IBM WebSphere upgrade looks beyond J2EE

IBM is developing an upgrade to its WebSphere application server that aims to make it easier for companies to orchestrate transactions among groups of business applications, and to expose applications as Web services that can be used by other companies, an official said this week.

The WebSphere upgrade draws on a technology being developed by vendors including IBM and Microsoft  called BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), as well as capabilities being prepared for the next iteration of Sun's J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) specification, version 1.4, said Scott Hebner, IBM’s director of marketing for WebSphere.

The upgrade aims in part to make it easier for developers to build and deploy applications that can be offered as services to other businesses by integrating workflow, business rules, and transaction capabilities into WebSphere. A company that has built its own retirement plan application, for example, could expose it as a Web service and make it available for use by other companies, Hebner said.

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IBM is developing an upgrade to its WebSphere application server that aims to make it easier for companies to orchestrate transactions among groups of business applications, and to expose applications as Web services that can be used by other companies, an official said this week.

The WebSphere upgrade draws on a technology being developed by vendors including IBM and Microsoft  called BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), as well as capabilities being prepared for the next iteration of Sun's J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) specification, version 1.4, said Scott Hebner, IBM’s director of marketing for WebSphere.

The upgrade aims in part to make it easier for developers to build and deploy applications that can be offered as services to other businesses by integrating workflow, business rules, and transaction capabilities into WebSphere. A company that has built its own retirement plan application, for example, could expose it as a Web service and make it available for use by other companies, Hebner said.

"The developer sees a collection of Web services to compose and choreograph into transactions. What's nice is the developer is insulated form the underlying complexity, whether it's CORBA or CICS or Java, it's a series of business services made available to them," he said.

Hebner pointed to what he called shortcomings in the J2EE specification that make it insufficient in itself for doing such development work. Developers today can use J2EE with standards like XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to expose applications as services. But those standards don't provide a way to define workflows and orchestrate groups of applications, he said.

"J2EE by itself just isn't sufficient, it's like a heart without the lungs. Putting on a veneer of Web services progresses it, but it's not enough for an on-demand environment. A new set of application server capabilities is needed," he said.

Sun, which created Java and is overseeing its development, is expected to announce enhancements to to the J2EE standard early next week that relate to Web services. The company declined to discuss those plans Thursday.

The features in the J2EE specification are designed to appeal to "a wide, common set of developers, and when something makes it in it needs to be a pretty well established standard," said Ralph Galantine, a group marketing manager at Sun.

"As far as completeness goes, we often hear the other criticism, that J2EE is too big," he added.

The specification is designed to meet 80% of developers' and vendors' needs, he said. For the other 20%, users may need to look beyond the standard to other, emerging technologies.

The enhancements to WebSphere will be delivered in a release due out before the middle of the year, Hebner said. IBM released an upgrade to the Network Deployment edition of its application server in December, Hebner said. Due in the coming months is Version 5 of the Enterprise Edition. It will be accompanied by a corresponding upgrade to WebSphere Studio, IBM's tools for building Java applications, he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.