"Our customers were demanding more information about their shipments," says Steve Renken, Norfolk Southern's CIO. The company is also considering a bill-of-lading application that will not only confirm shipments but also quote pricing.

Norfolk Southern recently bulked up its network architecture for the e-business push. That meant adding a second ISP and deploying BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol 4) in its routers in case of a failure with one of its ISPs, as well as dual firewalls, load-balancers, and intrusion-detection and Internet filtering software for security.

"The infrastructure was built to assure high availability," says Ranny Grubb, Norfolk Southern's former manager of customer integration services, who masterminded the new e-business architecture. Grubb is now managing consultant with Roanoke, Va.-based Virtual IT.

On the server side, Norfolk Southern went with Java servlets for the "middleware" that sits between its Web applications, such as its coal-transportation system and legacy back-end DB2 database. These servlets not only integrate the old and new software, but also handle security and personalization. In addition, Norfolk Southern runs a Teradata data warehouse behind the application servers. "We reach to the back-end platforms from a pair of app servers that take that data and convert it to HTML and present it to the client," Grubb says. "That's instead of having the client talk to multiple back-end systems, which wasn't a good option from a security standpoint."

After looking over different products, Grubb says, he realized a component-based architecture with best-of-breed applications was the only way to go for integrating the Web and legacy applications. "It was a waste of time trying to find a single integration product," he says. The only catch with this multivendor approach, however, was that Norfolk Southern had to use vendor-specific APIs to talk to the IBM OS/390 mainframe environment. "But now we have a pure environment, without a lot of dependence on the vendors," Grubb says.

Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern's Web application server environment is evolving quickly. But the Java-servlet approach has its trade-offs, particularly its limited management functions. If the server were to receive a large number of requests simultaneously, it would be difficult to manage one that was causing problems. That's because the Java-server environment cannot drill down to that level of detail in its management functions, Grubb says, but Sun Microsystems is adding some extensions to Java that should help.

The rail company is planning to move the Java servlet architecture onto an Enterprise JavaBeans platform, with BEA Systems' WebLogic application server.