InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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December 18/25, 2000 |
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Java Draws Corporate Converts
Development staffs are using the language and the J2EE platform for business-critical apps
By Alan Radding
o more excuses. It's time for Java in corporate IT. Bursting onto the scene five years ago--eons ago in Internet time--Java should be ready to take its place on the menu of acceptable, mature enterprise technologies. At least, that's the intent with the latest release of Java 2 Enterprise Edition.After years in which Java development seemed to be reserved primarily for Internet applications, hot dot-com developers, consultants, and geeks, the business world finally seems to be catching on to Java, a programming language from Sun Microsystems. Its appeal lies not just in its affinity for the network and distributed computing, although intranet, extranet, and Internet applications remain the major focus of Java development, but in Java's other qualities, such as ease of programming and cross-platform capabilities. "We're pretty much moving to Java for everything. We particularly prefer its cross-platform capabilities," says a developer at a large multinational corporation.
But even as corporate developers increasingly opt for Java, there remains some concern about the readiness of the environment for Java 2 Enterprise Edition. "We're doing a lot of Java development, but we're using Java 2 Standard Edition, not J2EE," says Lana Mangold, application systems manager at J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. in Lowell, Ark. The company has 10 active Java developers on staff and is training 16 more. At present, about 60% to 70% of all application development at Hunt is done in Java. "Long term, we'd like to go completely to Java," says David Lilly, director of application development.
For Hunt, the appeal of Java is the ease it allows in creating Web-based self-service applications that let customers check shipment status, enter orders, and perform other tasks over the Internet via a browser. These aren't anything fancy, just an HTML front end and Java servlets on the back end running on the company's Web server. "We want to make it easy for even mom-and-pop customers to do business with us," Mangold says.
But Java isn't just for E-business, either. Hunt is also developing Java applications for internal use, deploying Java clients to employee desktops. One such application uses a visualization component, SpatialFX from ObjectFX Corp., to let employees monitor and manage truck capacity graphically. The Java application runs on employee desktops within a Delphi application, which provides the rest of the functionality.
A number of issues are standing in the way of J2EE adoption by corporate application-development groups, however. These include concerns about the maturity of the development environment, the need to find or train more Java developers, the complexity of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and the need to upgrade to the new generation of J2EE application servers to take full advantage of the technology. There's also an undercurrent of concern about what Microsoft is doing with its .Net initiative and C# and what impact, if any, those actions will have on a development group's Java plans.
"If you believe all the hype, Java for the enterprise is here now. But if you look at the fine print, you'll see that it comes close, but it's not quite all the way there," says Mike Gilpin, VP and research leader at Giga Information Group.
The fine print, however, doesn't appear to be discouraging Java adoption, judging from the Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server market. Giga projects the application server market will reach $1.64 billion in 2000 and $9 billion by 2003, up from about $585 million in 1999.
J2EE application servers are emerging as the key to developing and deploying scalable enterprise Java applications. Application servers provide the necessary infrastructure to execute, manage, and maintain business-critical applications, especially E-business applications. J2EE defines the programming model and provides the key underlying services, such as security, transaction management, and messaging, to enable developers to quickly build networked Java applications and effectively deploy them in the distributed world.
"The Enterprise JavaBeans component model and associated Java 2 Enterprise Edition standards will dominate the application server market and drive a potential market growth rate of almost 180% year to year," Gilpin says.
A rush to deploy the latest J2EE application servers in the business environment is fueling this growth. Observers count upward of 200 application servers being offered today, with more appearing weekly. However, Gilpin expects only a few to dominate the market. "We see potentially as few as two or three companies each claiming 20% or more of the market and several smaller vendors that specialize in market niches claiming less than 10% each," he says.
The J2EE application servers likely to emerge on top include BEA Systems' WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, Sun's own iPlanet, and Sybase's EAserver, says Evan Quinn, a VP at Hurwitz Group. Other likely players include Allaire, Bluestone Software, and SilverStream, he adds. More specialized players include Iona Technologies, which provides a J2EE application server with strong Corba object broker capabilities, and Enhydra, a Linux-based application server.
The application server is emerging as the focal point of the new distributed, networked corporate development. The application server acts as middleware, making the necessary back-end connections, running business logic, and handling a variety of low-level functions, such as transaction management and security. Increasingly, application servers are adding the kind of functionality offered by packaged commerce platforms and E-business software providers such as Ariba Inc. and BroadVision Inc., Quinn says. "All vendors are headed in the same direction: to an E-business platform," he says. The latest application servers are adding support for wireless computing with built-in transcoding and integrated XML capabilities.
You can build distributed applications without an application server, but you'll end up building much of the functionality it would otherwise provide by yourself. For example, Hunt uses Lotus Domino as its Web server. It has no application server. "We've already built a lot of the functionality we'd get in an application server," says Mangold, but she isn't committed to Hunt's homegrown code. The company is considering acquiring IBM's WebSphere J2EE application server.
WebSphere is the most controversial of the leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition application servers. The controversy revolves around IBM's decision not to seek formal J2EE certification for the product, a business decision reflecting the dynamics of the industry as much as a technical issue. But WebSphere's lack of formal certification certainly hasn't discouraged business customers and doesn't appear to present any insurmountable obstacles.
"We don't think that full certification is that important. We build EJBs and do distributed processing and haven't encountered any problems," says Drake Philbrook, CEO of Globalogic Corp., a San Diego consulting firm and developer of custom E-business applications standardized on WebSphere. To the contrary, he says IBM's J2EE customizations give it better backward compatibility with legacy IBM systems, better enterprise scalability, and better management across diverse systems environments, essentially building on IBM's historic strengths in legacy enterprise computing.
But Globalogic hasn't really exercised all the advanced features of Java 2 Enterprise Edition. It makes extensive use of EJBs and does Java messaging. Globalogic also makes extensive use of XML in its application, often writing an interprocess message as an XML stream, but other J2EE features remain untouched.
Photo of Lilly by Bill Welch
Photo of Philbrook by Nick Souza
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