LEXICON GENETICS - 2006 JBOSS INNOVATION AWARD WINNER - NEW GENERATION TECHNOLOGY

Category: New Generation Technology
Winner:Lexicon Genetics
Submitted by: Buckley Kohlhauff, Mark Ma, Jason Williams
Industry: Biotechnology
Geography: The Woodlands, Texas

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss Seam to glue together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBoss jBPM to dramatically simplify their development process and create a robust platform that can deploy mission-critical applications for the Texas Institute of Genomic Medicine.

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1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Lexicon Genetics is focused on the discovery of breakthrough treatments for human disease. We use our proprietary gene knockout technology to systematically discover the physiological and behavioral functions of genes to identify potential drug targets. We have advanced more than 70 knockout-validated targets into drug discovery programs.
Lexicon Genetics employs over 700 people between our two sites in The Woodlands, TX and Princeton, NJ. Lexicon’s revenue for 2005 was $76M

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The challenge was to re-engineer a legacy production system that has been running for five years. The business logic for the system was spread among various layers and components. Most of the documentation that existed was outdated. We had less than a year to redesign and implement the core architecture and workflows. In addition the new system needed to address the fundamental problems that were present in the existing system and be flexible enough to support the same goals with different business processes.

We needed to reengineer a legacy application from php/apache to an enterprise platform in order to support our major involvement in the recently established Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). We have implemented other projects on the JBoss platform and have been pleased with the results. JBoss is a powerful and stable application server and we feel that the JBoss Seam framework will revolutionize Java Enterprise development.

3. What was the desired solution?
Our guiding philosophy was to select a group of frameworks that prevented us from writing a lot of non-business code, but at the same time allowed us to make modifications quickly if we needed to. In addition we always want to leverage standards in the industry. We have utilized J2EE for 3 years so our solution needed to stay within that context to leverage our internal knowledge and skills.

We selected JBPM in 2005 as our solution for modeling our business processes. We selected JSF as our UI framework since the application needed to be accessed from a browser. The introduction of seam excited us because we felt that too much time was spent on connecting the backend layers in previous JSF applications we had written. We had some internal solutions that were built upon codegeneration, but they weren’t flexible and couldn’t help us with JBPM integration.

The Mouse production software encapsulates a complicated workflow covering many scientific and business processes involved in the production of genetically-modified knockout mice. It has to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a large user-base comprised of many distinctive roles. It also needs to be scalable and configurable enough to be used by other organizations involved in TIGM that may need customized workflows.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
We already had selected JEMS as our stack for enterprise applications in 2004 after reviewing alternatives from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. That decision was based upon a matrix of feature requirements, cost, support options, references, and published data.

We also evaluated other application servers and frameworks such as Oracle JDeveloper/BPEL, JRun, and Spring. JBoss proved to be the most cost-effective and robust provider. JEMs allowed us to quickly adopt SOA-based development, increasing the reusability of our code. It enabled us to break our company’s scientific and business processes down into granular projects that fulfill specific needs and adapt to changing requirements in our fast-paced software development lifecycle.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
JEMS is our platform for application development. The trend we see is tighter integration with the JEMS suite, therefore we lean towards selecting tools from within the suite.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

The Seam framework significantly reduced development and deployment time by gluing together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBPM. It enabled us to focus solely on our complicated scientific and business logic without having to put together the pieces of the enterprise framework ourselves. With the traditional Java Enterprise architecture there are so many tiers that have to be explicitly implemented, configured and glued into place. Seam makes all of that transparent to the developer.

We especially benefited from Seam’s introduction of the conversation context, as well as the integration of JBPM. The conversation context helped us resolve classic technical challenges such as users using our software in multiple windows. The JBPM framework allowed us to clearly define our business and scientific processes, and it provided a simple and efficient way of implementing the workflows, while implicitly maintaining the data integrity.

For user interface development, we have been using JSF for 2 years. Seam’s direct integration of JSF made it the perfect framework to allow us to reuse some of our existing custom JSF components that provide a rich user interface for our users.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
We have a clustered front-end and back-end running on Dell 2850 servers. We have 4 separate clustered instances of JBOSS spread on 3 servers. Our backend comprises of 3 servers running Oracle 9i RAC.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
We used JBoss support and training. The level of support and training is on par with what we receive from our other vendors. Early adopters clearly have an advantage to effect the direction of the product and therefore benefit from support.

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
Get support and training early in the process. The learning curve isn’t steep but it can be completely avoided by doing what you would normally do with other software purchases.

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