6.3. J2EE Helped Codexa Bring Order to Its Universe

Despite daunting requirements, the Codexa Service was built and deployed in only 18 months. Codexa believes that the J2EE platform helped to make that possible. It is naturally channel-neutral, because it is layered, distributed, and network savvy. The architecture has everything in place for client-side delivery of data. It allows data to be rendered dynamically in many different ways, and it gives a rich, multidimensional interface capable of rendering sophisticated views of how market sectors decompose, how information within sectors decomposes, and so forth. As an ASP, Codexa felt that development time with any other technology would have been prohibitive.

On the server side, the J2EE component architecture lends itself to building extensible application frameworks, and it leverages the Java 2 platform to provide for security and scalability. To be vendor-independent, the J2EE platform does not dictate how lifecycle services will be delivered. Rather, it is centered around CORBA, which Codexa used to provide the lifecycle-management services defined in the OMG's Object Management Architecture (OMA). CORBA relationship services enable componentization of the entire system, which makes for ease of deployment and profiling.

Codexa chose GemStone/J as its J2EE application server in part because of a successful shared history. Tom Geer, Codexa's chief architect, had worked with GemStone Systems (now Brokat AG's Java Server Unit) starting back in 1997, while building a network management system for Visa International, currently in production. At that time, the Java-technology-based application server market was not well-defined, but Geer felt that GemStone had and continues to have the best vision among application server vendors about the direction of J2EE technology. When he joined Codexa, Geer turned to the J2EE platform and GemStone/J to build the channel-neutral and highly expansive architecture of the Codexa Service.