8.7. Benefits of the J2EE Platform and HP Bluestone to Altura
The J2EE platform and HP Bluestone have both delivered significant and tangible benefits to Altura. There are increases in efficiency at every level. Developers are more productive; 16 application servers and 8 Web servers now accomplish what previously required 120+ Web servers to do (on essentially the same hardware, running the same operating system); administrators can now use a single management console to oversee the entire Web application infrastructure. And for visitors to the site? They enjoy the experience of high performance and high reliability—which can help foster a high return rate for Altura and its merchants.
“Going from our original environment to Java technology and J2EE was like being in hell and going to heaven,” says Zimmerman. “What we used before was not a programming language; it was a scripting language, and its capabilities were limited. In the beginning of our move to HP Bluestone, we had to build up a lot of Java classes before we could be productive. So initially we were more productive in our old environment than we were in the Java environment. However, after nearly a year of development in the Java environment, we have such a large library of Java classes that we're much more productive now than we ever were in our original environment. It's an object oriented library, it's an extensible library, it's reusable. I can debug in a source-level debugger using a variety of tools, I can use a variety of profilers. It's the difference between batch programming on punch cards and a modern programming environment.”
The day-to-day management and maintenance of the Altura site is greatly simplified, too, says Hunt. “With HP Bluestone, we can support a lot more users, more sessions, and more connections per server. We can pull a server out, without pulling down the whole site. We can also maintain our code more efficiently. If we wanted to add a feature in the old architecture, we would have to bring down the site, deploy the new feature to the servers, test it, and then bring the site back up. With HP Bluestone, we do all that on the fly. When a new feature is ready, we can make it available across all shopping malls within minutes, without taking anything offline.”
If a machine fails, the failover mechanisms in HP Bluestone ensure that no user sessions are lost. Altura site managers now have a site-wide management console—which someone other than their own developers maintains. Altura no longer has to devote its own development resources to the creation of a centralized management system—instead, it can deploy those resources on projects that add real value to visitors coming to the site.
Finally, the benefits of Java technology, HP Bluestone, and J2EE extend far beyond just being able to develop a tool quickly and manage a site more efficiently. The reusability and extensibility of the J2EE objects and the ability to deploy entire sites dynamically make it easy for Altura to syndicate their content to other shopping malls quickly—even to develop whole new sites for new customers in a very short period of time.
“If someone comes to us and says, 'We want a new mall, and we need it up and running in two weeks,' we can do it. Even if it's late November and they want a mall with 100,000 products online in time for holiday shoppers, with their look and corporate character, their color schemes, and integrated with their back-end infrastructure. We can do all that because of Java technology and the J2EE platform—and we can do it for anybody, anywhere, in any language, and in any currency.”
For more information about HP Bluestone, visit http://www.bluestone.com. For more information about Altura, visit http://www.altura.com. For the CatalogCity.com Web site, visit http://www.catalogcity.com.