Faulty connections to databases, mainframes and inside application servers are the main cause of Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application-related downtime, research claims.

Connectivity issues concerning J2EE applications are causing always-on systems to lose around a day's productivity every week, according to research sponsored by Java software management vendor Wily Technologies.

The survey stated that only 42 per cent of J2EE-based applications deliver against the performance targets set at the point of deployment. But the problem clearly did not lie with Java itself, as respondents indicated that it achieves high performance levels.

With only 13 per cent of respondents citing code-related issues as the cause of downtime for web services and consumer websites, the remaining 86 per cent blamed faulty connections to and from the Java application.

The survey found that surrounding environment and connectivity with other systems were often the sources of performance and availability issues.

Application code bugs were seen as the likely cause by 13.7 per cent, with configuration and tuning problems coming second with 11.9 per cent.

"Most large organisations are at various stages of porting applications over to a Java environment," said Roger Andrews, UK managing director at Wily Technologies.

"The biggest loads are imposed on the back-end connectors. Tools can give visibility of these during testing and development as well as in production, because Java environments have so many moving parts they should be constantly monitored."

Mike Thompson, principal research analyst at Butler Group, told vnunet.com: "The failure rates [according to the survey] are not that much greater than other projects - it is a very high figure, but only slightly higher than doing a standard development in Java."

But Thompson was surprised at the role of connectors in the high failure rate.

"The fact that connections to databases rate highly [as reasons cited for causing downtime] surprises me. It's something that's been done long before Java," he said.

"But that is inherently where problems might arise as Java is not very lightweight and so connecting to transaction-heavy systems isn't going to be that fast."