Study Questions Companies’ Ability to Handle J2EE

Amid the growth of Sun Microsystem’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition , new research is calling into question the ability of users to use the platform efficiently because they don’t yet have the proper processes in place to handle the applications built with the language.

Wily Technology, a Brisbane, Calif. company that gauges how well Java
performs, said it has completed a study on the quality of how Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications run in certain enterprise environments.

After interviewing more than 350 J2EE users who work outside the software industry, the research firm concluded that applications running on the J2EE platform were available to users 88 percent of the time. “That means on average, companies are losing over 20 hours, or one full day per week, of availability,” said Lewis Cirne, founder and chief technology officer of Wily Technology.

Cirne said that three major pieces must be put into place to make the Java platform work properly for businesses: structured management processes to triage and resolve problems; dedicated application management resources; and better tools to enable real time monitoring and rapid problem isolation.

The study comes on the heels of the passage
of J2EE 1.4 by the Java standards body Java Community Process (JCP), a Java advocacy group.

The next generation version of J2EE has been touted for its
ability to power Web services , which allow
applications to talk to each other like never before.

The Wiley study found that enterprises who rely on J2EE to run their
applications must endure at least one full day of downtime per week.
Downtime, a reviled word in the computing industry, could mean lost dollars for companies that rely on software to power their businesses.

Survey participants said their companies will spend 52 percent of all
application development budgets on J2EE in 2003, with 30 percent of the respondents saying that they will develop more than 75 percent of their applications in J2EE. Accordingly, Cirne said organizations must take application availability and performance issues much more seriously or risk losing revenue, customers, and trading partners.

In other aspects of the survey, participants listed J2EE application
performance as ranging from average to poor, with applications averaging only reaching 60 percent of their performance targets at their worst. Those surveyed also said the genesis of J2EE application problems is code-related only 13.7 percent of the time, with 86 percent claiming that the cause of poor application performance is rooted in poor database or mainframe connections.

Moreover, the Wily study found that determining what the J2EE problems are takes too long — as much as more than a whole day in 30 percent of organizations. Wily is presenting a full report of the results of the survey in a series of seminars presented in cities across North America.