IBM looks beyond J2EE

05/02/2003 Written by Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK via Vibrant Media

IBM Corp. says the Java 2 Enter­prise Edi­tion (J2EE) is not enough to sup­port its on-​demand com­put­ing strat­egy, so the company’s look­ing to imple­ment a services-​oriented archi­tec­ture through its Web­Sphere appli­ca­tion server.

Scott Heb­ner, direc­tor of prod­uct man­age­ment for Web­Sphere, said IBM plans to deliver net­work trans­ac­tion sup­port, work­flow, and Web ser­vices man­age­ment and pro­vi­sion­ing among other enhance­ments toward a services-​oriented architecture.

“A big push is to focus on deliv­er­ing the next-​generation appli­ca­tion server opti­mized for build­ing on-​demand appli­ca­tions,” Heb­ner said.

Heb­ner said that from 1997 to about 2000, enter­prises focused pri­mar­ily on mak­ing exist­ing appli­ca­tions avail­able through the Web. From 2000 to now, the focus shifted to putting new front ends on these appli­ca­tions, he said. But from here on, with on-​demand com­put­ing, the focus will be “not only to inte­grate busi­ness processes but to do them in more dynamic ways and to allow oth­ers to inte­grate them into their oper­a­tions.”

Indeed, “the under­ly­ing soft­ware archi­tec­ture has to evolve to be more of an oper­at­ing sys­tem for the Net,” Heb­ner said.

This “requires a next-​generation appli­ca­tion server that takes the J2EE ker­nel and makes more of a services-​oriented archi­tec­ture out of it,” Heb­ner said. ““The J2EE archi­tec­ture is insuf­fi­cient for this type of appli­ca­tion and inte­gra­tion.”

IBM will deliver the advanced fea­turesÑin­te­grated work­flow, busi­ness rules and pro­vi­sion and audit capa­bil­i­tiesÑin Web­Sphere 5 this year, Heb­ner said.

A new class of appli­ca­tion server usage is required, Heb­ner said. “It’s much more than J2EE,” he said. The next-​generation appli­ca­tion server archi­tec­ture would include this service-​oriented archi­tec­ture, as well as IBM’s auto­nomic or self-​healing tech­nolo­gies and grid com­put­ing, said Heb­ner.

In addi­tion, Heb­ner said, the move toward a service-​oriented archi­tec­ture would help devel­op­ers.

Today devel­op­ers “are writ­ing a lot of cus­tomized J2EE code, and with the service-​oriented archi­tec­ture it’ll allow devel­op­ers to take a much more visual approach to imple­ment­ing busi­ness ser­vices instead of cod­ing every­thing line by line,” Heb­ner said. “The devel­op­ment pro­duc­tiv­ity increase is huge.”

Jason Bloomberg, an ana­lyst with Zap­Think LLC, a Cam­bridge, Mass., mar­ket research firm, said: “IBM’s Web­Sphere team under­stands and is com­mit­ted to ser­vice ori­en­ta­tion, and will take full advan­tage of the Web Ser­vices sup­port in J2EE 1.4. What’s most excit­ing about IBM’s SOA [service-​oriented archi­tec­ture] lead­er­ship is that they will be help­ing their cus­tomers move beyond the sim­ple use of Web ser­vices for sim­pli­fy­ing inte­gra­tion to the more com­plex con­struc­tion of service-​oriented archi­tec­tures based upon Web Ser­vices stan­dards and the WSIF [Web Ser­vices Invo­ca­tion Frame­work]. Enter­prise cus­tomers who imple­ment such SOAs will poten­tially see sub­stan­tial busi­ness ben­e­fits in the form of increased busi­ness agility.”