August 14, 2000

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The New Developer Portals

Buying, selling, and building components on the Web speeds companies' time to market

By Andy Patrizio

More on components:

EETimes Managing redundant components (7/24/00) Electronic Buyers' News Special Report: Distribution -- Surviving the online jungle (7/10/00) Electronic Buyers' News Solectron finding a way out (6/19/00)

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omponent-based development is hardly new: People have wrestled with the idea of building their applications from reusable parts since the mainframe days. Whether it's development cost, time to market, lack of highly skilled staff, or a desire to avoid reinventing the wheel, the idea of reusable components has been around for some time. Making it work, however, has been another matter entirely.

For the longest time, components were tied to one particular platform and language. There was no guarantee an existing component could actually be reused by another developer, even for another project in the same company, much less for a project in another company.

Adding to the complication of component reuse was the fact that the sands of the infrastructure kept shifting under developers. "You didn't have a complete model that was static long enough to develop something on it," says James Barry, VP of strategic initiatives for Collab.Net Inc. in San Francisco, a Web site for developers that offers tools, components, and services. "By the time you were done, the model had changed. If you were willing to lock your shop in to technology that you weren't going to upgrade for three to five years, then you could do pretty well with components, but no one wanted to do that."

The concept of reusable components has been around since the 1980s, but it really took off with the emergence of the Internet as a medium and the maturation of object models, most notably Corba, Microsoft's Component Object Model, and Sun Microsystems' Java. Given the plug-and-play nature of these models, it was inevitable that a marketplace for components would emerge.

ComponentSource.com, the first commercial Web site to sell components, set up shop in 1995, selling code such as Visual Basic extensions. The Web site was created because its founders, programmers themselves, couldn't find a decent outlet for reusable components. "It was hard because there weren't a lot of resellers offering components back in the early '90s, and the ones that did would carry only the top sellers," says Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource.com in Atlanta.

Even with components selling for as much as $10,000, they're still cheaper than a yearlong development project. "If you're looking at a time to market of 90 days instead of one year and all the business issues, and then compare that price vs. the cost of development and the fact that you could get a 30% to 50% reduction of time in development, then that's not a whole lot of money," says Tom Dwyer, managing director of enterprise Java at the Aberdeen Group.

The whole issue revolves around time to market, Patterson says. "Companies out there have to be able to beat their competitors to market with services and apps," he says. "You don't want your programmers writing something that's not their core competency. The supply of components is getting larger and larger, so companies are able to create more pieces of their apps using these components for faster time to market and lower costs."

Java components gained momentum with the first major enterprise-scale Java technology, Java 2 Enterprise Edition. J2EE is a platform for mainframe-scale computing across distributed systems that consist of several components that work together. J2EE includes Corba support, Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, JavaServer Pages--Sun's answer to Microsoft's Active Server Pages--and Java Servlets (server applets). All of these components allow for more-powerful Java-based applications on the server. "People are starting to build systems on 20-to 30-machine clusters of application servers using J2EE," says Suneet Shah, chief technology officer with Diamelle Technologies Inc., a software and consulting services firm in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y. "Those things weren't feasible in the early days of Java or other languages."

J2EE application servers in and of themselves are simply containers for components. After you pick the application server you're going to run, the next thing you look for are components that you drop into the server. Because of standardization across platforms, customers aren't tied to any one vendor.

"Most large companies have gotten sophisticated enough to know that they want to avoid getting locked in to a single vendor," says Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline.com Inc., another component portal based in Cleveland, Ohio. "There are 30 different vendors providing application servers. Customers can start with BEA Systems, and if BEA falls behind technologically, then there's an out to IBM's line of servers without having to waste thousands of years of development time because the architectures are relatively compatible."

There was also the matter of finding the components. While you could get a collection of components with rapid application development tools, such as Inprise Corp.'s Delphi, third-party players were usually small and didn't have the marketing reach of major players such as IBM, so their components weren't widely distributed.

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Illustration by Laura Coyle
Photo of Patterson by Mark Escher
Photo of Stack by Roger Mastroianni

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