John Swainson, general manager of IBM's Apps and Integration Middleware Division, was recently interviewed by CRN. John talks about Websphere Express, delivers token pot-shots at Oracle and BEA, and talks about the integration market. "Business integration is more than simply creating a bunch of enterprise JavaBeans and stringing them together".

CRN Interview: John Swainson, IBM Software Group.

I'm trying to figure out if we should be annoyed by the indirect pot-shot at us (unintentional I'm sure) while mud-slinging at Oracle. ;)

/Magnus Stenman
Orion Application Server, Ironflare AB

All of this macho strutting about back-ends reminds me of baboons. I realize that billions of dollars are at stake, but does there have to be so much chest-thumping about server-side technology.

I want more than "We run on big iron in huge installations." How long did it take? How long does it take to get acclimated to the environment in order to start producing high quality code? How painful is it when a new version of the application server comes out and someone wants to migrate? Are projects built and deployed in some excesively proprietary way that prevents me from using the tools I want to use?

He is right that business integration is more than stringing beans together but he gives no analysis as to what Websphere uniquely offers that goes beyond this.

The only thing worse than fluff is pseudo-macho fluff.

-A

Classic article with no substance.

very poor

"Let's face it. If someone wants a cheap Web app server, they can go get JBoss or Tomcat and be perfectly happy. So if I was looking for something cheap, why would I buy Oracle's app server?"

Or Websphere Express for that matter. Don't confuse cheap with value. Marc Fleury said it best in a theserverside.com interview that companies need to factor out licensing costs in architectural decisions. Consider the cost of porting as an architectural change case instead. If you expect your product to scale you must develop against a cluster up front. IBM is smart to buy mindshare on the low volume end but the learning curve may be the real hidden cost. Buyers look at the total package (technology+brand+support+brand+cost+brand+spec compliance+brand)

Shops doing new J2EE development would be well served to evaluate a Tomcat+JBoss+Ant+XDoclet+(Eclipse|*) stack against a Websphere(Express|Full)+WSAD stack for low usage or pilot projects. The former stack has more moving parts but offers high cohesion and loose coupling - a key architectural principle.

Andrew clifford wrote:

 
"Let's face it. If someone wants a cheap Web app server, they can go get JBoss or Tomcat and be perfectly happy. So if I was looking for something cheap, why would I buy Oracle's app server?"

1) Value for money & technology stack

per CPU, you get the web server, the App Server (OC4J, web and ejb containers), 5 named user licenses of JDeveloper & clustering. This is NOT a limited product unlike websphere express or weblogic workshop and this lot is $5000 per CPU.

2) Web Services

JDev and OC4J are the core of the web services support and we have a unique offering in that we can expose PL/SQL packages as web services using very easy , wizard based development

3) Because customers asked us

I run lots of awareness seminars and we often get feedback along ths lines of " wed like to use 9iAS BUT its too much technology for the project and its too expensive"

So Oracle have created a Java, J2EE, Web Services offerinm that, unlike the opposition is not restricted



"Or Websphere Express for that matter. Don't confuse cheap with value. Marc Fleury said it best in a theserverside.com interview that companies need to factor out licensing costs in architectural decisions. Consider the cost of porting as an architectural change case instead. If you expect your product to scale you must develop against a cluster up front."

Clustering is INCLUDED in 9ias Java edition

" IBM is smart to buy mindshare on the low volume end but the learning curve may be the real hidden cost. Buyers look at the total package (technology+brand+support+brand+cost+brand+spec compliance+brand)

Shops doing new J2EE development would be well served to evaluate a Tomcat+JBoss+Ant+XDoclet+(Eclipse|*) stack against a Websphere(Express|Full)+WSAD stack for low usage or pilot projects. The former stack has more moving parts but offers high cohesion and loose coupling - a key architectural principle. "


Too many moving parts for many developer shops in fact - with Java edition you get the developer tool with lots of wizard based, framework support, the server and you can get tech support as well. I used to put teams together and the amount of time it takes to string a number of tools into an equivalent environment is more than the cost of 9iAS Java edition

check it out on otn.oracle.com


Phil McLaughlin
Business Development
UK 9iAS Solutions Team

I guess this article was begging for a response, so let me take the bait. Business Integration is definitely more than stringing web services together and also more then buying a bunch of products and branding it.

What is WebSphere Business Integration really is? Is it
o MQSI
o Crossworlds
o Holosofx
o WebSphere enterprise (Dragonfly)

Currently it must be a Product Managers dreamjob at IBM spinning a good yarn around all these products together and making slideware out of it.


Adapters
---------
The list that is displayed is the CrossWorld adapters. Why I guess that is because the list is big. Why are they not J2C compliant, well J2C is very weak and does not do blah, blah etc. MQSI calls any piece of code an adapter and for Dragonfly suddenly J2C is very important and its adapters are J2C based. Ofcourse none of these adapters work across different products.

Workflow engines
----------------
At one count there were half-a-dozen human facing workflow engines and another dozen process workflow engines and product teams at IBM were busy building newer ones. Its incredible that they still go and acquire more of these things at regular intervals.

Transformations
---------------
You guessed it, each of these products has its own mapping tools. MQSI is an antique, Holosofx is a little toy, Crossworlds need to do java callouts even for iterating over arrays, WSAD IE does XML to XML mapping using Xalan XSLT.
For heaven's sake pick one tool and make it decent

Monitoring
----------
WBI proudly claims it does monitoring until you read the fine print. This works only for integrations define using Holosofx and deployed on MQSI, Using Crossworlds for B2B you are out of luck, Dragonfly stuff ooops sorry.

The list goes on and on, but I guess this is a wrong article to take a bait with comments like MQSeries = JMS Provider, but anyways here it is.

thanx
Seshu Adunuthula

<seshu>
What is WebSphere Business Integration really is? Is it
o MQSI
o Crossworlds
o Holosofx
o WebSphere enterprise (Dragonfly)
</seshu>

Is it even reasonable to expect that IBM will be able to consolidate the differences among the products it acquired and (at least marketechturally)
assembled into WebSphere? I'm curious to know whether IBM will be able to
support BPEL4WS across a mixed baggage of products or will they get rid of
them at some point in an attempt to offer cleaner BPEL4WS orchestration?

Cheers.

Jill.

What?!?!
The emperor has no clothes?!

I've never had more trouble with and appserver and dbms than I have with IBM's products. Big Blue will never get a recommendation from me unless were talking about VisualAge.

At last count, there were several hundred products that had a similar name ...