News

CTO says managing J2EE apps no longer an afterthought

• By Rich Seeley
• August 17, 2004

Managing J2EE enterprise applications is not always the first thing on a Java developer's mind, but that may be changing, according to Martin Milani, CTO at Intersperse Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based provider of monitoring and management software.

The concept that you would build something first and then try to figure out how to gauge its operating characteristics and performance in the real world would be laughable in almost any industry outside software development, he points out.

"Boeing wouldn't build a 757 and then try to instrument it," Milani quips. But how many applications have been built without much forethought about how the IT department is going to know if it's running efficiently or even correctly?

Two trends Milani sees in J2EE development are providing some hope the just-code-it mentality is changing among enterprise Java developers. First, he finds more IT organizations rewriting legacy applications in Java to fit into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Second, in more of those projects, the developers put in instrumentation before they fly.

"We're starting to see IT looking at monitoring and management in the beginning of development," Milani tells JDT. He says the trend is evident especially in the federal government where engineers are putting plans for instrumentation into SOA blueprints.

Monitoring and management is important in J2EE because applications are much more dynamic than most of the legacy predecessors, often originally written in Cobol and other ancient computer languages. Once the new Java apps are up and running, IT departments are looking at trying to follow tens of thousands of objects and process hundreds of events per second, Milani points out.

His company's new Intersperse Manager 3.0 is specifically designed to provide application management for these "next-generation J2EE and SOA-based applications," Milani says.