Company reports on a year's worth of <BR>real-world Java deployments at JavaOne
This year’s JavaOne developer conference was packed with new product announcements, technical sessions on the recently released JDK 1.1, roadmaps for future Java enhancements, and firms reporting on exciting beta and pilot projects. Standing out from the crowd was the 0 billion transportation giant CSX Corp., which began deploying an enterprise-scale Java project called TWSNet one year ago. CSX’s story, together with a year’s worth of real-world experience, is still turning heads.
CSX’s verdict on its experience is a resounding one in favor of Java. “Java is now the primary programming language for client/server development at CSX,” said Marshall Gibbs, assistant VP of enterprise solutions at CSX Technology in Jacksonville, FL, the IT unit of CSX Corp.
A quick review
Perhaps the most unusual thing about CSX’s adoption of Java technology is that it was not the product of eager engineers, but rather the result of CEOs that didn’t know any better.
According to Gibbs, as he presented a prototype mock up to CSX’s Shippers Council — 12 executives from CSX’s largest customers — people started scribbling on napkins and passing them to CSX president and CEO John Snow. At the close of the demonstration, Snow turned to CSX Technology president John Andrews and publicly asked, “Everybody wants one so when can they have it?” With only a short pause, Snow said, “Three months!”
At that moment CSX Technology possessed one SPARCstation 5 — everything was oriented towards C++ development for an MS-DOS-based client that accessed information on CSX’s mainframe via SNA. The demo had taken three months to create in C++ and now Gibbs was on the hook to deliver the real thing in the same time frame.
Ninety days later — April 15, 1996 — TWSNet was deployed with seven customers, tested, and then deployed further. Functionality was enhanced over three delivery phases, so that now 50 CSX customers can order railroad freight cars, enter and query comprehensive waybill information, track shipments via an interactive map with drill-down capabilities, access account information, and send and receive email.
The response from TWSNet users is overwhelmingly positive, Gibbs told the JavaOne audience. CSX assumed that, like its DOS-based predecessor, the application would generally be deployed on a single workstation for each customer firm. Gibbs reported however that approximately 400 users are on-line at 50 customer sites and 100 more firms await training and deployment of TWSNet. The application now supports approximately 100,000 page requests per week, with the average active connection lasting more than two hours.
Application workstations are being deployed in accounting to access billing and account information, on loading docks so that receivers know the contents of containers before they arrive, and in a variety of roles not originally envisioned by CSX or its customers. Indeed, one firm that re-ships freight through CSX has negotiated a deal to private-label the application and deploy it to their customers, Gibbs reported.
Stunning results
The JavaOne crowd clearly was impressed by the results Gibbs reported, with one questioner remarking, “This is exactly the kind of information I need to convince my boss that we should use Java.”
“Java is CSX’s enterprise computing solution,” Gibbs told the audience. “Java is deployed everywhere and at every level of CSX. And we are working on architecturally purifying CSX development.” Gibbs said that Java has integrated well into the enterprise, integrated well with legacy systems, and even integrated well into transaction processing applications.
“Our ROI on projects where we use Java has increased by 10 percent,” Gibbs said. CSX has written 350,000 lines of Java code. It has deployed more than one million lines of Java code. That is the level of code reuse CSX is getting out of Java, he said.
Experience to date shows that it takes CSX developers about five weeks to complete an average function in C++, while similar tasks take four weeks with Java. At the moment that extra week is being eaten up by testing requirements due to inconsistencies in the way Java Virtual Machines run on various platforms, Gibbs said, but he is hopeful that Sun’s investment in making sure JVMs based on JDK 1.1 will be robust and consistent will solve that problem.
Gibbs returned several times to illustrate various cost savings he attributes to Java. The far less functional DOS-based precursor to TWSNet cost CSX million annually to support, while the Java-based replacement was developed and deployed to the first 24 customer firms for less than million. The estimated cost of doing that in C++ with fat Windows clients, and upgrading client hardware was estimated to be million, Gibbs said. And CSX expects to save million internally on desktop computers due to its Java commitment.
Moreover, CSX’s two largest customers — one in autos and the other a shipper of bulk coal — will save 0 million in 1997 as a direct result of efficiencies, lower costs, less expensive client systems and cheaper communication links made possible by the Java-based system.
Lessons learned
Among the lessons CSX has learned, said Gibbs, is that there were many areas where they initially underestimated the power of Java, only to find it was certainly up to the task. And CSX developers had to break some C++ habits, such as learning to write “much smaller code modules that would go across the wire quickly.”
Looking forward, Java is going to play an important role in solving CSX’s year-2000 date problems. Approximately 65 percent of its legacy code will be off-loaded to midrange servers, Gibbs said. Much of that will be done by acquiring off-the-shelf applications for financials and human resources, which CSX is demanding are “Web-enabled and use Java heavily,” he said.
And finally, CSX plans to “get out of the Java middleware business,” Gibbs said. Having adopted Java very early, the firm was forced to create middleware solutions that did not exist. Now that vendors and Sun are “stepping up” to deliver standard Java middleware solutions with Enterprise JavaBeans and new enterprise-oriented APIs, CSX anticipates implementing off-the-shelf Java middleware soon.
