App Dev and Integration

As with every other area of IT this year, application development was about doing more with less. Tools such as BEA’s WebLogic Workshop Integration and M7’s Application Assembly Suite combined visual tools with powerful capabilities, allowing experienced developers to accomplish more in a shorter time frame and less experienced developers to tackle more complex tasks. Progress was also made in “front-end integration,” with Altio, Digital Harbor, and Laszlo Systems fleshing out their rich Internet application platforms, which pull data from back-end sources and present it to a smart, Internet-enabled client instead of a dumb browser. We’re eager to see Flex — Macromedia’s upcoming offering in this space — in the first half of 2004.

Certainly, there was a lot of activity on the Web services front in 2003. Major J2EE application server vendors BEA, IBM, and Sybase polished their tools for creating and deploying Web services (see Platforms), and other tools and platforms for Web services integration — from vendors such as Sonic and Systinet — continued to evolve. But the biggest sign that Web services rubber is finally hitting the road was the maturation of solutions for monitoring and managing services during run time, from vendors including Actional, Confluent, and Grand Central Communications. The next generation of these WSI (Web services intermediary) solutions continues to address real-world needs such as service contracts and exception handling.

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Developer Tools Compuware DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1 Compuware Very Good (8.3) Cost: $1,495 Bottom Line: This Visual Studio companion adds .Net memory analysis and enhanced .Net source-code analysis to what was already a commanding suite of tools for the professional Windows programmer. The wealth of capabilities will take time to master but will repay developers working across the full range of Microsoft programming technologies.

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Eclipse 2.1 SDK Eclipse Very Good (8.2) Cost: Free Bottom Line: This IDE (integrated development environment) boasts powerful extension capabilities, including a clever extension architecture that reduces launch time and accommodates internationalization. The promise of so much power does put Eclipse in danger of feature-creep, and new users may need some time to get used to the IDE.

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IBM WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer 5.0 IBM Very Good (8.1) Cost: $7,500 per CPU; $3,499, WebSphere Studio Application Developer (minus mainframe support) Bottom Line: This product blends a top-of-the-line Java, J2EE, Web services, XML, and Web-development environment with enterprise development support, including Cobol and PL/1. It’s sometimes sluggish in Windows XP but provides excellent capabilities for those who create, maintain, and extend enterprise application assets.

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ILOG Jrules 4.5 ILOG Very Good (8.0) Cost: $12,000 per developer seat, $20,000 per CPU; volume discount available Bottom Line: This solution is a shining example of what can be done with a business rules engine by adding a rich set of tools for both programmers and analysts. Analysts can build rules in ordinary language using an easy GUI or familiar spreadsheet. Programmers benefit from rapid deployment, automatic code generation, UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling, and excellent debugging tools.

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Jtest 5.0 Parasoft Very Good (7.9) Cost: $3,495, one user (North American customers only) Bottom Line: A fine mixture of static code analysis and JUnit-style test generation, Jtest is the sort of tool that is rapidly becoming necessary for proper Java hygiene. Soon every sensible person will be using one.

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Telelogic Synergy Suite Telelogic Very Good (8.0) Cost: Synergy Suite, $2,687 per user; Distributed Synergy Suite, $3,090 per user Bottom Line: This suite provides solid tracking and reporting tools that effectively address change requests and configuration management throughout the project life cycle. Synergy is well-suited to large, distributed development teams; the cost per user may be prohibitive for some shops.

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M7 Application Assembly Suite 3.0 M7 Good (6.3) Cost: $12,500 per server CPU; $3,000 per developer Bottom Line: M7’s graphical tool paradigm simplifies application creation by insulating the users from the intricacies of Java. It exhibits some glitches and has a basic source-code editor. M7’s tools should speed more junior Java developers along by allowing them to visually build apps, but experienced programmers already comfortable with Java and existing tools may find M7’s approach and lack of generally standard editing tools a hindrance.

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Rich Internet Applications AltioLive 3.0 Altio Excellent (8.7) Cost: Server: starts at $10,000 per CPU; Studio: starts at $5,000 for 10 seats Bottom Line: Altio’s middleware platform and superb IDE for building rich client applications tackle application integration from the front end, allowing companies to lower integration costs by weaving disparate applications, data sources, and Web services together in a browser-based interface.

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Digital Harbor PiiE Express 2.0 Digital Harbor Very Good (7.5) Cost: Starts at $500 per named user Bottom Line: PiiE moves application integration out of the back office and onto the desktop. Easy client-side development and visual data binding lowers the cost of pulling together data from disparate systems. Integrating Web services and non-JDBC data sources will take additional effort.

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Laszlo Presentation Server 1.0, Enterprise Edition Laszlo Systems Good (5.8) Cost: Starts at $10,000 per CPU; can be tailored to suit individual customer’s needs Bottom Line: Thanks to Macromedia Flash support, Laszlo Presentation Server 1.0 is adept at building strong visual interfaces. It does, however, provide limited server-side enterprise integration and a poor development environment. As a result, this solution is better suited for building vanity Web site enhancements than for constructing mission-critical applications.

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Web Services Actional Looking Glass 4.0 and SOAPstation 4.0 Actional Very Good (8.1) Cost: SOAPstation starts at $50,000 for two CPUs; Looking Glass, $75,000; Active Agents, $10,000 each; typical enterprise deployments start at $200,000 Bottom Line: Looking Glass 4.0 Web services management platform blends superb monitoring and fail-over capabilities for services-driven applications. Conditional policy and security provisions benefit service levels; application fault resolution has been greatly improved thanks to strong tracking. On the downside, it is limited by .Net-only support, and the Active Agents and Looking Glass Console are restricted to Windows.

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BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 BEA Systems Very Good (7.7) Cost: $62,000 per CPU, includes clustered version of WebLogic Server 8.1 and an instance of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 Bottom Line: BEA’s visual approach to business process integration is exceptional, but the effectiveness of this solution is limited by a lack of controls: Only a few basic ones are provided. Developers must adapt to a new programming paradigm.

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Confluent Core 3.0 Confluent Software Very Good (8.0) Cost: Typical deployments range from $100,000 to $150,000; components can be purchased individually Bottom Line: Confluent Core provides a well-designed system for managing and configuring Web services distributed throughout an organization. Policy pipelines ease the burden of creating management policies, and operational monitoring is first rate. On the downside, full deployments are costly.

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Grand Central Communications Web Services Network Grand Central Communications Very Good (8.0) Cost: Starts at $60,000 per year for one hub and one to three integration relationships Bottom Line: This value-added network for exchanging SOAP messages provides reliable message delivery, convenient logging and audit trails, policy-based security management, and simplified interoperability, making Web services transactions with trading partners and customers viable.

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Sonic ESB 5.0 Sonic Software Very Good (7.9) Cost: Starts at $10,000 per CPU Bottom Line: Sonic’s enterprise service bus provides a cost-effective and flexible platform for enterprise integration, combining messaging, routing, Web services, and message transformation to integrate and orchestrate the actions of multiple Internet application endpoints. Its only weakness is that it requires significant developer expertise in multiple technologies to use.

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Systinet WASP 4.5.1 Systinet Very Good (7.8) Cost: WASP Developer is free; WASP Server for both Java and C++ is free for development and single-CPU use and is $2,000 per CPU after that Bottom Line: This Web services run-time server integrates well with enterprise-grade application servers such as JBoss, BEA WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere for easy inclusion in the enterprise architecture. Policy-based security and comprehensive management tools ease the burden of engineering and operations staffs.