Java draws wide market interest

As Java enters its adolescence, ISVs and users are finding that it’s no longer just a toy for making cute animations on Web sites.

Java is being seized by the ISV community because it offers many advantages, from developer productivity to network savviness, compared to other languages. These Java-only applications capitalize on Java’s network features, namely the capability to download applets via networks, making it easier to distribute software and data within the enterprise and with trading partners.

What Java is perfect for are applications being used by a large, scattered group of users connected via an extranet, “there’s almost no other way [than Java] to do it,” said Steve Richard, director of marketing at Oblix, in Mountain View, CA. Oblix disseminates an interactive company directory to employees, including company information, phones, computers, and pagers across an intranet and lets people book rooms for meetings and update their own human resource information.

ISVs claim Java brings powerful advantages, even if some do not believe Java is robust enough to “write once, run anywhere” and scoff at its speed compared to C or C++. They tout its flexibility, elegance, fast coding, ease of deployment, and low administration needs, not to mention the elusive “cool factor” that has created 700,000 Java developers in less than three years.

“It really gives us the scalability of the traditional client/server applications combined with the usability of desktop productivity applications, and that’s our biggest customer benefit,” said Elizabeth Ireland, vice president of marketing at Extensity, in Emeryville, California. Extensity tracks and reports expenses, including materials, labor, travel, and entertainment.

Java-enabled applications handle payrolls, human resources, sales contacts, complex product configurations for sales proposals, manufacturing, and communicating with supply-chain partners.

“Its role is coming into focus,” said John R. Rymer, an analyst and president of Upstream Consulting, in Emeryville, CA. “I really don’t have any doubt that it’ll be big in the enterprise.”

One startup is exploiting the centralized distribution that Java’s modular, “network-aware” code allows. Rubric Software, in San Mateo, CA, makes Rubric EMA (Enterprise Marketing Automation) 1.0, Web-based marketing software written entirely in Java except for some bits of “glue code” that let it connect to legacy applications. The product is designed for marketing departments to create marketing programs and track their success. As such, it shares information on a “need-to-know” basis across corporate firewalls with users’ partners and contractors.

Java is perfect for providing this kind of functionality with just a few applets, rather than giving partners control of the whole program, Rubric CEO Anu Shukla said.

Being browser-based is another major advantage, Shukla said.

“It’s really unfeasible or impractical to have every [user] install a client,” Shukla said.

Another big advantage, according to Rubric chief technology officer Chris Maeda, is that Java generates code faster, so developers can be three to five times as productive as in C++.

Maeda agreed that Java does run more slowly than C++, about 10 percent to 20 percent slower.

“On the server side, it’s actually been fine, because it’s not the processor that’s the bottleneck, it’s the distribution [of the client software],” Maeda said.

Meanwhile, enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors, such as SAP and Peoplesoft, are adopting Java to their wares but at a slower pace than smaller ISVs.

“The big ERP vendors have a natural sort of conservatism and a reluctance to dive into an as yet unproven and unfinished technology,” said Joshua Greenbaum, a senior consultant at the Hurwitz Group, in Berkeley, CA. “They have a huge investment in their existing code.”

Oracle, however, is investing big in Java on the server because it will make it easier to serve applets to Java-based clients. Market leader SAP, which dominates the ERP market, is much more skeptical.

Heinz Roggenkemper, vice president of development at SAP Labs, in Palo Alto, CA, said his company is developing a Java GUI for SAP R/3, its flagship ERP suite, that is due out around the third quarter.

The company also plans to tap into the groundswell of Java support among developers by making its business APIs for customizing R/3 accessible to Java and Visual Basic programmers.

“We try to use Java where it makes sense, say, where a customer wants to avoid the hassle of installing software over a large base, or for specialized applications such as sales configuration,” Roggenkemper said.

For IT managers who are buying applications, Java’s presence may be transparent.

“Our customers don’t care what our product is written in as long as it works,” Shukla said. “[We used Java because] it’s the only way we could get it to work the way we want it to.”

A broad range of ISVs are seizing Java’s developer productivity and the networking features to create Java-based packaged applications.