JDA Software Group

Interoperability Between .NET and Java

Prepared by Matt Ulepic and Bob Simonoff with help from Alex Mason and Mark Shaffer.

Enterprise software grows in the same way as its market reach. Some of this growth is attributed to acquisitions, and such measures often require bringing together heterogeneous technologies. When JDA Software Group purchased Manugistics, the keystone to increasing its market share while preserving the existing customer experience was achieving high performance interoperability with minimal impact; JDA was offering compelling user interfaces based on .NET Framework while Manugistics was providing high powered solutions that leveraged a J2EE server framework. Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation proved to be excellent in providing .NET-to-Java interoperability, but Web services speed was lacking. To solve this challenge JDA chose to use Noemax's WCF-Xtensions which dramatically improved the overall communication efficiency and enabled JDA meet its high performance targets.

Situation

JDA® Software Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: JDAS) is focused on helping companies realize real supply chain and revenue management results - fast. JDA Software delivers integrated merchandising as well as supply chain and revenue management planning, execution, and optimization solutions for the consumer-driven supply chain and services industries. Through its industry leading solutions, leading manufacturers, distributors, retailers and services companies around the world are growing their businesses with greater predictability and more profitably. With more than 5,600 customers in 60 countries, JDA employs the industry’s most experienced supply and demand chain experts to develop, deliver and support its solutions.

JDA, in its purchase of Manugistics, brought together a suite of mature scalable applications under one roof. Some of these applications were implemented using Microsoft technologies, while others were implemented using Java and J2EE. The task facing JDA was to create highly interactive and compelling user interfaces for Windows clients which would utilize the existing J2EE application code on the server side, thus providing a rich user experience while keeping the existing maturity and scalability offered by the J2EE application tier.

The merger of these technologies presented an interoperability challenge. The key components to this challenge were providing high performance and minimal impact.

Solution

For the presentation layer, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was selected as the technology providing the most modern and compelling rich user experience possible. The challenge was in the communication layer, as there were only a very small number of approaches for making a WPF application communicate with a J2EE server.

“	The performance improvement we achieved through the use of WCF-Xtensions combined with the simplicity of integrating it into WCF has greatly simplified the process of adding extreme interactivity to our existing suite of products without the need for rewriting J2EE application code.	„
	Bob Simonoff Senior Technical Architect, JDA Software Group

JDA was intent on leveraging its existing J2EE server framework, grid architecture and applications. JDA also set forth a goal to use standards-based approaches wherever possible. To do this meant using Web services.

To provide the Web services infrastructure, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was the natural choice for the .NET-based client side. On the J2EE server side, JDA decided to use Sun Microsystem's Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT). Since Microsoft was already cooperating with that team on interoperability, it seemed to be the best supported path.

JDA began an extensive round of prototyping the details of how to make these technologies work together, make the development process as efficient as possible, the interfaces flexible and the performance superior. The prototype created was based on an analytical workbench with very heavy client-side data needs – meaning that a lot of data would have to be transported between .NET and J2EE. This was chosen because it was the worst case scenario from a data movement perspective. The other advantage was that the server-side code already existed, which would aid in determining the level to which existing J2EE code could be leveraged.

A team was formed consisting of senior J2EE and .NET architects to prototype a Web services-based integration. It quickly became apparent to the JDA team that WCF and WSIT were mature enough to meet the project needs. A Web services approach proved to be an interoperability solution with minimal impact, as required. However, performance was lacking and was not meeting the end-to-end requirements.

“	A significant enabler was Noemax’s Customer Support. A product is nothing more than the company behind it. And WCF-Xtensions has been a great contribution to JDA’s technology Portfolio.	„
	Matt Ulepic Software Architect, JDA Software Group

The JDA team tried several techniques to improve performance, but none achieved the desired goals. Then the JDA team tried Noemax's WCF-Xtensions, which includes several components that accelerate the performance of WCF-based Web services. Of particular interest was its implementation of the Fast Infoset standard which specifies a binary encoding of the XML Infoset that reduces bandwidth consumption, improves processing performance and is widely interoperable with Java and other platforms.

"The performance improvement we achieved through the use of WCF-Xtensions combined with the simplicity of integrating it with WCF has greatly simplified the process of adding extreme interactivity to our existing suite of products without the need for rewriting J2EE application code" says Bob Simonoff, Senior Technical Architect at JDA. "After a full year's use, Fast Infoset proved to be a robust and mature technology on both .NET and Java that has reliably delivered outstanding benefits."

To assess the performance gains introduced by the use of WCF-Xtensions, the JDA team run two primary test scenarios. The first, a control, involved a request of a simple Customer object array. The customer object contained a first name and a last name that were unique among the customer array. The Web service contained a single operation that received a request containing an integer and returned an array of customer objects sized to the integer. The second test represented JDA's target data model, the transmission of Demand Forecast Units. DFUs are highly descriptive and large data objects; not only do they contain great amounts of data but also represent an extensive hierarchy. This data model typically equates to complex XML that hinders processing. The use of a control and a target data model allowed the JDA team to confirm that its performance findings were both consistent and repeatable.

"A significant enabler was Noemax’s Customer Support" says Matt Ulepic, Software Architect at JDA. "A product is nothing more than the company behind it. And WCF-Xtensions has been a great contribution to JDA’s technology Portfolio."

Benefits

The JDA team was very pleased that they were able to easily integrate WCF-Xtensions into their client applications, that the Fast Infoset message encoding provided full interoperability between .NET and Java, and that tests showed that scalability and raw performance had both improved dramatically.

Ease of integration

For JDA, the impact to the existing code base of a Web services interoperability solution was a concern. Noemax mitigated this concern through the use of WCF binding extensions. The JDA team was able to integrate Noemax’s WCF-Xtensions into their existing Web service clients with no impact. They simply modified the WCF bindings in the app.config to reference Noemax extension bindings. For example, the client endpoint binding references changed from:

bindingConfiguration="TargetService_Binding"

to

bindingConfiguration="TargetService_BindingFiExtended"

The Java Web Services were also not impacted through the use of Fast Infoset because WSIT automatically supports the Fast Infoset message encoding.

.NET to Java interoperability

Fast Infoset implementations that conform to the joint ITU-T Recommendation (ITU-T Rec. X.891) and ISO/IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 24824-1) are available for a wide range of systems that include .NET and Java.

Fast Infoset serializes a W3C XML Information Set into a binary XML encoding on one side and deserializes exactly the same infoset on the other side without any loss of information. The schema-less design of Fast Infoset proved to be extremely robust independent of the type or complexity of the data in the message.

To use Fast Infoset as a message encoding, JDA selected the implementations available in Noemax's WCF-Xtensions and Sun' WSIT. JDA did not encounter any interoperability issues between these implementations, which has been working flawlessly throughout many months of heavy use.

Whether transferring a few kilobytes or hundreds of megabytes, whether the payload included binary data or not, whether buffered or streamed mode was used, whether with or without security, Fast Infoset always performed efficiently and reliably.

Excellent performance increase

The tests that the JDA team made showed that scalability and raw performance had both improved dramatically.

They established that Fast Infoset introduced excellent gains when communicating over the Internet, as the reduction in message size resulted in an generally proportional reduction in call completion time. When communicating over a wide area network such as the Internet, the highest amount of the time consumed by a Web service call is usually spent in message transmission. So by reducing message size the overall time taken to complete a call can be reduced by as much as the message size is reduced.

To evaluate the compactness offered by Fast Infoset, the JDA team used Microsoft's Fiddler tool to measure the size of the payload transferred over HTTP during calls to their Web services. The results of their tests repeatedly demonstrated that Fast Infoset produces a very compact message encoding. During a typical call to a Web service, the following measurements were taken:
 

By using Fast Infoset instead of text as message encoding, the size of the request message was reduced by 83%, the size of the response message by 73% and the size of the call as a total by 78%.

A similar level of compactness was observed with other calls that the JDA team made to different Web services, greatly cutting down bandwidth consumption and speeding up response times.

Additionally, the JDA team measured the level of memory use when large messages are transmitted, which is an important factor that can significantly affect server performance. The metrics gathered were peak memory usage, page faults and virtual memory size both at the client and at the server.
 

The above data were for a call to a Web service that returned a response containing 1,000,000 customer records with a size of 150 MB when serialized using text XML without non-significant whitespaces.

Following these results as well as those of several other tests, the JDA team concluded that the Fast Infoset implementation available in WCF-Xtensions introduced excellent improvements in all performance aspects on both sides.