BEA Debuts Server For Low-Latency Java Apps

"People aren't coming out of college knowing C and C++, they're coming out with Java degrees," says Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA Systems. That's part of the reasoning behind BEA's announcement this week of WebLogic Real Time 2.0, an application server that offers microsecond latency for Java applications.Historically, the Java development language hasn't been ideal for applications that require fast response times because of a quirky problem called "garbage collection," the automatic detection and freeing of memory that is no longer in use. Typically in Java applications, garbage collection takes place at intervals such as every 12 minutes; the application stops everything to take care of this chore. WebLogic Real Time 2.0, according to BEA, compresses the garbage collection pause time from 30 milliseconds down to 10 milliseconds, nearer to absolute real time. BEA has also integrated a latency analysis tool that lets developers look at spikes in runtime to make production smoother.

BEA also announced this week a WebLogic Event Server for serving event-driven applications. This server contains a self-contained Java complex event processing engine that will support 10,000 rules being applied to 50,000 complex events per second with sub-millisecond latency, Churchward says. This lets developers build CEP applications by simply writing rules. On Wall Street, firms might use this to build Java-based complex event processing applications for algorithmic trading or to create pre-trade analytics.