What do you do when the heterogeneity of your IT infrastructure and your OS-specific legacy deployments are standing in the way of true progress? You could follow the same path that Steve Goldsmith, Application Software Development Supervisor at FCCI Insurance Group did when he embarked on a mission to level the playing field across FCCI's Windows, Linux, Oracle, and AS/400-based systems. Achieving some commonality across all systems meant standardizing on a platform for business logic that was common to all, picking an integrated development environment that could address the entire infrastructure, and applying some glue to handle the presentation. Goldsmith and his colleagues settled on Java for the business logic layer and HTTP/HTML for the presentation layer. But FCCI didn't stop there. Even though establishing commonality across its entire application infrastructure promised to pay huge dividends down the road, FCCI knew there was a way to squeeze some additional ROI out of the consolidation effort. Enter open source. According to Goldsmith, once the basic architecture was established, it was just a matter of using best-of-breed open source components for each of the parts: the IDE, the Web Server, the J2EE server, etc. As Goldsmith tells the story, there was a bit of trial and error before FCCI settled on a final configuration. Now that the hard part is over, FCCI is saving thousands on licensing fees and Goldsmith is declaring that that commercial software's days are numbered. Here's his story.

At the time, our environment consisted of IBM AS/400s, Windows 2000 servers and Oracle servers, and we were acquiring a company with an established AS/400 system. Windows-targeted solutions -- including the forthcoming Microsoft .Net -- were not going to run on all of these platforms. IBM and Oracle were fully behind Java. If we wanted our code base to work on all of our platforms, Java was the logical choice.

We started off using Borland's JBuilder with Apache Tomcat to develop JSP and Servlets. We decided on HTML templates to separate presentation and business logic tiers. There are several good server-side template solutions in the open source world. We selected Velocity because of its flexibility and proven use in Turbine and JPublish. For database connectivity, we used JDBC and a class called DBConnectionManager for connection pooling. This model worked well, but in order for us to use the full J2EE stack, we needed to add EJB and the other J2EE features that Tomcat was missing.

It didn't take long to figure out that JBoss had everything we needed and then some. JBoss is 100 percent pure Java and has an HTTP 1.1 Web server, hot deploys, clustering, JMX, and more JBoss allowed us to take our existing Servlets running under Tomcat and run them under JBoss. We started taking advantage of the available J2EE features immediately by tossing DBConnectionManager and using JNDI for DataSources and JavaMail. JBoss and our applications can be deployed to Windows 2000 Server, Linux and AS/400. Up to this point, we were still using JBuilder as our IDE, but that also was about to change.

While looking to build the ultimate J2EE development suite, I came across Eclipse. When combined with the 1.4 Java SDK, JBoss and a host of plug-ins, Eclipse not only compares to JBuilder but surpasses it in several ways. Eclipse+JBoss allows hot class replacement in deployed EJBs, as well as debugging the client and server code in the same IDE. Eclipse's perspective paradigm makes it easy to switch between editing, debugging and schema editing. If we ever decide to use commercial software, our code will work with JBuilder, WebSphere Studio, BEA Weblogic, and others.

Currently, we are actively developing our business logic tier using EJBs and homegrown data cache technology. We have progressed from writing Servlets to writing Applets, Thinlets, Swing applications, AS/400 RPG code calling native Java objects, and so on.

Today, IT shops are able to develop complete enterprise solutions without paying expensive license fees. The days of paying thousands of dollars for enterprise development suites and tens of thousands for application servers are numbered.

Have you had a similar awakening or success in establishing commonality across your application infrastructure using open source? Share your thoughts and opinions using TalkBack below, or write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com.