InformationWeek

June 19, 2000

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Application Servers Fuel E-Business

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In addition, an automated servlet generator afforded Bekins' developers an almost 75% productivity increase by eliminating the need for manually written servlets. "Because we had WebSphere and Visual Age for Java, we could take advantage of just about everything IBM offered in integration and auto-coding," Mowen says.

ChoicePoint Inc. in Atlanta opted for BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic application server because of its tight integration with BEA's Tuxedo transaction-processing middleware. ChoicePoint provides access to public records over the Internet, but because not all public records are online, ChoicePoint routes some requests to field offices for offline processing. Its complex application validates users, processes transactions, routes requests, and uses Java Server Pages to generate the results as HTML pages; it was built using several Tuxedo middleware services including an additional security layer, says VP of technology Matthew Eberz.

Pitney Bowes Inc. relies on Bluestone's connectors "to integrate with everything our installed base might have," says Bernie Gracey, director of software and systems engineering. Gracey's team is building the Danbury, Conn., company's production mail and document factory product and uses the Bluestone application server to connect to Corba systems, IBM MQSeries, SAP, and more.

In terms of application development, the application server is delivering many of the capabilities once provided by the integrated development environment. In some cases, such as with the SilverStream application server, the IDE is an integral part of the product. In other cases, tight integration is provided with a standalone IDE, such as with WebSphere and Visual Age for Java. BEA Systems' WebLogic includes Visual Café and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. As application servers embrace Java 2 Enterprise Edition, however, they become open to any IDE that produces J2EE-compliant code.

"We chose SilverStream more for the application development environment than the application server," notes Jeff Bush, Web development manager at Mutual Insurance Corp. of America in East Lansing, Mich. The company had built client-server applications in PowerBuilder, a fourth-generation language. When the Web came along, Mutual initially tried to use a Web-enabled version of PowerBuilder.

Mutual sells insurance to physicians and turned to E-commerce as a direct channel for medical malpractice insurance. The Web application registers physician visitors and allows them to request quotes for coverage. The next version, now under development, will provide real-time quotes. The entire application is being built using the SilverStream application server and its development tools.

"The SilverStream development environment is easy to use, it's totally Java, and it makes things very simple," says Bush. The developers particularly like the intuitive graphical interface and the automation of much of the Java coding.

Finally, application servers are providing prebuilt components--such as tag libraries, servlets, JavaBeans, or Enterprise JavaBeans--that promise to rival packaged applications. In the Microsoft world, prebuilt components are based on the Component Object Model.

Packaged components, however, are pretty new to application servers. As a result, they are attracting interest from developers, but few have used them yet in production applications. Bekins Worldwide's Mowen sees the application server complementing, rather than replacing, packaged solutions. The company expects to implement both i2 Technologies for logistics and transportation management and Siebel Systems for CRM. "We hope WebSphere will be able to support both of them," he says.

One of the big reasons for using application servers and n-tier application deployment schemes is scalability. Application server vendors build in scalability in a number of ways. At the most basic level, the application server provides simultaneous session pooling, state management, and connections to back end resources for multiple users.

The application server may also provide vertical scaling by substituting a bigger, more powerful hardware platform--a faster processor, more disk and memory, more cache, more processors (for symmetric multiprocessing or parallel processing), or server clusters. Or the company can fire up more instances of the Web application on more servers, referred to as horizontal scaling. A really large site will likely do both.

Then there is platform scaling, a type of vertical scaling. For example, eDaycare started small with Windows NT, but it planned from the start to migrate to Sun's Solaris platform for greater scalability. With WebLogic as the application server, and by programming completely in Java, Rahman expects no problem with this migration.

Scalability, however, becomes very complex from a system standpoint. The application server must provide automatic load balancing to efficiently distribute the processing among resources. It must also coordinate and manage session information across multiple instances of the application. Fortunately, the application server handles most of these functions behind the scenes, allowing the application developer to focus on the business logic.

Still, how the developers design and build the application can greatly affect scalability. "Performance varies, depending on how you build the application and on how you separate the different components," notes Cimetière, who says he has encountered significant differences in performance, depending upon the design of the application.

"For scalability, we set up multiple processes and add more application servers," says Victor Brilon, technology architect at Anywhereyougo.com, a Dallas portal for wireless application development. As hardcore Java programmers, Brilon's team uses Enhydra, an open-source application server, along with the Apache Web server. "Then, we load-balance between the Web server and application server," he says.

Preparing for high volume from the start, Planalytics wrote its code to support large numbers of page views. "Scalability is almost very easy," says Worden. The application servers run on richly configured Unix machines, and an Oracle database resides on a four-processor machine. As volume grows, the developers intend to roll out more Bluestone application servers.

Application servers are supposed to make life easier for developers, and the newest generation of products is starting to live up to that promise. By automating the underlying communications and core processing, and by addressing basic scalability issues, the application server lets developers focus on E-business, not plumbing. But even with the best application server, building E-business applications is far from idiot-proof; you'll still need skilled developers.