IBM and Microsoft are vying for developer loyalty with upgrades to
collaboration-focused messaging platforms.
At its annual Lotusphere show this week in Orlando, IBM's Lotus
Software unit will unveil two projects designed to bridge Domino
and WebSphere development environments while protecting existing
Domino developer skill sets.
The projects, codenamed Montreal and Seoul, aim to address some of
concerns that erupted at last year's show when IBM revealed plans
to standardise Lotus technologies on J2EE.
Then, many Domino developers expressed fear that the Notes client
and Domino development environment would become obsolete with
WebSphere taking over.
Billed as part of Lotus', next-generation collaboration strategy,
the initiatives aim to help protect the Domino developer skill set
and related applications as they move into a Java environment.
Project Montreal will adapt some Domino Designer functionality to
IBM's WebSphere Studio Java-based developer toolkit. Project Seoul,
meanwhile, aims to provide collaborative capabilities in a
component fashion for use in a variety of J2EE-based applications
and business solutions.
The Montreal and Seoul technologies will begin to hit to the market
later this year. IBM will also use Lotusphere to trumpet the use of
common components across Lotus and IBM software groups, as it
continues its efforts to mesh the radically different Domino and
J2EE application development environments.
The messages delivered at Lotusphere aim to assure Domino
developers that "they have protection in all the applications and
skill sets they have invested in", said Ken Bisconti,
vice-president of messaging solutions at IBM Lotus Software.
Although Montreal and Seoul are designed to ease the unification of
Domino and WebSphere, IBM is also attempting to pave the road
toward DB2 as the underlying data store for its messaging platform.
"In the long term we think DB2 will be the repository of the
future. But one of the reasons it is not the repository of the now
is because they have to get the development tools lined up so the
Lotus developers who are used to writing on top of Domino can do
the same kind of work in DB2," Giga Information Group
vice-president and research leader Dan Rasmus said.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected to ship the next version of
Exchange, formerly codenamed Titanium in mid-2003. Based on the
same code as Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003 is viewed as an
incremental upgrade towards a future version of a messaging
platform that will be based on its Yukon unified data storage
technology.
The next-generation offering, codenamed Kodiak, will also delve
further into web services, according to Jim Bernardo, product
manager at Microsoft Exchange. To address developer challenges in
the interim, Microsoft plans to ship a managed API set designed to
help developers embrace web services in the middle of the
year.
"On Exchange we are not yet a full web services version, but we are
in process of building managed APIs that make it easy for
developers to write web services leveraging Exchange," Bernardo
said.