4.8. Future Directions

According to Higdon, players such as HomeSide have to embrace change as part of their competitive strategy. For instance, the company in its current form is the product of merger and acquisition. “Mergers and acquisitions are facts of life in our industry,” says Higdon. “Our use of component-based design principles means that we can modify or replace parts of the application without disrupting the business.” For instance, changes could be made to business logic in a service layer EJB without affecting the Web layer. Conversely, JSPs that generate graphics, logos, or other presentation details could easily be swapped out and recompiled, without any disruption to the Web site.

He adds that BEA's support of J2EE standards helps HomeSide keep its future deployment options open. First, there is the fact that both Java technology and BEA support open systems standards. “We are assured that WebLogic will run on whatever server platform we choose,” notes Higdon, who adds, “Since BEA WebLogic Server is scalable to any kind of hardware platform we may need, our business can grow well beyond our current projections and we will be able to handle the additional load.”

Then there is the issue of staying current with technology. “With the J2EE platform and BEA WebLogic Server, we believe we will stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the marketplace. That gives us a pathway to the new and emerging standards that Sun and its partners are developing, and helps us to retain developers who are interested in working on the cutting-edge, and keeping their skills marketable.” Higdon is confident that BEA's strategy to support new J2EE platform standards as early as possible will give HomeSide an important technical competitive edge over other lenders.

4.8.1. Distributed Deployment

HomeSide plans to redeploy the application and Web server tiers into a more equitably distributed configuration that takes advantage of clustering to provide high availability. Specifically, the application server (which contains the EJBs) will be moved off the large HP V-class server, which currently houses the database and back-end application. “We had to prove the viability of the new system before we could buy the right hardware for the application,” notes Higdon.

Under the new deployment plan, BEA WebLogic Server will be based on a cluster of HP L-class servers (the same systems currently used for the Web-server tier). The Web server layer will be moved onto smaller, rack-mounted HP A500 machines that are more appropriately sized for the task (they will be based on a cluster of multiple, four-processor systems). In addition, accelerators for performing compute-intensive secure socket layer (SSL) encryption/decryption processes will be used to increase performance.

The database will remain on the V-class machine, along with the legacy applications, which should experience a significant performance improvement once the application server is moved off onto the cluster.

4.8.2. Upgrades

When the project began in late 1999, HomeSide implemented the Web application using BEA WebLogic Server 4.5.2, which supported version 1.0 of the EJB spec. The development team has already begun migrating to BEA WebLogic Server version 6.0, adopting the emerging EJB 2.0 specification.

However, the transition to a newer version of the EJB spec may affect the current development schedule somewhat. That will require such changes as:

• Conversion of the deployment descriptors from text to XML

• Code modifications, such as the use of the RMI-IIOP compatible narrow method instead of the look-up method that was used in the EJB 1.0 spec

According to Higdon, the changes should be somewhat minor, but will require a thorough regression test of the system.

HomeSide is also looking at approaches to speed the download of Web pages from its site. Toward that end, it is reducing the size and number of graphics on the site, favoring a textual Next anchor rather than a graphic. In these cases, the differences won't affect the use of JSPs; they will still be used to generate Web pages that happen to contain fewer images. However, another alternative being considered would, in some cases, substitute the use of JSPs with Dynamic HTML for features such as task bars. The team has yet to decide what its Web-page tune-up strategy will be.

HomeSide also plans to add additional services to make the data-entry process less error-prone. An address validation service will be provided in the near future. This will standardize and correct the data the user enters for home address, as well as property address, and make sure the ZIP code matches the entry. HomeSide will also add checks to ensure the city, county, and area codes match to ensure the user is entering correct data. Correcting the data at this point will help speed the processing of the loan later and will ensure a timely close of the loan.