John Swainson is general manager of IBM's Application Integration Middleware division, and is also known as a pioneer of the WebSphere application server. Version 5.0 of the server was announced last month. In a recent interview with eWeek, Swainson talks about WS 5 and what's to come in the application server software space.

Read IBM's Swainson: WebSphere and Beyond.

This statement is interesting --------------
And we almost never see iPlanet (Sun ONE) even on the Sun platform ironically. Most of the time the Sun sales force continues to sell with BEA where the customer has chosen WebSphere they sell with WebSphere. So we see less and less iPlanet in the marketplace overall.

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That is likely an accurate statement. iPlanet app server 6.5 is a piece of &^%$. Sun should hope that 7.0 is better (early rumours indicate that it is) and not too late to join the party (I should be more accurate - even if Sun arrives to the app server party in time, it is not clear that it can benefit from it and it may well just crash the party, i.e. spoil it for IBM and especially BEA).

Sun needs to focus on taking Java/J2EE to the next step, adding adequate support for Web services to creating process-centric applications. IBM seems to understand it and I'm sure the Sun folks are reading this as I do. Cranking out more APIs from their spec labs won't do the trick. They need to figure out how to encapsulate the complexity of composing asynchronous Web services in a way that's friendly to Java developers. They have done this with JSP already in the presentation logic domain. With some effort, they should be able to do that for orchestration logic and have a chance to get a leg up on IBM and BEA in the app server space.

Cheers,

Jill.

That's true.