News Home     Latest Press Release     Latest News Log    

“Java Plugin and Virtual Machine Debacle”
By Bert Sammons - 9/23/2005

With advanced features like garbage collection, object-oriented programming, and a protected virtual machine, Java has seen many new adopters. Unfortunately, however, with many adopters come many differing opinions for new features and feature improvements. As these new features are implemented, inevitable core language changes cause incompatibilities with older versions of the virtual machine. Here in lies the problem.

As an example, lets look at some of the industry leaders in network management. Cisco has embraced Java in many areas of its core business including directly embedding Java in some of the equipment and building their software products using Java. CiscoWorks uses Java for its web-enabled console. The advantage of these web-enabled consoles are easy to see. Any web browser with the appropriate Java plugin can access the web console without installing any additional software locally. This makes managing an IT infrastructure less complicated as there is less software to manage at the workstation level. Cisco standardized their software on the Java 1.3.x series, since at the time they were engineering their solution, it was the most current and had the features they were looking for.

Now we add another management application into the picture that adds support for additional hardware and has the capability to import events from CiscoWorks to give a larger network picture. In comes the Micromuse Netcool product suite. Again we choose a web console for a less complicated IT infrastructure and choose to use the Java based Netcool Webtop application. Netcool Webtop standardized on the Java 1.4.x series for the additional features of the new branch.

Will this cause problems in our environment or will the newer Java environment have support for the older 1.3.x environment that we need for CiscoWorks? The answer is yes and no. The CiscoWorks Java applet will require a 1.3.x version of the Java virtual machine to be installed even if the 1.4.x version is present. With a little tweaking, we can convince the CiscoWorks applet to load in the 1.4.x environment by modifying the applet class string in the CiscoWorks web console web page, but this change would not be supported by Cisco as they invested their time and resources into development and testing on the 1.3.x Java environment. If we try to stay with the 1.3.x Java virtual machine, the Netcool Webtop application will require similar tweaking and may not work at all as some features in the 1.4.x Java environment do not exist in the 1.3.x virtual machine.

In the end, we are left in environment no easier to manage than if we had just installed the full clients locally on the workstations and managed them individually. At least then our solutions would be fully vendor supported.