Re: Interesting news item the September 2000 issue of News400... -- SYSTEM21

In Focus: Geac Takes a Voyage with EJBs
                                                                           
 by Joanna Moore                                                           
                                         NEWS/400, September 2000 , pg. 24 
                                                          Article ID: 8001 
                                                      Department: In Focus 
                                                                           




For years, IBM hailed Java as the future of the AS/400. If so, Enterprise
JavaBeans (EJBs) are the final frontier. Now Geac ? a Canadian company that
last October acquired JBA, makers of the AS/400 System 21 product line ? is
boldly going where no vendor has gone before. Geac is using IBM's WebSphere
Application Server and the EJB model to retool its existing customer
service applications with components.


The journey began when JBA decided to broaden its customer base by building
a new cross-platform enterprise resource planning (ERP) product to run on
the AS/400, S/390, and Windows NT. The company felt that its traditional,
3GL-based RPG applications, though popular, weren't keeping pace with
today's market, says Bruce McIntyre, Geac's vice president of product
strategy. JBA wanted to create a more flexible, component-based product to
allow customers to change their back office faster.


The company started by selecting Rational's unified modeling language (UML)
engineering tool, Rational Rose. Choosing the Rational tool set led JBA to
consider IBM and Microsoft (both Rational partners) for the middleware
vendor. Although a long-time AS/400 vendor, JBA tested against both
WebSphere and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and concluded that IBM
would provide the best option for a truly scalable cross-platform product.


When JBA committed to IBM, it settled on building a Java-based sys-tem with
WebSphere, but was unsure whether to adopt an EJB approach. "Not all Java
vendors are using EJBs, and they're very new on the AS/400," McIntyre
notes.


But JBA soon realized it would take a tremendous amount of time to develop
a new ERP package that could replace its System 21 offering. Instead, it
decided to build on top of System 21 and sell the finished product as
components.


In order to realize its cross-platform vision, Geac wanted to make sure the
new components would run not only on the AS/400 but on NT and S/390 as
well. Because System 21 is written in RPG, customers are currently limited
to the AS/400. As the number and functional richness of the components
increase, Geac will retire complete sections of the legacy application in
order to make the components truly portable, Brown says. For now, the
legacy RPG is treated as a set of SQL stored procedures.


Once JBA got behind a component-based system, the EJB model was a natural
fit, says Colin Brown, JBA's senior developer. Not only is the EJB model
the de facto standard for building component-based systems with WebSphere,
but it's flexible.


Geac plans to deliver its new applications as a booklet of reusable
business logic components that it can reassemble to suit each customer.
"That was the driving force behind us going down this path and why we used
the EJB structure," McIntyre says. "It gave us the ability to create a
tailored application for an individual customer."


Before converting to the EJB model, JBA grew its own technology. But the
EJB model forces JBA/Geac to build things according to predetermined
guidelines. The EJB model provides standard, well-documented interfaces so
JBA consultants can assemble the components easily. This conformity means
that the EJBs Geac/JBA builds can be reused within other systems.


But the effort to retool JBA's existing applications to use the EJB model
is "not insignificant," McIntyre says. A total of 22 employees work on the
project ? 10 developers, four designers, four architects, two product
testers, one process engineer, and Brown himself as project manager. This
team isn't much larger than JBA's previous development staff, but the
employees went through 5 weeks of retraining with IBM.


In fact, building with EJBs comes with the added benefit of mooching off
IBM's established knowledge and skills, says McIntyre. "We're not just
seeing a Java programming language, but a complete development and
deployment environment," he says. "The ability to link EJBs into a Web
application is very simple, and it's all structured from dedication to
authorization ? things that as a developer we don't need to worry about or
understand."


That's not to say there haven't been any bumps in the road. EJBs only came
to the AS/400 about a year ago, and IBM is still ironing out the kinks. The
EJB model wasn't as finished as it needed to be when JBA began working with
it, McIntyre says, and some early problems included security issues,
pooling difficulties, and just getting the EJBs to run. WebSphere 3.0.2
also brought some performance bottlenecks, but IBM and Geac have been
working together to resolve these in 3.5, Brown adds. IBM furnished a
schedule of promised improvements and has kept to it so far.


Geac develops much of its code on NT, then ports the code to WebSphere on
the AS/400 because, although the AS/400 now runs WebSphere Advanced
Edition, the NT version is slightly ahead and receives patches and fixes
before the AS/400. The main advantage to developing on NT is that each
developer has the entire developer suite on his PC. The porting process is
quite simple, Brown says, and is done on a daily basis. "There's no
separate phase of developing on NT and then porting," he says. "We can test
one subsystem on NT one day and then on AS/400 the next day. The actual
deployment process is very similar."


Although IBM has yet to release price/performance benchmarks for EJBs
running on the AS/400, Geac is committed to the AS/400. JBA is
traditionally an AS/400 shop and McIntyre believes its AS/400 customers
want to stay with the AS/400. "Moving to another environment like Netfinity
introduces complexity, so what would be the value in that?" asks McIntyre.


Geac and IBM are trying to determine which combination of hardware and
software will deliver the most cost-effective, scalable system. Geac plans
to test its latest code base on WebSphere 3.5 and will compare its results
against those for 3.0.2. The code will also be run on various models of the
AS/400 so that Geac can get an idea of the performance curve, Brown says.


In the long run, the EJB model will mean lower costs for Geac customers,
McIntyre says. The defined interface of EJBs means fewer tests and shorter
development time, he says. Plus, Geac will lower expenses by reusing 80 to
90 percent of its components. These savings will let Geac offer the product
for less than a traditional ERP package.


Geac is still hammering out exactly what customers will need in order to
run the new applications. WebSphere may or may not be packaged with the
application, and it's unclear which release of WebSphere would be required.
There's no reason the applications shouldn't work with other Web
application servers such as Bluestone Sapphire and BEA WebLogic, Brown
says, but because of its close relationship with IBM, Geac/JBA isn't
considering any options other than WebSphere. Customers will need OS/400 V4
or higher.


Geac hopes its System 21 product will be completely rebuilt with EJB
components by July 2001. This summer, Geac began beta testing on the AS/400
with a company in the U.K. Because it's Geac's first deployment, it's a
deliberately small-scale beta.


                                          ? Joanna Moore, Industry Reporter


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