service (JMS); and legacy middleware through the Java-Corba interface definition language. Increasingly, application servers are adding XML to their middleware EAI offerings.

The middleware functions drove Bekins Worldwide to IBM's WebSphere application server. "We needed to extend our environment, which was mainly IBM mainframes with 3270 screens everywhere," says Mowen. The plan was to use Java and the Web to give customers and employees access to applications previously running exclusively on the mainframe.

The company set out to convert as much of the application logic as possible to Java, using IBM's Visual Age for Java. Where Bekins couldn't convert to Java, it rewrote the code as stored procedures for its IMS database, and installed a WebSphere connector so IMS could run it.

continued...page 2