Candle upgrades integration software

Candle on Monday rolled out six packages targeted at helping infrastructure architects ready more reliable products for J2EE-based WebSphere environments.

The new PathWAI products are intended to provide development teams in larger IT shops with a way of more rapidly identifying and eliminating performance and operational problems early in the lifecycle of a mission-critical applications that could cause significant deployment delays.

“We find that a huge percentage of the problems among our users that happen in production could have been anticipated in pre-production. They tell us that most testing tools do not give them the level [needed] to pinpoint these issues early on, which become more expensive to fix later on,” said David Caddis, vice president of Candle’s application infrastructure management group.

A recent report from Giga Information Group said that 75 percent of all development projects fail, with many doing so because they were not properly tuned and tested for their specific environments.

“The goal is to reduce the high failure rates in application development projects by testing out that whole backbone. It is about looking at the impact of J2EE apps on other parts of the environments, like the database, but also better understanding what Web traffic does to it,” Caddis said.

Publisher John Wiley & Sons decided to go with the PathWAI products because it wanted to better ensure reliable communication between its IBM middleware and Sun Solaris environments, which were growing more complex.

“We didn’t have the utilities to look inside these [IBM and Sun-based] apps and so with PathWAI developers are now able to see what they need to tweak and change a little bit. It saves us mostly time, but time is money with developers because they always have to move on to the next phase of development in a project,” said Emil Perez, director of hosting administration  for John Wiley & Sons.

Among the new offerings in the Web Applications infrastructure category is PathWAI Performance Workshop for J2EE, which offers training for architects and developers accompanied by tailored recommendations for using J2EE in their respective environments. The company also announced the PAthWAI Tuning Workbench for J2EE, which helps corporate shops accelerate deployment as well as gain an end-user view of application performance for Java applications.

Included among the packages aimed at Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) are PathWAI Performance Workshop for Websphere Business Integration, which creates the architectural blueprint to help ensure the integration of and performance of EAI projects and PathWAI Tuning Workbench For Websphere Business Integration, a series of tuning and testing tools that help developers solve problems faster as well as making sure their infrastructure supports key applications since they are in production.

Available immediately, the new packages have an entry price of $9,000 although specific pricing depends on platform support and configuration.