Businesses Bet On Java

IT Shops are using Java app servers to run core business applications.

There's no better sign that Java has come of age than this: companies have bet on it for their mission-critical applications.

Java is no longer a curiosity or a half-baked solution to a problem that was never all that pressing in the first place. Rather, at a growing number of large companies Java has found a home on the server and in the middle tier of three-tier architectures, fueling bet-the-business applications.

An exclusive InternetWeek survey of 100 corporate IT executives finds Java apps cutting right to the heart of the enterprise, with e-commerce, purchasing and accounting leading the way. Here's just a sampling of mission-critical Java apps from the very largest enterprise users:

• Defense contractor Electric Boat Corp., part of $5 billion General Dynamics Corp., is using Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) to build an enterprise resource planning application to help build nuclear submarines.

• CNA Commercial Insurance is deploying a Java-based extranet using SilverStream Software Inc.'s Java application server, providing the $17.1 billion company's 3,000 agents with up-to-date claims status and documentation.

• Rockford Corp., a privately held car-audio maker, built a Java sales automation tool for its extranet. The tool serves 300 dealers today and will be growing shortly to a user base of more than 3,000 nationwide.

"It's just an application, but it's huge," says Stephen Earl, senior Web analyst with Rockford. "It handles more than 160 functions. Is it mission-critical? We run our business on it."

Some of the most innovative Web start-ups are banking their entire businesses on Java backbones. CareerPath.Com, which aggregates classified advertising for the newspaper industry, is cutting over its backbone this month to a Java servlet and, eventually, EJB-driven architecture, says chief technology officer Marco Papa.

Papa is hoping the new architecture will let the site-which handles more than 100,000 search engine requests per day-worry less about its application architecture and more about the data and content it delivers.

At the other extreme from CareerPath is BidCom Inc. The construction industry extranet site is in the final stages of moving its Java apps out of the middle tier and into the database, running on Oracle8i's new integrated Java virtual machine.

The evolution of BidCom's application-which started out as an Oracle-based PLSQL app, then migrated to a limited Oracle app server platform and finally back into the database as a Java app-shows that the power of Java spans a variety of architectures, says Larry Chen, BidCom's chief technology officer.

Yet it's just not fresh start-ups-free of existing infrastructures to contend with-that are turning to Java. Java also is proving a powerful way for large, established companies to link legacy applications and databases and then deliver data to a Web front end.

Insurance company Reliance National, part of $3.4 billion Reliance Group Holdings Inc., has moved its risk management system to a Java-based extranet. It lets customer service reps, plus outsiders including customers and agents, monitor insurance policy claims in real time. Built on a Java-based application server from Bluestone Software Inc., the application accesses various back ends, including IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, according to Fred Kauber, Reliance's director of collaborative solutions.

AlliedSignal Inc., a $15.1 billion advanced technology and manufacturing company, built a Java-based quality assurance application to help engineers track and correct product defects in the aerospace and automotive manufacturing process. The app, developed with IBM tools, replaces a green-screen app that often had users accessing up to 27 different screens to file a single report.

And that's just a start. With some basic business objects built, AlliedSignal is finding that object reuse isn't just a dream but a reality. "The idea right now is to get our business objects built, and then leverage them across many applications," says Dave Kulakowksi, Allied's application development manager. He estimates that reuse of Java objects has cut development time by 95 percent for new apps.

Given the need to support existing applications, Allied is using Java for only about 10 percent to 15 percent of its development work. But that percentage is growing, and the company's most important new applications are being targeted for Java development, Kulakowski says.

Reality Check
Despite all these significant strides, Java technology is far from pervasive: just 42 percent of our survey respondents say Java is ready for prime time. But 52 percent say they've purchased or plan to purchase a Java application server. And, of the 31 percent who plan to buy or make an additional purchase, the vast majority, 71 percent, plan to do so this year, demonstrating some momentum for Java on the server.

What's more, a full 90 percent say they'll make that key enterprise purchase within the next two years.

Yet it's important to separate the reality from the hype, especially as it relates to Java's evolution.

Many users at large organizations-while building mission-critical apps-say they aren't ready to make the move to cutting-edge technologies, including Java 2 or EJB.

Indeed, a surprising number of the leading-edge users are still in the evaluation stage with EJB, a new technology for sure, but one that is nonetheless almost a year old. Adoption of the just-released Java 2 (previously known as Java Development Kit 1.2) is cautious as well.

Despite its bullish view of Java, CareerPath.Com is still struggling with JDK issues. CareerPath is running various JDK versions across its highly distributed architecture, which includes an IBM WebSphere application server, Apache Web server, Excalibur search engine and Oracle database. "It's a juggling game figur-ing out what [JDK] patch level works with all of them," says CareerPath.Com's Papa.

That balancing act typifies the Java market today. Early movers are placing strategic bets on Java, working with the technology and tools available today-especially application servers-while trying to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of change with Java itself.

Pure Hype?
InternetWeek's survey shows a mixed bag of responses regarding 100% Pure Java. A total of 54 percent say they do not plan to deploy pure Java apps, with the main concerns being performance problems, cited by 37 percent; commitments to a single operating system, 30 percent; and lack of functionality, 24 percent.

And somewhat surprisingly, users also express complete disinterest in the ongoing battles between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft over Java purity. Those disagreements, both in the marketplace and in the courts, are having a negligible effect on implementation plans: a full 82 percent say the dispute is having no effect on their plans to deploy Java.

Some users, like AlliedSignal's Kulakowski, are relying on the portability of 100% Pure Java apps. "I want that platform independence," he says. "In the middle tier, I can move my apps anywhere. It's all 100% Pure Java, even the [object request brokers]."

However, most users are taking a pragmatic approach to Java purity. "100% purity is harder when doing systems integration," says Doug Meil, senior systems analyst/architect with Key Corp. bank.

For example, his company's application architecture includes native calls to IBM CICS. "But if a component happens to be nonpure, and it's still as cross-platform as possible-for example, the CICS Java gateway still runs on multiple platforms-that's a compromise we can live with," Meil says.

App Servers Emerge
One strong point of agreement: application servers have emerged as the key platform for building distributed server-side Java applications.

In planning his cutover to the new system architecture relying heavily on Java servlets, Java Server Pages and, eventually, EJB, CareerPath.Com's Papa spent months researching app servers last summer. What he found is that "there isn't one product today that does exactly everything you'd want it to do."

He settled on IBM's WebSphere application server, plus IBM load-balancing software.

The payoff is a more scalable, robust site. But check out the cost savings, too. A distributed Java architecture has let the company shut down one of its two expensive, $500,000-plus database servers, replacing it with cheaper hardware running app servers in the middle tier, Papa says.

Another distributed system built on an application server backbone is Rockford's sales extranet. The site, which delivers online order, account checking, shipment status and up-to-date sales data to Rockford's sales force, is built on BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic application server.

The sales automation application began two and a half years ago as an Oracle Forms application, running on the desktop of 25 sales reps. "It was a complete nightmare to maintain," says Rockford developer Earl. "You had to go to the client site to install and update the software, and it took ungodly horsepower on the desktop."

Then began an odyssey to find a better distributed solution. First, the application was moved to Oracle App Server 2.0 as an HTML app. That was less than successful, so Earl switched over to Microsoft's Internet Information Server, delivering Active Server Pages via Windows NT servers.

"You had all the ActiveX components floating around you could ever ask for [to help build pieces of the application], but you were tied to NT," says Earl, who didn't believe NT could scale.

Finally, he settled on Web-Logic's Tengah Java application server, which was subsequently acquired by BEA and renamed Web Xpress. Today the app is running half on Java servlets, half on Active Server Pages, but moving totally to Java, Earl says.

Rockford is using the EJB capabilities of the application server and is convinced an app server is the way to go. "I tell people you get about as much as you can use in one box: remote method invocation, EJB, servlets, Java and HTML," Earl explains.

Not everybody, though, is using an application server. BidCom is pioneering the use of Java in the database-in its case, within Oracle8i-and sees great performance gains with that architecture.

"The main advantage of the application server is load balancing and scalability," says BidCom's Chen. "But most Web pages are highly dynamic. If you do page compilation in the middle tier, you have to go back and forth many times to the database. By running everything in the database kernel, that makes everything that much more efficient," he says.

The key to placing business logic in the database server is Java, Chen says. That gives BidCom a powerful programming language with plenty of available tools, while also centralizing application management on the Oracle platform, he says.

The Pace Of Change
Yet for some users, the development of Java has been a bit too "wild." It's a problem Sun has recognized, and despite plans to continue to add features to the enterprise Java specifications, Sun's Java Software chief Alan Baratz says the Java platform-including Java 2 and EJB 1.0-needs to stay in one place for a while to let users catch up.

The InternetWeek survey finds users lagging in deploying, or even considering deploying, the latest Java technologies.

Java 2, which was released at the end of 1998, is only in use among 6 percent of respondents, and only 22 percent expect to take the Java 2 plunge this year.

Some leading-edge users are making the move today. Perkin Elmer's PE GenScope division, which built one of the first EJB apps on Persistence Software's application server platform, is porting to Java 2, according to George Morris, PE GenScope's principal software engineer.

Several other Java users say they are planning moves to Java 2, but can't make the move just yet because not all their vendors have ported to the new JDK.

Meanwhile, demand for Hot-Spot, Sun's long-awaited just-in-time compiler/virtual machine, does not seem to be running high. Only 10 percent of users expect to use it in any form by year's end. A full 37 percent of respondents say they don't know if they will use HotSpot, and 32 percent more say they'll never use it. Harsh numbers for such a promising technology.

Marrying Technologies
EJB fares a little better. A total of 10 percent of those polled are using EJB today, 21 percent more plan to use it this year and another 25 percent within two years. That gradual evolution found several other users looking to marry Java and EJB to another hot technology, the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

"What makes any Internet application complicated is that there's a lot of overhead transforming data from one format to another, out of the database, creating objects, assembling an HTML page," says Fima Katz, chief of technology at Fluential Systems. "XML allows you to streamline the entire process. You can present the entire application in XML, with the execution engine in JavaBeans," Katz says.

The integration of Java and XML illustrates Java's greatest strength: Java isn't a Windows killer or a religiously pure environment. Rather, it's a great glue for a wide variety of enterprise and Internet technologies. That's why businesses are betting on Java.