Web services for all, promises IBM

By Alun Williams

Posted on 25 Sep 2002 at 12:48

A single development environment for delivering Web services is IBM's promise for WebSphere Studio Version 5.

The idea is to make it easier to create Web services from existing software, covering multiple platforms as well as legacy applications involving older programming languages. That's Linux as well as Windows, and using Java too.

IBM highlights that WebSphere Studio is J2EE 1.3 conformant. This involves enterprise scale services for the Java 2 platform and it is a standard that Microsoft's equivalent .Net offerings cannot claim, with their exclusion of Java.

Through the use of Eclipse - the development environment donated to open-source - WebSphere Studio is meant to support the full life cycle of development, from initial modelling through to testing and debugging.

'For every dollar a customer spends on software, they spend five dollars to integrate that software, and IBM is dedicated to helping customers lower the cost of modernizing and integrating software acquired over the past three decades,' believes Scott Hebner, Director of Marketing for IBM WebSphere. 'With WebSphere Studio and Eclipse, IBM supports the industry's broadest range of languages, platforms, hardware devices and vendor integration.'

The combination of legacy support with the provision of Java based services is an industry first, claims IBM. While Microsoft's .Net framework covers supports a wide range of languages - we reported recently on Fujitsu's implementation of NetCobol - Java is certainly a route that Microsoft is not keen on travelling. This is the multiple platform card that IBM can play.

Borland, however, has also been highlighting the multi-platform support provided by its Linux-based development environment Kylix. We reported last year - Web services the Kylix way - on how its sister environment, the Windows-based Delphi, can share development code to achieve cross-platform support, from Linux to Windows.

The WebSphere release just announced - WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5 - is the first of many. It is priced at $3,499 per user. The larger scale offering WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer V5 will be available 30 September ($7,500 per user). Application Monitor and Workload Simulator versions for zOS and OS/390 should be available in October.

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