June 1998

        Industry
        N E W S  A N A L Y S I S
        by REMI DUBOIS

         

        Component Broker Watch—

        IBM Adopts Enterprise JavaBeans as Unifying Component Model
        For The Enterprise

        JOINED BY ITS CUSTOMER Charles Schwab at the IBM JavaOne 98 booth, IBM’s announcement, detailing plans for endorsing Enterprise JavaBeans technology across IBM software middleware and application servers, denotes another significant step towards quickly developed, large scale e-business applications that can be easily managed and deployed using IBM Component Broker and other services.

        With new business pressures bringing new business problems, such as those brought about by mergers, or banks being compelled to create new products quickly, companies are now often required to be able to interact with a single customer using multiple pieces of product or customer in-formation residing in disparate systems.

        Increasingly, developers are turning to distributed objects to create applications to solve new business problems. By taking pieces from existing information sources that are relevant to a new business problem, and then using a component model to create a new business application that bridges those existing sources, frameworks like Component Broker can integrate new and existing applications allowing disparate systems to combine and provide the new functionality.

        Component Broker is a framework suitable for large enterprises with multiple existing sources of applications such as IBM’s CICS, IMS, DB2, and MQSeries middleware as well as data stored in Oracle, SAP, Baan, and Microsoft systems in heterogeneous environments. Based on CORBA 2.0 standards, it will link with any client—fat desktops, Web browsers, or any system or enterprise application using standards-based middleware.

        The Next Logical Step

        With its decision to support Enterprise JavaBeans as its component model, IBM is continuing to execute its value-added strategy, which is designed to help customers define their business problems, understand and match those problems to the delivery of Component Broker, and then work in close partnership to get Component Broker installations up and running at customer sites. Following an aggressive release schedule, IBM initially shipped Component Broker version 1.0 in November 97, 1.1 in February this year, and then 1.2 in the last week of April.

        One of the reasons IBM is on a maniacal schedule to deliver Component Broker is to build the critical mass in the enterprise market segment they’re after. Rather than take the shrink-wrapped ORB-in-a-box approach, IBM plans to provide end-to-end solutions for businesses in order to solve new business problems with distributed objects. The company has been very aggressive driving Component Broker to market and adding one new large enterprise customer each week. With its schedule of releases, IBM is work-in to get the software right this year while getting it working in customer sites at the same time. Component Broker presently has over 4 million lines of code, and IBM is delivering point releases with added functionality every quarter.

        How does IBM plan to get enough ubiquity around Component Broker to get the market mass behind it? That’s where Enterprise JavaBeans are important. Enterprise Java-Beans give IBM and its middleware servers, a single programming model across a fairly powerful range of middleware: it can be said that the programming model and the component model are both Enterprise JavaBeans.

        By adopting Enterprise JavaBeans as a unifying component model across its soft middleware and application servers, IBM is seeking to make it easier for customers to deploy TCP/IP-based applications across corporate intranets, extranets, and the Internet. Since Enterprise Java-Beans are completely compatible with CORBA, they will be able to interoperate with other components running in a Component Broker environment. IBM plans to enable initial Enterprise JavaBeans support in Component Broker late this year.

        "Enterprise JavaBeans may be a spec, but it is a spec like no other. It’s the result of industry-wide collaboration and based on the experience we’ve had building Component Broker, and our experience with Java," said Alistair Rennie, IBM’s Marketing Executive for Component Broker. "The implementation path for Enterprise JavaBeans and Component Broker is swift—a matter of months—because the underlying structure is already there."

        IBM also announced its intention to provide Enterprise JavaBeans support in other software over time, including DB2 Universal Database, CICS/390 and IMS host-based transaction software, MQSeries messaging, and the Lotus Domino Web application server platform.

        High-Performance Java Transactions at Schwab

        In an effort to develop new ways to stay ahead of capacity demands, Charles Schwab is running an e-trading system using Enterprise JavaBeans that IBM has coded, as a prototype, directly into CICS. Schwab is looking to JavaBeans as components that can be developed quickly, deployed in Web and intranet applications, and reused throughout the enterprise.

        The firm relies on IBM’s TXSeries transactional middle-ware technology to extend the existing data and systems to e-business. IBM’s Component Broker technology, within the CICS Transaction Server, allows Schwab to base communication between these components on open industry standards, which is key in a heterogeneous environment.

        Scalability of transaction processing is vital to success in an e-trade system, which on "Gray Monday" saw over 1000 real-time transactions per second. Running CICS on a System 390, Schwab adds the business logic, in Java, on a parallel UNIX box and then uses ORB technology from Component Broker to deploy those transactions out to Web clients.

        Currently shipping on NT, AIX, and in beta on OS/390, Component Broker is IBM’s enterprise solution for distributed object computing, providing a scalable, manageable run-time for developing and deploying multi-tier component-based applications. When released later this year, Component Broker for OS/390 will be available for OS/390 Version 2 Release 5 and Release 6 customers.

        Extending The Enterprise To The Web

        IBM depicts Enterprise JavaBeans as a new specification that is being widely adopted in the industry because of the flexibility and productivity benefits it provides to customers building complex, bet-your-business Web applications. It does indeed have significant momentum in the industry—not just due to the thrust of Java and its sex appeal for the developer community, but also because the required mission critical services behind it—Component Broker, TXSeries transaction management, and CICS—are already in place.

        How IBM follows through on its strategy to solve enterprise level business problems for clients brought on board will be the true indicator of success in extending legacy systems to the Internet/intranet.

        Microsoft has been quoted as saying that Enterprise JavaBeans is a very powerful idea, but is "just a spec." But Microsoft might want to stay tuned, since they wouldn’t want to find out too late that Enterprise JavaBeans is actually a powerful set of software that is not relying on just vision.
        Sun has over 800 busy Java programmers, and with Enterprise JavaBeans, IBM isn’t taking a new standard and looking to invent all the necessary underlying services. Those services already exist, are available for the enterprise, and bring strong value.

        Many large corporations use IBM systems and middle-ware for transaction-based applications, and the vast majority of financial institutions use IBM systems for transactions and data warehousing. Plus, approximately 50-60 percent of Internet transactions are already passing through IBM’s TXSeries or CICS transactional systems.

        This is IBM’s strong suit, and these systems are not going to be replaced by NT server farms any time soon. Today’s business logic of the enterprise resides on these existing systems, and banks, for example, are not going to rewrite their core business systems just to be able to do Web banking—banks will be looking for the technology that provides the ability to extend their legacy business processes into Web-enabled enterprise information systems.

        Enterprise JavaBeans and Component Broker can help to position IBM’s mainframe and enterprise systems as application and communication servers in a distributed environment, and should put IBM in the enviable position of allowing customers to get to e-business quickly, without having to sacrifice scalability, security, manageability, and the flexibility of where to deploy.

       
          --Remi duBois