JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) is reaping the benefits of an open-source application development project that began last year, called "Tyger" after the poem by William Blake. JPMC's team of 50 in-house developers now uses a series of open-source Java development tools to create mission critical middle- and back-office applications.

According to Steve Neiman, engineer at JPMC, developers can now use open-source tools in the J2EE and application server space in a quick and controlled manner. Previously, developers used disparate and expensive applications with mixed results. "We weren't getting the bang for our buck that we had hoped for, so we looked back at our applications and while the app servers gave us a quick time-to-market on the first release or two, they took too much time to maintain," he says. Neiman, a 10-year veteran at JPMC, declines to name the older development applications, but hints that they were popular packages.

"As we started to rebuild the ideal environment from scratch by picking up open-source packages, we found that we had come up with an attractive solution to build nimble applications," Neiman says.

"Tyger now helps us influence which versions of tools are used by providing a pre-integrated stack. Maven, a popular open-source package, allows us to establish a central repository that all systems can automatically pull libraries from as they build. Tyger also leverages Tomcat and Apache, well-established open-source packages, as well as Spring, which is a lightweight container," Neiman says.

JPMC uses Java on its Sun Solaris and Linux systems. Although there are concerns about the stability and legality of open-source code, Tyger addresses those questions. "We recognized early on that people are going to open up open-source tools, but now they're being pulled in a very methodical way. We know what people are doing and they are not assembling code in 20 different ways with 13 obscure packages," he says.

Tyger began as a concept in February 2005 and small projects emerged shortly thereafter, says Neiman. JPMC officially released the software internally in October 2005. "Of all the things we tried that have economies of scale and new features, this has been our most rapidly adopted innovation," Neiman says.

The tools developed under Tyger are being used in JPMC's emerging markets, credit markets, and reference data systems. "We use this in places where you would think there would be an operating workstation," he says.

Neiman explains the project's cost savings. "The overall strategy is still one of 'disposable computing.' Cheap hardware and cheap software done in a common, automated fashion eliminates the need for developers to optimize excessively and thereby introduce complex, hard-to-maintain code. Our goal is to make it cheaper to buy 20 percent more capacity than to spend 20 man-days on optimization," he says.

While Tyger did not require the purchase of new hardware, it supports JPMC's basic horizontal strategy using PC blades instead of individual PCs. "This is much cheaper on a per-CPU basis. You're always afraid that you give up performance and if you have some high-end software that you have to buy multiple licenses for, you get a trade-off that is not so effective," he says.

Neiman says Tyger will eventually expand to JPMC's grid network. "It can route into the grid and in terms of being provisioned on the hardware, we are working on it. It's not as automated as some of the other grid projects but it will be shortly," he says.

"Watch this space," Neiman says.