Vendors rush to be at Java’s (server) side

Upcoming moves by Compaq, enterprise resource planning (ERP) startup Intentia, and transactional-middleware vendor Tibco point to an enterprisewide embrace of Java as the glue of choice behind server-side application development and object distribution.

This week, Compaq will make the first of a series of announcements — a bundling agreement with Java-based application server vendor Novera — that pulls together its planned product solution of Windows NT and Unix servers to house and transport distributed Java applications.

This news delighted officials at Sun Microsystems, the leading force behind Java.

“We’ve reached critical mass from the vendors,” said Sharada Achanta, group product manager for enterprise products at Sun, in Mountain View, CA. “As the momentum behind Java has taken off, even conservative users are seeing their vendors adopt.”

Compaq will bundle and optimize Novera’s jBusiness as the application foundation for its enterprise Java solutions. Compaq will deliver its first products based on jBusiness in less than three months, the same time frame in which Novera plans to provide support for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).

Novera’s pending support of EJB will help standardize the use of objects across Compaq platforms, and allow a single console to centrally manage both NT and Unix environments. It will also allow Component Object Model (COM)-based Visual Basic developers to write applications that talk to components on the 64-bit Alpha Unix side.

“The intent is to move toward enterprise-NT-readiness,” said Mike Cuccia, marketing director for commercial software products at Compaq. “The whole principle around Java is platform independence. We expect Alpha to be a major player.”

Adding more muscle to Java’s server presence, SilverStream Software last week teamed with IBM to co-develop and co-market enterprise Web applications based on SilverStream’s Application Server 2.0, which has been optimized to support IBM’s DB2 database, CICS transaction engine, and MQSeries middleware.

Separately, Tibco — in a move that gives Java objects a secure, asynchronous avenue to their destinations — will make its Information Bus middleware a delivery mechanism for EJB objects.

An alternative to message-queuing technologies, Tibco’s Information Bus provides a guaranteed mechanism for delivering objects regardless of the state of the connection across WANs. Adding support to EJB and the latest Java virtual machines offers developers yet another way to distribute their Java objects robustly for transactional applications, said James Powell, vice president and chief technology officer at Tibco.

The server-based Java applications market will get a further charge in September, when IBM announces it has landed a top-10 ERP vendor to deliver a Java-based version of its application suite for the company’s AS/400 server.

Intentia, in concert with IBM, will roll out a Java-based version of its Movex Enterprise Management suite, a set of tightly integrated functions supporting a range of business processes, including manufacturing, distribution, production, and finance and accounting.

“There will be a major push between [IBM and Intentia] this fall to promote this version. People will really finally see the advantages of a well-written Java [ERP] application on the server and how robustly it can perform,” said a source familiar with the plans.

Earlier this year, Intentia delivered its IBM Custom Server, bundled with a non-Java version of Movex, for IBM’s AS/400e server. Intentia also makes versions of the product available for NT and Unix.

“[Intentia] has a very strong application … a comprehensive and strong ERP product, both wide and deep,” especially in manufacturing, said Christer Wadman, an analyst at Benchmarking Partners, in Cambridge, MA. “In a couple of years they could be very strong.”

The embrace of Java from such disparate technology vendors as Compaq, Tibco, and Intentia is being joined by widespread adoption of the platform by developers, Sun’s Achanta said.

A developer at New York-based Cognitive Communications, a company that develops intranets for Fortune 500 companies, backed up Achanta’s assertion.

“[Server-side Java] enables you to really do object-oriented development. You can basically create reusable objects and impose a certain amount of rationality on the process. It’s the most elegant way of doing Web apps that I’ve seen so far,” said Ethan Cerami at Cognitive. “It’s like being back in computer science class. It finally makes sense again, unlike Perl scripts.”