3.6. Benefits
With its new infrastructure in place, jcrew.com is continuing its extraordinary success as a lucrative sales channel for J.Crew. The new site has increased J.Crew's annual revenues by 100 percent. This can be attributed to jcrew.com's ability to handle more than 8,000 concurrent user sessions, as well as its ability to generate 85 dynamic page views a second for each of its 250,000 unique daily visitors. The eight million hits it can handle in a given day also contribute to the bottom line. The best-practices methodology designed by Sun Professional Services and Fort Point Partners allowed the site to be launched in just four months. As shown in Table 3.4 the results of this successful deployment has been spiraling revenue growth for the Web site.
Chris Roberts, lead Java architect at the Sun Professional Services Java Center, explains the benefit of developing in a J2EE environment: “J2EE allows you to maintain separate roles and responsibilities so that a lot of work can be done concurrently among groups. For instance, a content team could work completely independently of the application team. It's all standard interfaces and everyone knows how it connects in the end. This best-practices approach to development is what sets applications built in the J2EE standard apart from those built with other methods.”
Chris Roberts continues, “JDBC allows you to build your application without concerning yourself with the kind of database you will use in the future. When we go in to ramp up jcrew.com in the next year or so, portability will be of minimal concern. The application doesn't need to know which kind of database it's running on, and that will prove to be a key advantage in the future.”
Indeed, since ATG has recently released its fully J2EE-compliant application server in ATG Dynamo version 5.0, J.Crew will be migrating its application to this platform by the middle of 2001.
Michael Dykes elaborates: “We will be seeing a total reduction in development effort as far as accessing the database. The new J2EE-based ATG Dynamo will add another database layer that automatically transforms query results into objects. Before J2EE technology, developers would have to translate between the relational views of the database and the objects. For example, in a database you would have a column for credit card information, a column for the expiration date, and one for the individual's name. Someone has to write the code to tie all these together as an object. The credit card is just one of a myriad of examples of tying data together as an object. The new platform will do this automatically, cutting development time exponentially.”