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Candle Corporation on Monday will launch a series of new testing and tuning tools as well as consulting services aimed at developers and architects creating complex J2ee applications and conducting enterprise application integration initiatives.
The six new product and services offerings in the one-year-old Pathwai line focus on trying to reduce the high failure rate of new applications that dont meet performance expectations.
“If [application architects and system designers] use best practices early on, address performance and availability issues early on and if they have capable infrastructure design, they can avoid a lot of these problems,” said Rob Goodling, market strategy director for Application Infrastructure Management at Candle Corp. in El Segundo, Calif.
The combination of tools and services are intended to help application infrastructure developers to quickly isolate and fix early application lifecycle problems that can cause performance problems in production and lead to delayed deployments and increased costs.
One early user of the new offerings found that they can save time and money, according to Emil Perez, director, hosting administration at John Wiley & Sons Inc. in Somerset, NJ.
“If (developers are) going down the wrong path and then find out when you deploy applications in production, you will end up rewriting or almost re-architecting the application,” he said.
On the J2ee side, Candle added a pair of new consulting services dubbed the PathWAI Performance Workshop for J2ee and PathWAI Deployment for J2ee. The performance workshop is a three-day J2ee training session for architects and developers that provides recommendations for using J2ee to support operations. It is intended to head off problems at the beginning of the design process. PathWAI Deployment for J2ee is intended to help application testers understand what kind of testing they need to do to validate new applications in the development and pilot stages.
Candle also added a new PathWAI Tuning Workbench for J2ee, a set of testing tools to tune J2ee applications before deployment to verify that they will scale in production environments and perform as expected.
“The emphasis is on tuning and it addresses questions like, Is this going to scale, does it work with the different (infrastructure components)? Its about trying to avoid things like using a CPU 10 times more than they thought,” described Paul Spicer, senior director of solutions management in the Application Infrastructure Management Group at Candle Corp. in El Segundo, Calif.
On the enterprise application integration side, Candle focused on the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Suite with a similar set of consulting services and tools. The new PathWAI Performance Workshop for WebSphere Business Integration service provides a three-day consulting engagement that incorporates an EAI infrastructure review covering WebSphere, MQSeries, message brokers, interchange servers and so on. It also includes recommendations for optimizing that infrastructure. The PathWAI Deployment for WebSphere Business Integration 10-day consulting engagement provides an assessment of application infrastructure during the deployment phase. It is intended to pinpoint and fix performance problems before full production.
The services are complemented by the PathWAI Tuning Workbench for WebSphere Business Integration, which includes tuning and testing tools as well as monitors for WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Business Integration.
The tools and services are available now, and entry pricing for the PathWAI Performance Workshop for J2ee starts at $9000.
In the first half of next year, Candle will expand the focus of its PathWAI J2ee tools and services to cover BEAs WebLogic, and add further business integration offerings, according to Spicer.