HP jumps up its Java promise for e3000

SIG meeting shows off HotSpot VM and language’s “killer app”

The only language shipped with the e3000 has much brighter potential for customers, according to HP’s message delivered at the SIG3000 meetings in California last month. Java not only has a faster virtual engine set for summer release, but sports a “killer app” in Enhydra.

The potential of the platform was the key issue at the three days of technical meetings, led by volunteer customers in the grand tradition of Interex user group meetings. Attendance was lean for meetings of the Special Interest Groups, held this year in HP’s Oak Room meeting space on the Cupertino campus.

But if the group of 53 registered e3000 customers was small in number, their passion and attention to detail was great. Many of the one- to three-hour sessions covered familiar ground for bulwark products: fundamentals like IMAGE/SQL, the MPE/iX operating system, and COBOL II. Some IMAGE advances were debated, and a few MPE/iX improvements were considered. HP is revamping its relationship with SIGs as a means to improve the 3000 (see separate story), so the meetings were long on drafting shorter improvement lists.

On the Java front, however, the hour-long SIG session and a language briefing carried both news and promising Web application help. The latter comes in the form of application servers written in Java, including one that HP is promoting from Lutris Technology called Enhydra.

Mike Yawn, the engineer from the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) dedicated to Java, didn’t restrain his praise for such application servers. He used the phrase associated with breakthroughs in the computer industry, the long-sought application that establishes a beachhead for success.

Yawn said Enhydra “is shaping up to be the killer app for Java on the platform. It’s the next step beyond a Web server. Once you start going interactive, you realize there are a lot of things you want to handle like security, how you talk to your database.”

Enhydra is arriving on the 3000 because HP made a commitment to running Java on the platform, the first HP division to do so in 1996. HP’s Alvina Nishimoto mentioned that Gartner Group consultants took note of the 3000’s lead on Java at HP in a report published during 1999.

IDC reported HP was “quick to endorse Java as both a language and platform development environment. For example, as early as 1996, Hewlett-Packard began development on a Java compiler and runtime system for its HP 3000 line. The MPE/iX-based systems have been marketed as ideal Web server platforms to the consumer marketplace.”

Making that ideal a reality has involved more than embracing the Web application server concept. CSY has just finished its first project to make the 3000 operating system a better place to run Java.

“To date, everything we’ve ever had to do with Java is tuning Java to make it work better on MPE,” Yawn said. “On MPE/iX 7.0 we actually went in and changed some things in the operating system to make [the e3000] a better Java platform. It’s the first time we’ve ever gone in and made specific OS changes in support of Java.”

The news came as part of HP’s update on its compilers on Language Day of the SIG3000 conference. The Java changes could be a factor in moving more of the e3000 community onto the 7.0 release. The fastest HotSpot version of the language’s Virtual Machine – which executes two to five times quicker than prior versions – demands the latest 7.0 release to run on the e3000. By shipping Java as the only language that’s bundled with the system, HP has returned to configurations of the 1970s, when the root language SPL came with every 3000.

Yawn contrasted the coming HotSpot to the current Just In Time JIT compiler in the SIG3000 language briefing. JIT sped up execution of bytecodes, but executing code wasn’t the only thing a Virtual Machine had to do. “HotSpot is more of an across the board thing,” Yawn said, increasing performance “by a bigger factor than the JIT did. It also speeds up things like memory allocation, garbage collection, synchronizing between threads. A lot of the performance benefits come from areas the JIT didn’t help at all.”

Java on the 3000 has also become native-threaded, meaning it can take advantage of the power of multiple processors on e3000s. A single Java VM could only execute on one processor in the past. “Now we’ll take as many processors as it needs,” Yawn said.

A faster virtual machine eliminated the need for a native version of the Java compiler won’t be coming out for PA-RISC systems, he said, “because HotSpot was seen as meeting most of the goals for a native compiler. We’ve always said that if we can get Java running as fast as COBOL, that’s what we need.”

Enhydra’s support

The SIG meetings also included an appearance from Lutris founder David Young, who outlined what e3000 customers can expect if they elect to pay for support of the 3.5 version of the application server.

The software’s 3.1 version, which works with the e3000, is available free from www.enhydra.org. But Young said a more up-to-date 3.5.2 version, with full support for wireless protocols, is being certified this month for MPE/iX by Lutris. It will carry a $695 charge per named developer when purchased from Lutris, and a $995 per e3000 license charge for deployment.

HP is treating the software as a reference sale — meaning that 3000 customers can’t buy Enhydra from HP, even though HP identifies the product as a part of its WebWise Secure Web Server Suite. Support is the key Lutris revenue stream, however. A six-incident support pack for the application server costs $1,250.

“Lutris is primarily a consulting company,” Yawn said. “If you feel like you need people to set up an application server and consult with you, they have people standing by to do that.”

Enhydra supports a number of the emerging wireless standards, Yawn said, including WML, HTML, XHTML, cHTML, VoiceXML and the Java2 Platform Micro Edition. “All the industry-standard TLAs are there, trust me,” Yawn said. One compiler, XMLC, allows the embedding of tags in XML code, invoking Java code to get dynamic page content.

But the Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) support won’t be coming until the 4.0 version of Enhydra, which Young said is expected to ship in May.

“We’re basically a Red Hat as well as a Linus Torvald of the application server space,” Young said in a presentation to the SIG members, referencing the leading Linux distributor and the creator of that operating environment.

Make Java easier

Even with all the promising news about Java at the SIG meetings, savvy customers gave HP notes on how to make it more accessible. For example, only the most advanced HP shops will know how to put the power of downloaded Enhydra to work, according to one application provider.

“I think Enhydra and things like that are really good solutions,” said Duane Percox, a founder of K-12 app supplier Quintessential School Systems. “But I know you can throw Lutris Enhydras at MIS shops in the 3000 world all you want, and the two-person MIS shop is not going to download Enhydra and begin doing all their development code in Java, and come to grips with Java servlets and application servers.”

Percox, who’s also on the MPE Forum executive committee, said 3000 developers “are rather pragmatic and practical in their view of the world. The average development shop just wants to get something done, a deployable architecture, one that works and is available on every box. They want the McDonald’s experience: It might not be the best burger, but at least you know it will always be the same.”

Others at the meetings said installing Java on the e3000 is still a process with inadequate documentation. It still looks complex to the average 3000 manager without Unix experience.

“I see Java as a very important part of what I may want to do in the future,” said Jeanette Nutsford, SIG-COBOL co-chair and a founder of application provider Computometric Systems. “But I think the key is hiding the fact that it’s Java. I mean, do you know what the XL is written in that you’re calling from your COBOL program? Do you care? The fact that it runs fast and efficient is [HP’s] job.”

Cortlandt Wilson, chairman of SIG-CONSULT and an e3000 developer, said the process of installing Java was painful and more difficult than he expected. He had to discover fundamentals like where to place the JDBC driver through questions to the SIG-JAVA listserver.

“There were certain issues that were HP 3000-specific,” Wilson said at the SIG meeting. “You have to go figure this stuff out.” Wilson proposed an improvement item for SIG-JAVA’s list to better document how the language is installed on e3000s.

Chuck Townsend of Java tools provider LegacyJ, said HP 3000 sites look for help from his technical staff. “It is a different world,” he said. “We get a lot of questions from our customers trying to do servlets. Some basic [Java] documentation, or more elaborate documentation from HP would be just wonderful.”

HP’s Yawn said the company wants to pull together the efforts on Java, currently spread over several development groups.

“It’s currently a division, where I’m on the language team and we do Java, but the database team does JDBC, and the Internet team does Jserv. I’m not sure we’re all completely in sync all the time, as far as ‘am I putting all the things you need in there when you install?’ and that kind of stuff. We could do a better job of coordinating and making it consistent.”