Open-Market Component-Based Development with Enterprise JavaBeansTM Technology

by Sam Patterson, CEO, ComponentSource, Inc.

June 2, 2000 -- Under increasing competitive pressures to improve services to customers, organizations need to be able to add new features to their business-critical applications. Trying to stay ahead of the competition is becoming harder and harder.

ComponentSource Offers Training at Java UniversitySM Program On Monday, June 5, 2000, from 10:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. in San Francisco, just prior to the JavaOneSM conference, Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource, Inc. will participate as an instructor in a training session on the development of Enterprise JavaBeansTM technology-based components and the opportunities, process, sale and consumption of open market components.

Writing an application entirely from scratch is a slow process. An application strategy, which is set to become pervasive, is "open market component based development." Time-to-market constraints have led to the rise of the open market for software components. Much like going into a store: corporations can buy pre-built expertise with supporting documentation, all encapsulated in standard "off-the-shelf" software components, and integrate them directly into their solutions.

Component-based, multi-tier applications are the future of enterprise computing - a future that is right around the corner. Developers who use Enterprise JavaBeans^TM technology from Sun Microsystems are realizing the benefits of these components:

• Portability and scalability to a wide range of enterprise servers
• Simplified application development, deployment and maintenance
• Protection of IT investment

Today's Enterprise JavaBeans platforms are designed specifically to support component-based applications on an enterprise-wide scale.

Open-Market Component-Based Development Defined

Open-market, component-based development offers customers the ability to choose expertly built, off-the-shelf software components for any platform from multiple component authors and to combine them with their own in-house components to build an application. Designing and building applications using open-market software components gives developers access to tried-and-tested business logic, which means they can focus on building specific components that differentiate their solutions. The reward to business includes: faster time to market at lower cost, with competitive advantage and long-term solutions that are adaptable to changing business needs, resulting in a maximum return on investment.

Enterprise JavaBeans^TM Components: The Revenue Stream of Tomorrow

Server applications traditionally have been built using proprietary transaction processing systems, which made it difficult to write portable, enterprise-class software. With the introduction of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB^TM) technology, server-side, enterprise software applications may now be created as a collection of software components, or enterprise beans. These EJB technology-based applications may now be deployed on any EJB technology-compliant application server, such as Sun-Netscape Alliance iPlanet^TM, IBM WebSphere^TM, BEA^TM Weblogic or IONA iPortal Application Server^TM.

Enterprise application developers are increasingly employing component-based software development techniques, which enable them to reduce their time to market and improve their software quality. Software authors who are experts in a specific horizontal or vertical market sector are now "componentizing" their applications to meet the increasing demand for sophisticated business software.

While many commercial EJB components are already appearing in the market, this growing trend toward "componentization" represents an enormous opportunity for companies and authors to sell their components, turning years of yesterday's research and development into tomorrow's revenue stream. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the market for off-the-shelf software components will be worth $1 billion by 2002, creating extensive opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs) and software developers to become component authors. This market research is further proven by the increase in requests, over the last six months, for EJB components monitored on ComponentSource's Component Request Center.

"If we acknowledge that the velocity of change is set to increase over the next couple of years, CIOs today are faced with a real dilemma - that of how to build an organization for speed that can also adapt to change. Standish research shows that applications built using standards-based components permit faster time to market and are more flexible. ComponentSource can help businesses reap the advantages of `open market component-based development.' - Karen Boucher, executive vice president, The Standish Group

The "Componentization" of Software

The essence of a "component," which is an encapsulation of business logic or technical functionality, is that it can be built and then continuously improved upon by an expert or organization. By buying a component, a developer can add functionality to an application without sacrificing quality. Indeed, quality should improve, as the component will typically go through several development iterations and reflect feedback from thousands of users.

What Type of Components Will People Buy?

Initially, software components were used to provide technical functionality, such as SMTP for email or enhanced user interfaces. Developers are now requesting sophisticated components that solve real business issues, such as credit-card authorization components for e-business applications. To find out what components are in demand, visit the Component Request Center or look at the case studies from authors who have already entered the open market for components.

The Market is Ready

The open Enterprise JavaBeans specification from Sun Microsystems is a component model for building server-side, enterprise-class applications. Enterprise JavaBeans technology is now being widely adopted, and so there is a new target market for component authors, who can focus on creating portable and reusable components, rather than spending time on building complex proprietary middleware services that lock in users.

The EJB technology specification requires application servers to provide a host of services that the EJB components may depend upon. Because the services are specified using Java technology interfaces, the bean implementation is not tied to any application server vendor's implementation of those services. The specification also enables the application server vendors to provide a robust, scalable, secure and transactional environment to host the EJB components, which are implemented using the Java programming language as specified by Sun Microsystems. It is a rich, portable and secure programming language that supports automatic garbage collection, reflection and dynamic-method dispatch.

The Advantages of Using Software Components

BEA's EJB technology-based e-commerce components, for example, can help an organization save an estimated 80 to 90 percent on development time by offering ready-made components commercially. This obviates the need for company developers to write all of the different pieces of an e-commerce application themselves. The development team can then concentrate their efforts on adding features that will differentiate their solution for competitive advantage.

Leveraging Vertical Domain Expertise
In addition to speeding time to market, software components are highly suitable to leveraging vertical domain expertise. Any developer who wants to add credit card processing to an e-commerce site would, in addition to writing all the code, have to go out and make deals with the banks and credit card companies. Alternatively, the developer can buy a proven, off-the-shelf credit card processing software component for integration with the e-commerce site. In addition to obtaining the code, the developer also obtains "plug and play" banking and credit card services.

Hard Dollar Returns
Today's chief information officer (CIO) is aware of component-based development, and has probably been embracing it in various forms for the last five years or so. However, typically the CIO hasn't really seen a pay-off from his or her investment. The company may have spent as much as $3 to $5 million dollars on tools to move the IT organization toward a component-based development environment. They may have spent equivalent amounts training the development team. But the return on investment (ROI) hasn't come quickly.

ROI can be measured with precise technical metrics, one of which is function-point analysis. This measures how quickly functionality can be placed into an application, for example, as function points to dollars spent, or function points to man-hours of development.

Therefore, for component-based development to pay off, and drive up the function points per dollars spent, CIOs have to find "off-the-shelf" components that free up the development team's time. With access to a wide market of different EJB components, the CIO would be able to dramatically accelerate functionality, providing a return that can be measured in hard dollars.

The Growing Market for Enterprise JavaBeans Software Components

ComponentSource is seeing the number of open-market EJB technology-based components dramatically increase, and we think the trend will continue over the next year. And, as the tools further mature, and as the open market for components develops, the demand for EJB components will increase rapidly. ComponentSource's revenues based on development in Java technology are already increasing 400% quarter on quarter. Even more remarkable, the only thing limiting growth is component availability. The market could, in fact, grow much faster if there were more off-the-shelf EJB components.

This red-hot growth indicates acceptance of this new third-party market -- not only for Enterprise JavaBeans components, but for the EJB component architecture as well. All middleware vendors are now supporting EJB technology, and applications are increasingly based on it, which, in turn, fuels the component market. This is the key driver for the open market for EJB components.

Patterns of Development

If a company has never designed or written a complex business component before -- take, for example, an e-auctioning arbitrage component -- how does the developer know where the component goes? What does it plug into? This is relatively important with server-side business applications, and Sun has shown forward thinking in coming up with the concept of patterns, which are similar to the concept of blueprints.

These patterns can be used to search for components on the open market. Multiple patterns fit together to form an application. In the e-commerce pattern, we might have the shopping cart, the registration system, the invoice printer, e-mailer, the credit card authorization, the accounts receivable connector that hooks up to the accounting system, and the FedEx tracking component. This pattern can be used to build a new component-based system.

Jumping on the Bandwagon: Actions the CIO Can Take

The challenge today is in delivering new and evolving services to customers in the fastest possible time. Organizations need to embrace open market component-based development or risk losing out to businesses that already have.

Here are a couple very specific actions that the CIOs implementing Java technology can take:

1. Move the organization toward open-market standards: J2EE technology-based standards and to EJB component development.

2. Ensure that the components developed internally and those purchased externally meet the same standards so that they are all interoperable.

3. Express to the market the need for off-the-shelf EJB components. (One way of doing this is through ComponentSource's Component Request Center.) If a particular open-market component doesn't exist, you can go to the Component Request Center and request it. Existing authors, ISVs and independent developers look for such requests all the time because they know that if they can create it, it will sell.

The open market is facilitating software reuse everywhere. Off-the-shelf components provide a successful model from which internal components may be built. Educate some of your current workforce in developing software components in the open market way and achieve reuse across your organization today. The ComponentSource white paper, "Creating Commercial Components" is a step in that direction.

An Open Market for Opportunity

Research conducted by Sun Microsystems indicates that 77 percent of developers using Java technology want access to off-the-shelf EJB technology-based components when building their applications. PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded in a recent report that the market for off-the-shelf components will be worth $1 billion by 2002, creating extensive opportunities for ISVs and software developers to become component authors.

This market research is further proven by the increase of requests for server-side Java technology-based components monitored on ComponentSource's Component Request Center over the last six months.

This is a supply-driven market. The demand for EJB components is huge, and the market is relatively young. Professionals from individual authors to heads of huge IT organizations can release these components onto the open market and receive a substantial revenue stream in return. Even companies that are creating EJB components for their own internal systems can look at releasing those components on the open market to help fund their development costs or their reuse initiatives. It's quite amazing: we've seen some large system integrators do that already. They are actually using the proceeds from the components they sell to fund their internal re-use effort.

That's what we're here for at ComponentSource. Over the past five years we have built the world's largest repository of open-market software components. ComponentSource not only is the largest marketplace for procuring and specifying open market software components, it is making software re-use a reality through a variety of industry initiatives and services. We are breaking down the barriers for companies that are trying to adopt open market component-based development. It's that simple.

About ComponentSource

ComponentSource's business-to-business service model includes multi-currency purchasing; toll-free numbers in 31 countries; multi-lingual call centers (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian); source code escrow; express corporate accounts, cross-product technical support, license tracking and purchase history; a Component Request Center for developing new components; the ComponentSource Repository Integration Kit, which allows corporate customers to link to the ComponentSource catalog from their intranet; The Solutions Center, which enables developers to easily see how software components may be integrated into existing systems, or used to build mainstream business solutions from scratch via process diagrams populated with available off-the-shelf software components.

Our white paper, "Creating Commercial Components (EJB)" can be downloaded beginning June 5 from the ComponentSource Web site.

Looking forward to seeing you at our Java University training session!

See Also

[ This page was updated: 05-Jun-00 ]