InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

December 18/25, 2000

Java Draws Corporate Converts

continued...page 2 of 2

By Alan Radding

Illustration by Timothy Cook

More on J2EE:

sidebar:Doing EAI With The J2EE Connector

sidebar:Microsoft's C# Challenge: Overcoming Developer Reluctance

TechWeb: Sun Gives Java Developers A Fast Fix (12/5/00)

TechWeb: BroadVision Opens Up E-Commerce Platform (11/15/00)

TechWeb: Startup Looks To Keep Java Chips Alive (9/11/00)

Send Us Your Feedback

Catapulse Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., opted for BEA's WebLogic. Catapulse provides application development-management tools, such as source-code management, version control, defect tracking, and requirements management, through an application service provider model. It runs its portal off the WebLogic J2EE application server. "We like BEA because they're early to adopt the standards and [the system] performs very well," says principal engineer Darcy Jouan.

As far as the deployment of the Java application, it really shouldn't matter which Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server is involved. Java promises cross-platform computing and that means application servers, too. The J2EE certification is meant to ensure enough consistency in the implementation of the standard that EJBs built in, for example, a WebSphere environment will run in a WebLogic environment or on any other J2EE application server. And for the most part, developers report that Java components work pretty well across application servers. "At worst, you might bump into some custom tags, but things on the standards front seem to change by the week anyway," says the developer at the large multinational company.

This kind of coexistence, if not exactly ironclad compatibility, is critical if J2EE is to succeed in application development. The reality for most companies, and certainly large enterprises, is that they'll have multiple J2EE application servers. Companies will be no more successful enforcing a single application server standard than they are enforcing any other single computing standard.

Darcy Jouan Photo by GAry Parker "We have about 350,000 employees spread across several businesses. Things happen that you can't control," the developer says. As a result, that company has WebSphere, WebLogic, and iPlanet application servers. The same situation exists with J2EE development tools, where different development groups adopt their favorite integrated development environment. "We are trying to push Visual Age and Visual Café, but people have their own preferences," he says.

Even with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition standard and the Java Community Program, which attempts to guide the standard, incompatibilities arise because every vendor tries to add value to its products. For example, the large multinational company has encountered some difficulties getting IBM's Visual Age to work seamlessly with BEA's WebLogic. The developers, however, quickly worked it out. "The marketing promises seem to run ahead of the actual technology, but we're still just talking about Java code," the developer says. Since it's all Java code, it's pretty easy to fix.

Instead of focusing exclusively on how well the application server toes the line of the J2EE standard, companies are picking their application servers based on several factors, including compatibility with existing technology and previous experience with the vendor. For example, Winterthur Insurance of Winterthur, Switzerland, had long used Corba to deploy cross-platform, component-based distributed applications. When it wanted to build applications for a corporate extranet and the Internet, it selected Iona's Corba-capable iPortal J2EE application server. It already had deployed Iona's Corba object brokers and intended to leverage its Corba applications in the new environment.

As early as 1997, Winterthur began assembling a strategic middleware infrastructure designed to provide connectivity to its legacy systems. It used Corba to wrap CICS, IMS, and DB2 applications, conventional insurance-industry back-office applications, as service objects that could be reused when building new applications that would combine various services. "We wanted to provide access to our OS/390 mainframe applications based on a service architecture," says Thomas Goetz, technical architect at Winterthur.

The legacy applications would be wrapped as a Corba service. Large legacy applications were broken into small services and organized by use cases. "This lets us combine things in different ways," Goetz says. The concept was right, IT advisory firm Gartner declared in a recent examination of the Winterthur approach, but by relying on DCE-RPC protocol Winterthur made the strategy challenging.

When the full impact of the Web hit the insurance industry in 1999, Corba alone wouldn't suffice. Instead, Winterthur augmented its Corba strategy by adding a J2EE application server. The company could then quickly and easily develop Java applications consisting of servlets and EJBs, which could interface with Corba interface definition language to access the legacy services. It also uses the Java Database Connector for database access and J2EE's Java messaging service in conjunction with MQSeries. "The key to the whole thing is the interconnectivity with Orbix," Iona's Corba object request broker, Goetz says. Iona's iPortal turned out to be the ideal application server choice.

Hewitt Associates LLC in Lincolnshire, Ill., is another company with lots of legacy systems. "We're basically an IBM shop," says Tim Hilgenberg, chief technology strategist, explaining the company's selection of WebSphere. The company deploys its Java applications across a wide range of platforms, including IBM's 390 and Unix, as well as Windows NT.

For example, Hewitt, a benefits consulting and benefits outsourcing firm, recently built a J2EE application. The Secure Participant Mailbox application was designed to deliver timely, often-confidential information to customers, allowing them to access the information through a browser over the Internet. Essentially, the application is nothing more than a database holding documents from an array of both new and legacy systems and in a variety of formats--any MIME type supported by the Internet. The application makes extensive use of EJB entity and session beans and uses IBM's MQSeries for messaging, mainly to bring documents from the OS/390 mainframe into the application.

Corporate Technology Partners Inc., a Denver technology consulting firm, came to the Web with a PowerBuilder background. Today it builds Internet and Web applications for clients using a variety of technologies, including Java2, C++, and PowerBuilder. One of its applications may include a combination of ActiveX, Java, PowerBuilder, and C++ components. "We use Sybase's EAserver as the J2EE application server. It lets us mix and match components within the same application," says president Mark Pfeifer.

In conjunction with EAserver, the company also uses Sybase's PowerJ IDE. For Java applications, it works primarily with JavaServer Pages and EJBs. For database connectivity, the company relies on Java Database Connector. "We are usually building new applications for our clients. We don't normally have to connect to legacy systems," Pfeifer says. Its own corporate portal, used for demonstration purposes, is built completely with J2EE and EAserver.

According to Giga, the numbers of J2EE servers will quickly narrow. By the end of 2000, the market leaders will be BEA Systems and IBM, each with approximately a 24% share of the market, followed by Art Technology Group with 10%, iPlanet with a 9% share, and Allaire with an 8% market share. Close behind will be SilverStream and Sybase, each with 5% to 7% market shares. Giga is advising the larger, more conservative companies that need to pick an application server as part of a major infrastructure commitment to stick with the vendors in the leading group. For smaller projects or those that have some unusual requirements, one of the niche application servers may provide just the right answer.

Finding a J2EE application server is just one piece of the corporate Java puzzle. There are ongoing concerns about Java as an open standard and questions about the impact of Microsoft's actions. Notes Giga in its latest J2EE report: "The most significant source of uncertainty in the application server market is the possible disruptive effect of the debate over Java standards. If the debate over standards becomes more strident, it may damage users' confidence and slow market growth. Any uncertainty over the standards process will most favor the vendors seen large enough to prosper even in the absence of a unified standard."

Java has already established itself as the platform for the Internet and for E-business. As E-business becomes increasingly important to a company's bottom line, Java will have to become part of the corporate IT development toolset. If history offers any guide, you can bet that there will be continued contention over the Java standard and new technologies emerging to rival Java, but you can also be sure that Java isn't going away.