Part of an occasional series from our industry insider who writes under the pen name El Nino.
Today’s Java 1.2 party in New York is the latest wave in the litany of press releases that have proclaimed new products that finally make Java enterprise-capable, deployable for the largest systems. Java has always been ‘write-once run anywhere’ but now, constructing enterprise applications is straightforward with Jelly Beans and Easy Jelly Beans and applications will practically build themselves. The best part is that this month’s products are compliant with the latest specifications before they’ve even been written. Next month’s products will be compliant with even more draft specifications. What’s actually going on is a hype war of unprecedented proportions. It would make sense if it were being done to freeze a market (the standard way to give vendors more time to get their products out)…but in this case it’s an open-systems volley to counter-freeze Microsoft’s COM+ freeze-play. All this would be commercially interesting if there were actually some demand out there, but it doesn’t really seem that there is much in the way of paying customers. Let’s back track a bit. All the noise is about enterprise applications, which is custom software built by or for individual MIS departments. So, what’s an enterprise app? Seems like these days, it’s a workgroup app with a new name. Enterprise is supposed to mean big, aircraft-carrier big: 10-100 developers, 50-5000 simultaneous users, thousands of concurrent threads or transactions. Nobody, not even Sun or Microsoft, claims that they can actually do this with Java or COM+. Listen carefully to their disclaimers, and you’ll find that nobody seems to have actually deployed enterprise-scale applications with Java. Heard at recent vendor-sponsored Java events: We recommend that your Java application use no more than 50 threads for the best reliability and: Our Java application server seems to run best at about 16 threads…and you should restart it once a week. OK, but everyone expects that MIS is in process of doing enterprise Java, right? Actually, it’s not even started: MIS has little interest in actually building big apps in Java or COM+ in the next 12 months. Recent intention surveys reported in ComputerWorld and elsewhere put the serious-use intentions out about two years. In the meantime, MIS has bigger problems on its mind – Java will be used only in pilot projects designed to keep developers motivated. Think COM+ is in better shape? Take look at recent reports from the Standish Group and other analysts that herald MTS and MSMQ as dangerous technologies that will put your data and transactions at risk from day one. So what’s going on? This is a big vendor push in a flat market for developer products. The noise makes lots of headlines and causes endless assertions of competitive advantage. But there’s little of practical business value here, at least for end-user shops over the next year. Until the vendors get their act together and deploy products that actually work with other vendors’ products, all we really have are suppositions. Don’t waste any of your valuable time evaluating this stuff now – first, ask your vendor for customer references, and actually talk to them. In private conversations, they’re likely to give you an earful about their frustrations with Java – on the client and the server. Ask them how much fun they’re having with JDK compatibility and stability. To summarize the best response to the current New York follies, I’ll update the inimitable words of Robert Tholemeier, when your vendor starts telling you about this stuff, put your fingers in your ears and start singing loudly to yourself.
