IBM has previewed its upcoming version of its WebSphere
Application Server 6.0 which is due out later this
year.
The preview version, available now as a free download at IBM's
developerWorks site, affords developers a chance to work with the
J2EE standard using the WebSphere Application Server code base.
Company officials said Version 6.0 of the WebSphere Application
Server will also serve as the foundation for several other IBM
software packages designed for business integration, portal and
collaboration.
"We see the major focus of J2EE 1.4 as providing the most
complete programming platform for web services. It incorporates all
of the work we have been doing around web services in the Java
world for things such as JAX RPC 1.1 and JSR 109, which is,
essentially, enterprise-level web services," said Bob Sutor, IBM's
director of WebSphere software.
IBM sees Version 6 as instrumental in helping corporate users
take their first stab at creating service-oriented architectures
(SOAs), given its improved support for web services and the latest
J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 adapter, along with a
handful of other capabilities expected to be in the finished
version.
"Making this [technology preview] available now looks like a
good move given that J2EE 1.4 is an important release, especially
from a web services standard perspective. It is also good for IBM
in that WebSphere has been criticised in the past for lagging
behind in supporting cutting-edge standards. This shows IBM may be
changing that way," said Steven O'Grady, senior analyst with market
researcher RedMonk.
The WS-1 Basic Profile 1.0 also aids web services in
communicating across multiple platforms. The product's support of
JCA 1.5 provides both synchronous and asynchronous communications
among J2EE and popular packaged applications including those by SAP
and Siebel. This helps corporate users implement more reliable
transactions without requiring proprietary interfaces.
The product also has JMS "pluggability", which allows users to
interoperate with IBM's DB2 database, thereby eliminating the need
for using proprietary software to store and access information
about transactions in the event of hardware or software
failure.
Corporate users interested in downloading the preview version
can go to:
www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/WASTD6Support.html
Ed Scannell writes for Infoworld