App server market shifts emphasis with J2EE standard

Rethink IT, Dec, 2004

We don't know what we did, but IBM--we're sorry, we really are. There must be some ghastly offence Rethink IT's provided the world's funniest computer TV ad maker. This can be the only reason the company point-blank refused to talk to us for this month's overview of the application server universe.

Now that struck us as a bit odd. It was only in October that the company officially unveiled WebSphere 6, the latest rev of its app server software, due for customer release by the year end, and which is said to include a bunch of neat new features such as better recoverability, failover, drag-and-drop application development interface and all sorts of other things that you'd think it'd be dying to tell the world about.

Especially to the data center audience of this publication, who have after all been waiting two years for the release 6 upgrade to the IBM app server functionality. But a gentleman called Bob Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere Infrastructure Software, gave instructions to his publicists that the company was not to co-operate with us in the production of this article.

So, next time you see Bob, you'll have to ask him the questions we wanted to ask him on your behalf. You can say sorry from the Rethink IT team--did we forget to send a card, Bob? Meantime, we thought it'd be interesting to review, in Big Blue's absence, what's happening out there in the app server world. A good place to start, of course, is with definitions. What is an app server? Cast your mind back to the days of CICS and transaction monitors like Tuxedo. We needed things like that in the host and Unix environments to act as accelerators to help applications focus on their main job--encapsulating business logic, data and functionality--and let the operating system do what it did best--run the hardware and synchronize the system processes.

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