The Return Of The Java Client

When Java was first introduced, people thought in terms of applets--especially if the topic was e-business. Then disenchantment set in. Inconsistencies in applet behavior, immature development tools and the inherent limitations of ultra-thin clients turned many IT managers off to applets.

Server-side Java became all the rage, and many proclaimed the death of the Java client.

Now, client-side Java is back with a vengeance--and not always in the form of applets. The need to build robust B2B apps drives many IT managers to create full-featured client-side Java applications for their e-business partners. And many of these client apps are so healthy in size that they have to be stored on a CD, rather than over the Web.

"We're definitely seeing a resurgence in client-side Java," says Gartner Group analyst Mark Driver.

"You just can't deliver the kind of rich interfaces and capabilities that B2B sometimes requires with HTML to a browser alone."

The return of client-side Java doesn't mean server-side Java is taking a back seat.

Developers are still running the bulk of their B2B code on application servers. But more often, they're supplementing server-side components with fairly sophisticated client-side features--creating Windows-like desktop apps for their e-business customers and partners across a broad range of industries.

"Our customers need a lot of functionality on their end, including plenty of off-line management capabilities," says Luciano Zanchi, a corporate banking project leader at Banca Commerciale Italiana of Milan, Italy. "That's not something you're going to be able to provide with some little applet."

BCI, known in Italy by its nickname "Comit," has more than 15,000 employees and in excess of $52 billion in corporate assets. To better serve its small- and midsize- business customers, the bank created a set of services it calls Comit OnDesk--an extension of the branding it already established for its consumer offering, Comit OnLine.

Comit OnDesk lets BCI's corporate customers check the status of their accounts from anywhere in the world, execute transfers and electronic payments, and track activity of their accounts at other financial institutions. The application, which BCI distributes to its customers on CD, also lets those customers manage and maintain any JDBC-compliant financial database.

"With the JDBC interface, they can integrate their banking application directly with a DB2 database, an SAP R/3 system or their corporate financials," says Zanchi. "That can be very helpful as they try to streamline their own business processes and institute various best financial practices."

In addition to benefiting BCI's customers, the Java banking system reduces BCI's own processing costs. The bank charges its customers a fee for the software, but they pay a reduced rate for every transaction they execute using the system. "They recoup the fee in a relatively short amount of time," Zanchi says. "We're just giving them a strong incentive to use the system."

While the original application is distributed on physical media, updates are delivered electronically when customers access the bank's servers. Security is delivered through digital signatures, encryption and passwords. BCI's system was built by IBM using VisualAge for Java. The corporate e-banking server is a high-availability IBM double-RISC/6000 SMP system running AIX. Communication between the server and BCI's legacy apps is managed by IBM MQSeries middleware, which is installed on the bank's RISC/6000, S/390 main-frame and AS/400 branch servers.

Zanchi says Java's platform independence makes it an appealing development technology, since it will potentially let the bank migrate to other platforms.

But that's not something the bank is actively considering today, since it's fairly committed to IBM's AIX platform and all of its customers are using Wintel systems.

The real draw for Java, managers say, is that it offers a flexible, manageable development environment for building scalable Internet apps.

"We just launched Comit OnDesk, and we already have 500 customers who use it very extensively," says Zanchi. "From what we have seen, IBM's Java architecture will let us maintain the performance that customers require over the Internet, even as that number grows to tens of thousands of users."

Java On CD
Another organization taking this approach of distributing Java applications on CDs to its partners is the National Marrow Donor Program in Minneapolis. Founded in 1986, NMDP is a nonprofit organization that arranges stem cell transplants for patients around the world with life-threatening blood diseases who do not have matching donors in their families.

NMDP maintains a database of more than 4 million individuals in the United States and overseas who have registered themselves as potential donors. At any given time, there are about 6,000 active searches against this database. The searches are initiated by health-care facilities that signed up to participate in the program--typically larger metropolitan-area and university hospitals.

The heart of NMDP's IT architecture is its Search Tracking and Registry (STAR) system, a set of applications written in C in 1992 for Sybase running on Sun Solaris. In the past, NMDP would interact with its subscribers via e-mail. The hospital would send a message with the specifications for the search and NMDP would respond with an ASCII report that listed potential donors (by number to protect their identity) and indicated how well they matched the request. The hospital would continue the process by asking NMDP to contact a specific subset of the donors on the initial list.

The problem with that system was reports would be run as a batch process once a day, which meant the hospitals had to wait 24 to 48 hours to get past the first stage of the process. Additional iterations further extended the time line for donor searches.

This year, NMDP rolled out a client-side Java application it calls TransLink that lets subscribers query the STAR database in real time. This direct access can reduce the time it takes to pinpoint an available donor from days to hours--an improvement that can make the difference between life and death for a patient in need.

Like BCI's Comit OnDesk application, NMDP's TransLink is simply too complex to be delivered as an applet. "We're giving users a very rich application with an interface that lets them open multiple Windows as they navigate their way through our database," says Paul Zyla, NMDP's senior manager of system development, who adds that this type of full-featured Windows interface makes it easy for users to quickly pinpoint the data they're looking for.

NMDP also turned to its database vendor--in this case, Sybase--for both the requisite middleware and Java development environment. Sybase's EAServer (formerly Jaguar Component Transaction Server) manages session threading between Internet users and the STAR database, maintaining session integrity and pooling back-end connections for optimum scalability. The development environment was Sybase's PowerJ, which offers tools for writing and managing Java and HTML code.

"PowerJ was a logical choice for us, since it is tightly integrated with the rest of the Sybase product line," Zyla says. That product line also includes PowerBuilder, Sybase's flagship development platform, which NMDP has used extensively to build its other applications.

Because of the commonality between PowerJ and PowerBuilder, Zyla says his organization can freely reuse business objects it created for Java apps in any of NMDP's non-Java applications, and vice versa. He says that's a benefit other IT managers should consider in choosing Java tools. Zyla says if IT managers choose a Java-integrated development environment (IDE) on its own merits, without thinking about how it fits in with the rest of the company's app development strategy, the company could lose some opportunities for code reuse.

NMDP handled the problem of updating user desktops by creating an FTP Java class within the client application that automatically downloads software patches as required, and then triggers the necessary installation routines. For security, NMDP users receive RSA SecureID tokens for authentication as well as Check Point client VPN software for encryption.

A Broad Appeal
Norman Gearhart, chief technology officer for the Ohio State Legislature, also values Java's platform independence, but says its appeal goes beyond that. "Java is just a very powerful platform for building distributed applications," he says. "You can have multiple processes going on in several different places at once, which is often what you need to make a complex application work."

For example, Gearhart points out that sometimes a particular process--such as a text search--will get too CPU-intensive for a particular machine. With the flexible distribution that Java allows, such processes can simply be moved to a larger server.

That's especially important to the state legislature, since its showcase client-side Java application is an XML content management system that Gearhart and his team developed to support the intensive document-centric business processes of government, such as developing amendments for proposed legislation.

As Gearhart explains it, the main document in the worklife of the legislature is its "journal," which like the Congressional Record, documents every motion, bill proposal and vote. The journal is an extremely complex document, but its only real structure used to be simple line numbering, which made it extremely difficult for legislators and their staffs to pinpoint the information they needed.

To get an idea of what a challenge this is, the state's budget this past year was 2,100 pages. Locating a specific appropriation within such a document would obviously be a very problematic task.

Gearhart and his team solved this problem by transforming the journal into an XML document--a fairly radical move considering that XML has been primarily applied to relatively small and highly structured units of transactional data. But with the new XML document management application that Gearhart's team built, the journal content and other government documents can now be searched, shared and utilized in other applications with unprecedented ease.

While there's no hardwired link between XML and Java, Gearhart says there's plenty of synergy between the two technologies. For one thing, many of the best third-party XML tools, such as editors and parsers, are written in Java. This makes it easier for Java programmers to integrate such prefabricated tools into their custom apps. Java also makes it easy for programmers to treat XML documents as static objects within applications, simplifying the creation of code that can move and manipulate the data those documents contain.

In the legislature's case, CORBA was also used to ease communications between various processes running on different machines. So, Gearhart used XML to allow flexible manipulation of the journal's text, Java to bring flexibility to the applications that perform those manipulations and CORBA to more easily communicate between any and all of the applications.

"The architecture of Java, XML and CORBA has really been the key to our success," says Gearhart. "It has given us the flexibility we need to meet our immediate requirements while building something that's going to serve our purposes over the long-term." That's important to someone in Gearhart's position, because unlike private-sector companies, governments don't develop applications like this very frequently. "This is something we're going to have to use for 15 years," he says.

The legislature is also a prime example of an organization that's very much in need of Java's platform independence. The operational independence of individual legislators, various executive and judicial offices, and other interested parties such as lawyers, political groups and the media, means that Gearhart's IT team has no control over user platforms.

In fact, there are many differences between the various groups that work with the journal and the legislature's XML document management tools. One is the client platform or platforms they may be using. Another is the amount of horsepower they may or may not have on those machines. Yet another is whether they're storing documents locally or not.

So the application is designed to run in several configurations, depending on the particular needs and resources of the user. For example, as with BCI and NMDP, the full Java application can run on a client machine against a local XML data store. The client Java component can also be run locally, while the server component runs somewhere else on the network against XML data in still another location. Or there may be no local Java component at all, just a browser connecting with a Java Server Page on a Web server, which acts as a remote client and in turn connects with Java apps and XML stores elsewhere on the network.

This type of deployment is a testimonial to Java's flexibility as a distributed processing environment.

And, according to Gartner's Driver, it offers insight into the nature of its relationship to XML. "XML allows you to make your data portable," he says. "Java allows you to make your application processes portable."

With the implications such open, inter-organizational processing could have on the B2B world, it's no surprise that Java--especially in conjunction with XML--has become a pervasive development technology for e-business service providers.

"A lot of business processes are about the creation and exchange of documents," says Tom McCleary, senior director of business development at B2B portal infrastructure provider Commerce One. "By interfacing XML's Document Object Model to Java, you can quickly and easily create a JavaBean for that data. Then, because Java APIs have become so widely accepted by the market, you can use such an API to interface into your back-end business systems."

Thus, a company can generate a purchase order in XML and send it through an e-business exchange such as Commerce One for secure transfer to a supplier. By creating a Java application object for that document (i.e. a Bean), that data can then be entered directly into the supplier's ERP system via software such as WebMethods' Enterprise Adapters. "The combination of XML and Java integration tools gives you a very powerful set of capabilities for B2B e-commerce," McCleary says.

Tapping these potential capabilities isn't a piece of cake. For one thing, there are still inconsistencies in how Java Virtual Machines--the software layer that sits on top of different operating systems so they can handle Java apps--behave on different platforms. And many browsers don't even have a JVM installed. "Sometimes things don't display exactly the way you want them to," says NMDP's Zyla.

"That's why over time you learn to avoid programming certain types of interface actions."

Zyla also says because of Java's idiosyncrasies, it's a good idea to hire experienced Java programmers. But according to Gearhart, Java expertise is getting tougher to find, especially as the popularity of Java continues to grow at a rate faster than good Java programmers become available.

But he suggests that IT departments be careful in trying to overcome the skills shortage with IDEs that promise to make Java programming easier for inexperienced developers by providing lots of pre-fabricated widgets and modules.

"Some of those IDEs actually produce proprietary code, rather than pure Java," he warns. "That can cause you problems later on down the road when you want to do new things with your application components." Gearhart says maintaining the purity of his Java code was a primary factor in his selection of Inprise's JBuilder 2.0 IDE.

Regardless of how IT departments tackle the problem of Java development, one thing is clear: Client-side Java is back. The new client apps can give customers and e-business partners vital online and offline functionality that can streamline B2B processes and enhance B2B relationships. Without that functionality, B2B apps can be unduly limited by the capabilities of desktop browsers and jeopardized by the inconsistencies of JVMs.

Lenny Liebmann is an InternetWeek contributing editor. He can be reached at ll@exit109.com