Executives talk about BEA’s ESB and JRockit latest versions
December 14, 2005 In this interview, Kelly Emo, senior product marketing manager for BEA, and Guy Churchward, general manager for BEA's Java Runtime Products Group, talk about BEA’s ESB and JRockit latest version releases and what it means for the Web services industry. Q: Tell us about AquaLogic Service Bus 2.1. Emo: This is building on the announcement we made in June, when we rolled out the AquaLogic family of service infrastructure. That service infrastructure represents a line of products that are uniquely focused on being able to deploy and manage service-oriented architectures in a very heterogeneous environment. The whole idea is to enable our customers to move to SOA, and start reusing services to actually integrate and deploy them in ways that allow them to be very dynamic and meeting the needs of the business in a heterogeneous environment. So it’s not just Java, it’s for multiple environments, .NET, or third parties. AquaLogic service bus is in the messaging category of the AquaLogic family; it’s our ESB. AquaLogic Service Bus is focused on very high performance service integration, enabling the integration developers, and the integration architects to very quickly set up integration between services, and allow that service interaction to dynamically change. Q: What’s new in this release? Emo: The focus around the 2.1 release is really around a lot of feedback that we got early in the process. A lot of the features in AquaLogic service bus 2.1 are all about making that configuration even faster and easier, as larger numbers of services get created and assembled in an SOA, and then also adding the ability to govern the whole process in of creating services and integrating them. On the governance side, we added integration with the AquaLogic Service Registry and support for UDDI 3.0. We now have is full import and export capabilities. Q: Describe how service registries will be used in conjunction with AquaLogic Service Bus. Emo: Customers use service registries as their centrally managed way of publishing services and governing the approval process of their services. The service bus can now be pointed at the service registry and automatically allow you to browse through those services, and import any number of them. You can do it is a full import, you can do it as a selected, a category of services you can import those into the bus. That’s automatic through the import capability. On the flip side, as the integration specialists are configuring what we call the proxy services, which is where all the integration logic lives, and all the policies where you can do your contact-based routing, your transformation, security, those proxy servers can now be exported to the registry, and can also be reused by the other groups. So you’ve got some real logic in the contact-based routing, and complex transformations then can automatically be reused throughout the organization as well. Q: Does AquaLogic Service Bus support large enterprise SOA rollouts? Emo: As the use of the bus grows in the organization, and as more teams want to publish services and assemble new processes based on those services, there’s going to be more people interacting with the service bus. So we built what we call a change center. That’s in an infrastructure within the bus that allows multiple groups to come in and set up projects, and set up their own configurations, basically using services that have been imported, or their own assets. Then they have an infrastructure where they automatically test any of those resources at any time of the process, to make sure that it’s working before they commit them. Then on commit, they can roll out partial configurations, full configurations; and they can roll back any portion of configuration at any time. We also have developed what we call referential integrity, and that means, ‘let me know immediately if anything breaks before I commit to it.’ This way, I can know at any time if someone has added or set up an integration, that maybe is dependent on another resource like an XML schema or a WSDL that doesn’t exist or changed. It’s a very good tool for ensuring that configurations are going to work before they are committed. That’s the whole idea behind the change center. Q: What management aspects are included? Emo: We’ve added some extensibility capabilities, support for SAML 1.1, and support for business to business and EDI use cases. We’ve added some additional monitoring capabilities for the operations side of the equation, providing new alert metrics. Giving them a lot of flexibility, so they can look at not only things like response times, but also minimum response times and maximum response times, and ratios, success ratios, and failure ratios. All of those can be either populated to the dashboard, or can be sent to reporting capabilities, or can generate or trigger alerts that go to e-mails, or to queues that can proactively allow managers to take action. Guy Churchward, general manager for BEA's Java Runtime Products Group, discusses the latest release of BEA’s JRockit. Q: Tell us about the history of BEA JRockit. Churchward: We acquired it with a company called Appeal about four years ago. JRockit is a unique enterprise mission-critical JVM. It's in the same space as Sun's HotSpot and IBM's J9. Q: What's new about this release? Churchward: This release is the next iteration of our high-performance JVM. There's a number of pieces in it, key points, which is performance, scalability. We're enhancing the platform support, we're working on the instrumentation side of it, and then also some innovation. As far as performance is concerned, we lead all of the industry-leading benchmarks, as we have done for some time. One of our mantras is to make sure that we get the highest possible performance. So if anybody wants more juice out of their mission-critical enterprise server-side deployments, then JRockit is the right JVM of choice. As part of that, we've also enhanced heap sizes, so when an application wants a sandbox to play with, it asks the JVM for heap, a slice of memory it can mess around with. On Windows, the size has gone from 1.8 GBs to 2.8 GBs. We've even have managed to push the heaps up to around 320GBs on Itanium - functionality that helps multiprocessors and multi-core systems for future state deployments. Q: Are you looking to extend beyond Intel-based machines? Churchward: Traditionally we've been on the Intel and Intel-compatible platforms, and we finished that off recently with a full 64-bit implementation of the Windows solution for EM64T, Intel's 64-bit offering. We're actually expanding the platform to support SPARC Solaris. That's good news for people that have a blended environment, that want a single choice of the best JVM for an enterprise deployment. Q: Tell us about the "Mission Control Center" associated with JRockit. Churchward: We have instrumentation, to help you figure out what your applications are doing. And if they're doing something bad, you can figure out what they're doing. Mission Control Center is a suite of three products. They include a management console, which is, in essence, the UI for the suite. But it's also something you can set to capture information. If my application is doing a certain thing, then SMS me, or email me, and it will trigger an action. We've got the Java Runtime Analyzer, or JRA, that's almost like a flight recorder, which checks what everything's doing. If you want to go into absolute detail on any tiny thing that happens with your applications up the stack, then that's the baby to play with. The final part is the memory leak detector for runtime diagnostics. This is completely unique to the market. Traditionally, when you're running an application in production, and your application has a very small leak in it, it's very hard to detect. The same with a long leak, something that goes over a long period of time. If you try to put production diagnostic systems on your system, you accentuate the problem, because you're using up more valuable memory. Then you end up with this confusion of software, you're measuring yourself and your problem. Or, if you take the application and run it in a test suite, and it doesn't have the right production links, you generally can't find the problem. It's difficult to solve. We've enhanced JRockit to enable noninvasive production diagnostics. The function actually lives inside the JVM, so you're not installing any other applications. You can actually trigger this thing, fire it up, and then run it for a long period of time, where it will check your application, and find the leak, and you can track back from the application to methods, right away down to threads, and find the line of code you've got the issue with. Q: What do you mean by deterministic garbage collection? Churchward: To efficiently manage a heap, you have garbage collection. When you're running out of memory inside the heap, you look back at the heap, figure out which blocks of code are still live, and get rid of the ones that aren't, shake it around a bit, and then you have extra memory to play with. Traditionally, there are two ways of doing that - manual or adaptive. Most of our competitors have the manual technique. We offer what we call deterministic garbage collection mode, which is a third option. If you have a heap size of, let's say 320 GBs, and you decide to do a garbage collection, once you figure out the links you need to throw away, you need to pause everything to throw them all away. Then you have pause times, and if the pause time is too big, it can take applications down. That's not right for real-time environments, and is a reason Java doesn't traditionally play in the front-office and the transaction processing space. So as part of JRockit 5.0, we offer deterministic garbage collection, and that will surface in a release called WebLogic Real-Time Edition, in concert with WebLogic Server. That will enable people who want low-latency, predictable garbage collection in a near real-time fashion to actually get this functionality. And it will guarantee you a 99.95% SLA against a sub-millisecond pause time. 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