By Gian Trotta

The latest tools, tactics and techniques needed to unlock J2EE’s proven capability, avoid its ever-growing complexity -- and align it squarely behind business’ ever-changing needs -- were detailed in depth during our recent “Delivering Highly Scalable, Reliable J2EE Infrastructures” Webinar.

“As much as we love technology, we usually still need a business justification in which to implement it,” said analyst Jasmine Noel of JNOEL & Associates, who recently completed a detailed J2EE Application Management study.

Three current justifications she cited included delivering lower costs, the flexibility needed to compete in a global market and the auditability necessary to comply with new corporate governance regulations.

However, Noel noted that auditability “is a highly manual effort that eats up a lot of IT staff time that would be better spent developing and managing business applications.” And while on-demand enterprise infrastructure, standards-based service-oriented architectures can help, Noel focused on the revolutionary way J2EE can resolve the conflict.

“What I’ve been seeing is that J2EE really does deliver … you can go from a concept to deployment in 3-6 months,” she said. That, in turn, allows business to respond to computer trends and customer demands often within a single quarter, “and that rate of software delivery could not happen with any of the older software architectures,” Noel added.

However, since J2EE ties together so many disparate applications and groups, isolating application problems can be especially difficult. “At most of the enterprises I talk to, only one-third of J2EE problems get solved in under a couple of hours. But the more that business revenue, partnering, processes and manufacturing depends on J2EE applications the more unacceptable those long wait times are going to become,” she said.

But Noel shared proven ways to distinguish between code and operational issues in general and J2EE and other technical components in particular to ensure problems are avoided or quickly isolated in a way that reduces demands on developers.

IBM Senior Engineer Ruth Willenborg then described how IBM’s Extended Deployment Server (which sits atop both the 5.0 and newly-released 6.0 versions of WebSphere Application Server) and new features in 6.0 allows servers to better pool resources, partition applications and handle failovers. Other features like improved messaging, JMS integration and transport channel service also result in better availability, performance and scalability.