Dressing Up Open Systems

The transformation taking place will eventually remake the entire landscape of application development. The best integrators and providers are already taking careful stock of how to position their companies and train their developers to take advantage of these changes.

Why is this happening now? For several reasons. First, the Web has grown up and matured beyond being just a simple page-display protocol with a bunch of simple and clickable links. An entire new area of Web services has grown out of the original HTTP protocol work and, with it, a new series of tools, protocols and methods. A good example is what is happening today to many corporate Web sites. Originally, they were nothing more than electronic billboards, presenting static information about the company to visitors. Then came dynamic links that updated Web data in near real-time with corporate databases. But that wasn't enough, and now corporate Web sites include personalization information, so pages are customized to particular customers and partners, and have corporate information portals that can be used by internal employees to connect to a wide range of corporate resources, information and tools.

"People no longer view the Web as simply a medium for transmitting brochure-like information, but instead it has become a rich user interface that allows internal applications to be deployed immediately," says Ari Kahn, the CTO of software vendor FatWire, Mineola, N.Y. FatWire has experienced extraordinary growth delivering Web-content management and control applications,which sell for six figures and more,to major corporations looking to take back control of their Web sites. All of these changes mean application developers must get increasingly sophisticated about their tools and techniques to keep up with such advances.

The Power of the Web

The Web has become so pervasive that the Internet-connected Web browser is now the de facto operating system of choice and the one common element that cuts across partners, suppliers and customers. The pervasive Internet infrastructure has also raised customer expectations, according to John Lemisch, president of Data Management Solutions, a developer in Palm City, Fla., who is focused on Internet-applications deployment.

"More users [today are Internet literate and demand more and more connectivity, including both the Internet and better communications, in general, with their partners and customers," he says.

Second, these Web services have motivated a new series of tools and standards. Although the Web has been around for more than a decade, it has taken most of this time for Web-leveraging products to catch up with non-Web-based applications to offer enough integration, robustness and choices for applications developers to take advantage of them. Solution providers are now able to deliver more rapid prototyping and delivery of applications to their customers with these new Web-based tools, making their services more desirable as business conditions change and more flexibility is demanded.

"The ability to rapidly create solutions that fill the void created by shrink-wrapped software is what keeps us profitable," says Capel English, CTO of Snaps, an Atlanta, Ga., consultant who is heavily into Web-services application development. Snaps is one of the largest fax integrators in the world and a leading reseller of numerous telephony/computing solutions.

The demand for new platforms and devices has also grown. Corporations want to run applications on more mobile devices. For example, they want the ability to incorporate real-time bar code scanning of their inventories into their databases. And with those devices come requirements for new applications that can take advantage of their portability, along with the challenges of working on smaller displays and with less capable memory and processors.

Finally, the nature of the applications-development process has evolved during the past year, migrating away from strict e-commerce efforts and involving more generalized custom solutions. According to VARBusiness' State of the Market surveys done in the fall of 2001, the overall percentage of respondents planning to deploy e-commerce applications has decreased from 40 percent in 2001 to 34 percent in 2002. However, there was an increase in overall custom-application development, to the point that exactly half those polled do some of this work. And the spread of e-commerce and intranet development has migrated more toward the larger resellers and integrators, with a larger proportion doing those kinds of applications compared with the smaller shops.

Part of the shift in focus has to do with the changing nature of the overall economy and the IT industry itself. The boom and bust of the Internet has made for a sharper focus on returns, profits and cutting costs, and extraneous programs and divisions. Bill Sanders, director of strategic services for Bell Industries' Tech.logix Group, a consultant and developer based in Indianapolis, Ind., says, "Changes in application development really began in the fall of 2000 with the fall of the dot coms. Since then, there has been a slow but steady migration to application development with a clearer return on investment."

Some of that is caused by the increasing emphasis on

e-commerce applications, says Deb Mukherjee, CTO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, a developer based in Teaneck, N.J. "Customers care less about vanity Web sites these days and more about quick-and-dirty approaches to delivering e-business applications," he notes.

Cognizant was founded in 1994 and spun off Dun and Bradstreet as a life-cycle software developer, specializing in leveraging offshore programmers on large projects in e-commerce and data warehousing.

Development Opportunities

All of the new horizons opened up by the Web and the Internet have created new opportunities for developers. "Every time there's a change in the economy, there's movement in the apps marketplace," says Javed Matin, CEO of Myriad Solutions, a major Washington, D.C.-based Computer Associates VAR. Myriad focuses exclusively on productivity and life-cycle applications. In just two years, the company has brought in more than $3 million nationwide by working with Computer Associates' applications, consulting and training.

Those changes mean that developers have to go back and recode their applications to match changing business conditions. "Customers want their apps to be customized easily so they can implement changes in their business processes quickly and cheaply," Matin says. Businesses need to react to a changing climate and conditions, and that means that a certain level of flexibility must be built into their underlying applications.

Kirk Wolfe is the president of Enterprise Mobility, a reseller based in the Cincinnati area. His company develops sales-force automation tools on PalmOS, PocketPC and Windows NT platforms using a variety of tools and programming languages. "People are now looking for fast return on their investment and relatively low-cost solutions," he says. "Automating paper-based processes means that handheld devices might solve that, and they are going in with test deployments to see if these things can scale and give people what they really want. Ultimately, though, the applications have to be simple, and easy to use for people who aren't especially computer literate," Wolfe adds.

Matin agrees that opportunities abound: "With new technologies emerging, there is additional pressure on the business owner to be more competitive and deliver more with less. This translates into movement and shift in the IT arena, especially [with regard to the choice of development platforms."

When it comes to platforms to support application

servers,a business that Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group last year estimated to be in excess of $2 billion,opportunities abound. The biggest players in the application server game are BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun. Each company has positioned itself differently: IBM is preaching open systems and says its WebSphere tools are cut from the same cloth as Apache et al.; BEA promises its Java from WebLogic Workshop is portable and usable on a variety of systems; Microsoft claims that with .NET it has the best Windows development tools, and Oracle says its database is where it all starts and ends, and its 9i JDeveloper is a complete development environment that goes beyond the competition. And Sun has added portal pieces to its Sun One Java application server, which should be available this summer.

Figuring out market share for these vendors isn't easy: who's on top depends on the analyst firm you pick. (see "Analysts Reports Cloud App-Server Debate," June 10, page 24).

And these five are tough competitors, to be sure. Oracle offers a migration kit to move BEA WebLogic customers over to its application server platform. IBM talks about how it wants to get back to a duopoly of itself and Microsoft as the main solution providers. Sun is bundling its Sun One server for free with its Solaris licenses, targeting BEA and other Unix vendors. The rest are just as fierce and trying to position themselves as the de facto application server for the next generation of developers.

But the claims of the heavyweight platform vendors may all be moot for mainstream application developers at the major solution-provider and integrator shops, once Web services takes hold. The reason? Due to open-systems choices, these commercial platform vendors may be overpriced and too much trouble.

The various open-systems choices cost less, for sure. And open systems is increasingly the chosen path for the midsize development shops that don't want to get locked into commercial vendors' platforms (see "The Three Tiers of Web Applications," page 34).

Open Source Rules

Whatever their claims, none of the big five application framework vendors are thrilled about the legion of thousands of independent software developers that are part of the open- source movement, which takes on all the 1960s flair and implications of the word. These developers share their enhancements to the common tool base, and work cooperatively on a wide number of projects, tools, interfaces and protocols,all in the name of advancing the technology behind Web services. No single company or even developer is in control, and the organic nature of the open-source community means that rapid developments and enhancements can happen, to the mutual benefit of everyone. Bob Matsuoka, CEO of independent software developer RunTime, based in New York, is someone who has lots of experience using a variety of open-source tools. "Even with all the work going on with .NET, it still doesn't compare to the level of activity surrounding the open-source community," he says.

That has important implications for the solution providers who want to leverage Web-services applications: Because the tools can be had for free,or nearly so,the entry costs shift from spending money on the tools to spending money and time on training staff members. It also means that providers and their in-house developers can do a better job matching up their tools with their projects, and not be as concerned about being locked into one vendor's offerings.

There are some signs that open source is becoming more the norm. George Brown is the president of the Aston Group in Vancouver, a company that specializes in large international software development. The company deploys various Microsoft, Great Plains, SAP and CRM products, and also extends applications to work across the Internet. He talks about how "the early adopters are looking at these open-source protocols and development environments as everyday tools. They are now penetrating into the vocabularies of the everyday developer." And Matin says, "People are now moving toward component-based object-oriented technologies." Java is just one of the object-oriented programming languages that can be used to extend applications out over the Web, and it is catching some interest with the more traditional client-server kinds of developers.

That doesn't mean these tools are for everyone and every situation. "The Web is several years away still for most of my business users, says Bill Warner, president at Gross Pointe, Mich.-based Compunique. "This means these types of tools will not catch on for some time to come."

Compunique develops a wide variety of applications for both Internet and non-Internet users. And "contrary to popular opinion, there are still many database applications that don't need to be and shouldn't be on the Net," notes Cal Locklin, a consultant with integrator AIMS DataCom, Northville, Mich. "Certainly, most companies don't want to share their accounting data with the rest of the world. And there are other types of data that are also considered proprietary. Plus, I've found that a number of the smaller business owners just aren't comfortable with Internet security and prefer to stay away from it unless absolutely necessary," he says.

IBM and Eclipse

Of the five biggest application development platform vendors, IBM has embraced open systems with the most religious zeal. "The best way to make open standards successful is to use them," says Scott Hebner, director of marketing for the WebSphere product line at IBM. As an example, he points out that earlier versions of WebSphere used to run on top of IBM's own Web server based on Notes and Domino,the current version makes use of Apache code. "We want to drive cross-platform capability and interoperability, and the best way to do that is to make use of open standards," he says. "We also want developers to feel at home with WebSphere, and the best way to do that is to make use of the same tools they do."

Hebner contrasts IBM's efforts today with what architectures the company was pushing a decade ago with its Systems Application Architecture. Back then, "we published a big stack of books and manuals, but no actual code. Plus, it was all for proprietary IBM systems such as mainframes and the AS/400," he says. "We learned from those mistakes, and today we are doing the exact opposite: implementations for both IBM and non-IBM systems, lots of code and very little paper."

Most notable among IBM's application-development efforts is a project called Eclipse.org, an open-standards corner to enhance and extend WebSphere-related services. "Eclipse is a toolkit for building new tools," Hebner says. "It provides an integrated capability for developers who can pick the best-of-breed tools and also share their own with our community."

That community has grown rapidly,more than 8,000 developers have registered with the site. With this effort, IBM is trying to incorporate the needs of its developers in new ways, by giving them world-class tools.

"Microsoft has always been strong in the tools marketplace," says Andy Sweet, CIO of Perficient, an Austin, Texas-based e-business systems integrator and WebSphere reseller. "And IBM needed to respond to that and produce something that is good for the community, good for us as developers and good for the competition in that it raises the bar on overall tool quality."

Speaking of Microsoft

Sitting squarely in IBM's aim is Microsoft and its .NET applications framework. "Both WebSphere and .NET play leadership roles in the enterprise," Sweet says. Microsoft is taking a different tack from IBM: turning its back on open standards and leveraging Windows as the developers' platform of choice. But there's some risk in this approach for several reasons.

First, Microsoft's .NET requires developers to upgrade their tools and rewrite their applications to take advantage of Microsoft's version of Java, Microsoft's programming interfaces and other Microsoft-flavored tools. Older C++ applications won't necessarily work in the .NET environment. That forces the issue for developers who want to keep maintaining existing code, rather than switch to some new standard (see "Customize Or Maintain?" page 36). Second, .NET has perhaps the steepest learning curve of any of the big five frameworks. Understanding .NET may take some time and effort to truly get inside the product and realize its potential. English talks about how .NET has changed his development efforts. "We have recently moved all new development to .NET [but have not made the decision to port all of our custom apps to .NET. While .NET offers many new exciting features, it's steep learning curve and inability to upgrade VB6 apps to .NET means too much work for the type of one-off jobs we do."

In addition, .NET is very much a work in progress. FatWire's Kahn says: ".NET will certainly become another important platform, but it is not there yet. The .NET development tools are weak today because applications are evolving quicker than the development environment." That presents all sorts of problems for developers, who have to constantly update their tool sets to take advantage of the evolving platforms and environments.

Part of the issue over whether .NET will succeed has to do with whether developers are building Windows or Unix-based applications. "I don't see many of our customers thinking strategically about platforms," English says. Most of them have a combination of Windows and Unix. This is not going to change anytime soon. And while Microsoft is gearing .NET strongly toward the Windows world, that may not necessarily be an advantage. Martin Cole, president at Dallas-based Cole Custom Programming, is a developer who primarily uses Alpha Software for his custom programming. Recently, he's gotten more interested in Internet applications. "Although I, too, as a developer, resent Microsoft's ever-presence, I agree that having various versions of Windows will create major havoc,at least for the short run," he says. "No developer I have talked to likes the idea of .NET."

Some integrators are sour on Microsoft because of what is lacking with its toolsets. "I don't look to Microsoft for hot tools," says Ira Perlow, a consultant for Computer Systems Design and Assoc., Waltham, Mass. "They will have the largest penetration, but not be the best," he says. "I look for tools that give a strong leveraging of time and are not limited in power for the application needs of the target users." Matin agrees: "Other vendors besides Microsoft have a fair share of the apps tools market."

What About Linux?

Without a doubt, the Linux marketplace has reached a certain level of maturity, and many developers are moving their critical server-side systems to Linux servers and will continue to do so. There is a growing acceptance of Linux in the marketplace (see "Why We Love Linux," page 30, May 13). Look at IBM, which is "putting a boatload of investment into the Linux community," according to Hebner. "All of our WebSphere products run on Linux, and our Eclipse code runs on both Windows and Linux." Many consultants take the approach that "Windows is the preferred client-side application platform, while Linux is best for the server side of things," says William Suriwiec, a New York-based consultant with mobile- and voice-systems integrator Datavox Technologies. What's nice thing about supporting server-side Java is that you can write one set of programs that will run on both.

"I think the battle for the next generation of platform will be between Linux and Windows, and we may see other technologies emerging, says Matin, a developer. "As soon as clients see a better return on their investments, they will change to these newer platforms." Examples of these emerging technologies include both mobile and kiosk applications, as well as better and more effective Web/database integration.

One of the great ironies of the evolution of Web services has been that the choice of platforms isn't as important as it once was. "With Web services, companies can pick their platform and tools according to the needs of each application and not have to worry about interoperability," says Roger Smith, CTO of developer NCS Technologies in Piscataway, N.J. "Most companies we work with have already planted their flag in either the Windows or Unix camps, so we don't have to fight that battle. The browser as the universal client has almost become de facto."

The Internet hasn't completely replaced the aging mainframe data center, however. According to Matin, "You still have your mainframes running MVS, and then there is good old AS400 and Unix. We see a lot changes being made in these old platforms to enable communication with the new and hot platforms, such as Linux."

BEA, Oracle And Sun

"The Internet really blew the tools market apart," says John Magee, director of Oracle 9i Application Server Tools marketing. "Developers now have to think about many more layers when they build their applications and handle multiple architectures as well. All this means it has taken until now for our tools to catch up to the productivity levels that we had enjoyed previously, prior to the Web."

What makes Oracle unique is its comprehensive set of tools: "We are the only vendor that has end-to-end support," Magee says. "IBM doesn't have data modeling and profiling tools in their suite, nor do they have performance analysis and other extensions that allow a developer to stay inside the integrated development environment and get his work done. And BEA is only addressing one small part of the picture tool,they don't have tools to handle the business logic."

Of the major vendors, Sun is in the weakest position: while they originated Java and still derive licensing revenue from its competitors, they have been slow to market with their application server features and still are missing key Windows and Linux support, which they have promised at the end of this year or next year. Ironically, the vendor who first began the whole Java movement is the last to capitalize on its success.

The landscape of application development is changing, in large part due to the introduction and maturing of Web services and Web-related applications. And as the commercial vendors battle it out with open-source alternatives, the better integrators and developers are finding new sets of tools and new methods to deploy their applications. n