Could application servers be overkill?
Published: 02 Apr 2003 15:09 BST
Instead of using a full-blown application server, Cape Clear takes a more stripped-down approach. O'Toole says Cape Clear's namesake solution employs the open source based Jetty, the development of which is maintained by Mort Bay Consulting. With little more than some HTTP serving and Java servlet technology, and using Cape Clear's development tools (Cape Clear Studio), O'Toole claims, developers can have documents (again, metaphorically speaking) talking to each other in a matter of hours or days, instead of weeks or months.
Cape Clear can take any existing applications or entities, even ones based on Cobol or CICS, and turn them into Web services. In the case of mainframe applications, Cape Clear can wrap a 3270 terminal session, but a third-party terminal emulator is needed first. Once you have a document representation of those applications and entities, Cape Clear uses XSLT to integrate that "document" with data coming or going from or to other XML sources and Web services. I asked O'Toole if he expected Cape Clear's customers to proceed blindly with developing Web services that are devoid of any notion of orchestration or transactional state. O'Toole claimed that complicated protocols like the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS) or the Web services Choreography Interface (WSCI) are extra baggage and that any functionality that those specifications are designed to handle is easily covered by something found in virtually every system: JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript).
The idea of maintaining workflow and transactional integrity with JavaScript seemed to me to suggest a giant step backward from the proverbial new world of Web services programming. In the world of business process management, designing complex business routines and workflows is supposed to be a simple drag-and-drop process accessible to mortals like business managers and analysts. The oft-hailed benefits of this paradigm include the reduced amount time it takes to design a new business interaction as well as the reduced need for intervention from software developers. Referring to high-level drag and drop-like programming tools like these as "stickman" products, O'Toole said the idea is a pipe dream.
"I've seen it work for simple interactions," he said, "but in the real world, where something has to be choreographed, this sort of programming simply won't do. You're going to need good programmers, and JavaScript can handle just about anything beyond the basic functionality that's provided by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL)."
Is O'Toole on to something? Oracle 9iAS product marketing vice president John Magee doesn't think so. Magee acknowledged that not everything that could be wrapped in a services layer requires the enhanced funcitionality found in application servers like Oracle 9iAS. But, he adds, every company has some business logic that must be developed in a traditional language like Java or C#.
"Some developers are going to develop new applications, and when they do that, they'll need tools, fault tolerance, load balancing, and security," said Magee. Cape Clear's claims, he continues, "remind me of the early days of XML where people were saying that you're not going to need traditional servers anymore and that they'll be replaced by XML servers. The reality is that XML has to be baked into all the other technologies that are out there. The idea that there isn't going to be any business logic is fallacious."
I asked Magee what he thought about O'Toole's claim that any need for business logic can be handled with JavaScript. "It's highly unlikely," he said, "that any developers are going to toss out their existing development tools."
But Magee's biggest criticism of Cape Clear concerned the cost issue. With Cape Clear's cost of $10,000 per CPU, O'Toole claimed that customers will spend 10 percent of what they'd spend with one of the big application server providers. Magee's response? "Well, compare that to what we announced today. Instead of spending $10,000 per CPU for Cape Clear, you can spend $5,000 per CPU with us and get Oracle 9iAS, which includes full J2EE 1.3 support, support for clustering, the TopLink object relational persistence framework, and five licences for our Oracle 9i Jdeveloper integrated development environment."
Another caveat: Cape Clear 4 isn't all standard. In the process of wrapping other applications and data in a Java-based service layer, the solution also wraps them in a proprietary Web service management interface accessible by a central console that maintains a view of an organisation's entire Web services farm. Proprietary as it may be, it's 100 percent XML-based and the interface is published so others can access it.
For a weekly round-up of the enterprise IT news, sign up for the Tech Update newsletter.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
32 out of 54 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
