Download whatever happened to Websphere

Whatever Happened to ... WebSphere?
You could say there are two worlds of Web development — enterprise Web development and
everything else. In the enterprise camp are technologies like Microsoft ASP.NET and Java, while
"everything else" includes PHP, Perl, and now Ruby on Rails.
Once the de facto leader among Java-based Web application servers, Web Sphere Application Server
faces increased competition on multiple fronts. Has the venerable app server, which helped change
how the Web operated, kept pace with the times?
Of course, in practice the "everything else" technologies can and are used in enterprise Web
development. But the distinction speaks to the different origins of these Web application
environments. Enterprise technologies have evolved from the corporate space with a distinct
emphasis on business logic and componentization, while the "everything else" technologies have
grown "in the wild," driven largely by enthusiast developers with task-specific needs.
IBM WebSphere firmly occupies the enterprise ground. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is the
core, flagship product of a brand IBM has extended to a variety of middleware technologies
consolidated under the WebSphere name.
1._________________In the beginning — aka the early 1990s in Web-speak — Web servers did little
more than retrieve static documents and deliver them to browsers. New technology was needed to
enable servers to cook up data on the fly, delivering dynamic results to users. At first, Web
developers wrote their dynamic code in existing languages like Perl, or even C, and concocted bridge
technologies like CGI to hook them into the Web server.
In 1997, Sun released the first specification for Java Servlets, designed as a native server-side
programming language. In addition to robust processing facilities, servlets brought state to Webbased applications, using cookies and session variables to enable Web applications to track
information across multiple page interactions. In doing so, servlets helped push the Web from a
being document delivery system toward being an application environment.
Among the first Web servers to implement support for Java Servlets was IBM WebSphere, introduced
in 1998 under the name "Servlet Express."
As the Java language evolved under the auspices of Sun, it became increasingly sophisticated,
particularly with regard to modular architectural elements like frameworks and classes. The
JavaBeans specification also enabled Java developers to package objects into a single class for
increased portability.
This kind of component-based architecture is especially attractive to enterprise developers who
value the ability to re-use programming structures spanning a wide range of environments and
deploy them across large numbers of servers, potentially on different platforms.
Leveraged by IBM's established enterprise presence, WAS and its support for the evolving Java
language became a de facto leader among Java-based Web application servers.
2.____________
By the time WAS 3.5 was released in 2000, IBM was expanding its application in several major
directions.
Support for the then-new Java Platform Enterprise Edition, or J2EE 1.0, included distributed and highavailability modules for larger scale enterprise deployments. IBM also expanded WebSphere to a
wider range of platforms, including Linux, OS/400 and z/OS. This made WebSphere attractive to
enterprises with large investments in legacy infrastructure.
At this time, IBM began dividing WebSphere Application Server into multiple editions with different
feature and price targets. These divisions became even more pronounced in WAS 4.0, which had
three variations of Advanced Edition: Full, Single-Server Without Cluster Support, and a Single-Server
Development Edition.
Besides the server itself, IBM had been producing programmer tools to support application
development for WebSphere. In its earliest incarnation, WebSphere Studio supported only HTML
development, but later gave way to WebSphere Studio Application Developer, or WSAD, an
integrated development and testing environment with Java support.
3.___________
Despite its increasingly wide enterprise usage, developers were not always thrilled with WebSphere,
particularly the releases prior to version 5.
Common complaints accused WebSphere of being resource-heavy, requiring higher-end server
hardware to run competitively compared to alternative J2EE application servers. Others accused IBM
of providing weak server management tools and unreliable extensions to the Java specification.
Among dissenters, popular alternatives to WebSphere have been the open source products Tomcat
and JBoss. Like the earliest releases of WebSphere, Tomcat is a Java Servlet engine and lacks support
for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), which some developers find makes for a preferable, more lightweight
Java server solution.
JBoss, however, is more comparable to WebSphere. It is a J2EE server built on Tomcat. Again, those
who favor JBoss point to its open source nature and free price tag along with its lower resource
requirements.
But to WebSphere advocates, these open source solutions lack the value-added management and
development tools IBM built specifically for WebSphere, as well as the numerous tightly integrated
middleware modules available under the WebSphere brand.
4.__________________
To address the criticisms of early-generation WAS developers, IBM went back to the drawing board
for version 5, rewriting its codebase. In doing so, Big Blue unified the code across all WebSphere
platforms, substantially reducing architectural differences between WAS deployments.
In addition to support for the J2EE 1.3 specification, IBM redefined the various WebSphere editions
for version 5.
The Express Edition was targeted at small and midsize businesses that wanted the core J2EE
functionality but did not need large-scale deployment functionality. In contrast, the Network
Deployment edition enabled WebSphere to run across a cluster with proxy, load-balancing and
routing capabilities.
When version 6 was released in late 2004, IBM acknowledged its competition from open source
alternatives and launched the new Community Edition. Unlike the proprietary codebase for previous
WAS editions, the Community Edition is IBM's packaged version of Apache Geronimo.
Geronimo, like WebSphere 6, supports JEE 5.0, the successor to J2EE 1.4. (In the transition, Sun
dropped the "2" from Java Enterprise Edition.) Unlike proprietary editions of WAS, however, the
Community Edition is open source code that the end user can modify.
Although users of the free WAS Community Edition could just as well obtain its components directly
from Apache, IBM sells WebSphere support to Community Edition customers.
5._________________For now, WebSphere is tightly tied to its core technology, Java Enterprise
Edition. But some have wondered aloud whether Java continues to have a vital future in Web
servers.
Many Web developers — particularly those who come from backgrounds outside of the enterprise —
avoid Java. Since the development of servlets, numerous other server-side architectures have
appeared and matured, including PHP and Ruby on Rails. They are perceived are more accessible and
less complex than Java.
Seasoned Java developers sometimes scoff at these lightweight alternatives, which lack Java's
enterprise-grade credentials. But with sophistication comes complexity. Java's critics say it is
overengineered for many of the applications where it is used, costing additional resources and
development time.
One Java developer asks, for example, why Facebook — one of the most widely used sites on the
Internet with quickly evolving application functionality — has opted not to be built on the Java
platform.
The Java EE 5.0 specification is seen by some as having added even more complexity to Java when it
had promised less, prompting one analyst to call its release "the beginning of the end."
Realistically, Java servers aren't going to disappear. The concern among businesses that rely on Java
development is that the number of deployments could shrink and end up marginalized on only the
heaviest of Web applications. Meanwhile, the new, lighter technologies claim the large middleweight territory.
But is WebSphere's future destined to go wherever Java goes? With the release of the Community
Edition, IBM has demonstrated a willingness to be flexible in its conception of WebSphere, allowing it
to embrace an open source product beside its own proprietary editions. Whether this flexibility will
extend outside of its Java core remains to be seen.
As it is, IBM has extended the WebSphere brand to an entire ecosystem of products that integrate
with WAS. These include Web services, messaging and commerce applications. The value these add
to the core WAS product may well help it resist a shift in Java's fortunes.
Match these headings to the correct paragraph
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
The Future of JEE
Misgivings
Birth of a Servlet
Evolution
WebSphere Grows Up
We are now going to summarise this text. First talk to a partner and discuss how to summarise
texts. Write a list of five steps you have to take in order to make a good summary. What do
you have to include? What can you leave out?
Follow the steps you have all decided on and write a 200 word summary.