Java.org is the web presence of the New Jersey Java Users Group, an non-profit organization devoted to the promotion and dissemination of java best practices among members of the information technology community. The Users Group is led by Stephen Sashihara, President of Princeton Consultants, a management and information technology consulting firm with offices in Princeton and New York. The Users Group was founded in 1996, with a kick-off meeting held on the Princeton campus of Dow Jones featuring Princeton University Professor of Computer Science Anthony Appell as a keynote speaker.

Java.org seeks to provide an impartial forum where IT professionals and Project Managers can come for aid in making informed high level choices about whether Java is the appropriate tool for their projects. To further this aim, the site will periodically conduct interviews with CTOs, CIOs, and other members of the professional IT community to document and learn from their experience with java and the people and tools that help it bring life to the internet and beyond.

java.org: For starters, tell us a little bit about your company and what you do.

New Course: Our company was founded in 1996. Our product, ProCourse, functions as a single-source repository for all of a company's business metrics. Though we're specifically marketing it to corporate trainers at first,it isolates the effectiveness of any intervention and filters out the noise. Companies can spend about 2 percent of revenues on training. ProCourse tells a company which initiatives are getting traction and which ones are not.

java.org: What kind of system have you built with Java? Is it 100 percent Java? Is it a web-based application? ? Is it stand-alone?

New Course: All of the above. It is 100 percent Java. It can be deployed as either a stand alone or in a portal mode as an application service provider model. Or we could do it as a web-deployed application behind a company's firewall. Currently, we are using JSP and servlets. We are isolating all of the business logic away from the front-end in the server. Although, we are thinking of using other Java strategies for our next version

java.org:What specifically are you considering for the next round?

New Course: We are looking at EJB, but right now we have straight JSP in the front-end. It's a totally thin application. There are no client pieces. A little bit of JavaScript here and there. No applets. No Swing, although we are considering some of those technologies for our next version.

java.org:What would drive the move to EJBs?

New Course: Client activity with legacy databases and other corporate systems. EJBs will make it easier for us to work with other products and provide a very general way for us to hook into other people's mechanisms.

java.org:Were you actively shying away from things like Swing and applets and all of that?

New Course: We were at first. We wanted to keep the application 100 percent server-side because we are developing a new technology and we didn't know how people were going to use it. We wanted the application's deployment to be very simple, flexible, and portable.

java.org:Did you consider platforms or languages other than Java?

New Course:It was pretty much a no-brainer to go with Java for our main product. We actually tried to roll out a prototype in ASP. But it didn't get off the ground and we ended up scrapping it early and just focusing on the main version using Java.

java.org:How did you hire the Java staff for this project?

New Course: From Monster.com and a consulting firm. We had about a 50-50 mix between contractors and staff. The contractors were on a "contract-to-hire" basis: we had on option to hire after six months.

java.org:What were some of the difficulties involved in managing a software project in a language/architecture that was basically new to you?

New Course: Although most of our senior staff's expertise is in C++, Java didn't really present that many problems. It's a great technology, it did what we wanted it to do and our issues revolved more around specifications and scope and less around the technology.

java.org:How much time did you spend between the initial system specifications and first product?

New Course: Two months.

java.org:Two months?!!

New Course: Believe it or not. All in all, let's call it three. But you know that good software development is 80 percent planning and 20 percent coding. And then, of course, the 10 percent testing that makes 110 percent that drives you over the deadline. But we actually set some records for coding. The whole cycle was about 11 months.

java.org:How often are you releasing new versions?

New Course: We are on the verge of releasing our first production version.

java.org:How large was the development team?

New Course: Three programmers. One database guy. A project manager. A business analyst. HTML/GUI person, and one QA manager and a couple of testers. So ten people all told.

java.org:During the design phase did you use UML or anything like that?

New Course: Actually, we used TogetherSoft. We spent a lot of time choosing a design tool, because from the outset we really wanted the design to be repeatable and not just floating around in people's heads and on paper. So our senior system architect did an analysis of Rational and TogetherSoft. We chose TogetherSoft because Rational was kind of pushed towards Java while TogetherSoft was actually designed with Java in mind. It did a lot of things automatically that you had to do manually in Rational.

java.org:Did you use their built-in requirements, tracking and use-case stuff?

New Course: Truth be told, we did a bunch of preliminary design work and then wound up narrowing our scope very rapidly in the end, banded all the design tools together and then set our hair on fire and went off.

java.org:What sort of server are you running on at present?

New Course: NT.

java.org:Will NT handle you in terms of scale if you sell to a very large corporation with a ton of users?

New Course: Probably not, but then it is a very easy migration to Linux, or Solaris, or whatever because we're pretty platform independent. That's one of the advantages of using Java, and one of the reasons we are seriously thinking about EJBs for next time since they will allow us to do attributive load balancing.

java.org:When you consider going to EJBs, are you planning on retooling internally or are you planning on hiring people with expertise in EJBs?

New Course: We have those people on board now.

java.org:Are you planning on rewriting your previous code in your next version?

New Course: Yes, probably. We might be able to recycle some of the JSPs and that sort of thing, but the guts are definitely going to get rewritten and some of the things we have home-grown we might replace with third-party tools in our next version so we don't have to maintain it. It might even be more robust and have a little more functionality.

java.org:What are some examples?

New Course: Our statistical processing components. We use Kavachart for graphs and might go forward with that or use another tool like it.

java.org:There are some companies that are Microsoft-only shops. Have you had any trouble selling your system to these companies?

New Course: No, that's not even relevant. In fact, we are even giving more business to Microsoft because we use Internet Explorer as the client for our application and use SQL Server as the database. Those are the only two things they have to buy off the shelf in order to use our application and they are both Microsoft products.

java.org:Do they manage the servers themselves?

New Course: Yes, if they do the deployment behind the firewall they're going to have to manage the server themselves, but it's not that much to do. Same with the SQL Server, it pretty much takes care of itself. All you have to do is swap out the tape. And you would be hard-pressed to find an IT shop that doesn't have SQL Server running somewhere. And if the JSP version of our application gets too big for Microsoft's shoes then we'll switch over to Oracle. It's really not an issue because our customers don't care what the plumbing is inside, they're buying the functionality.

September 20, 2001