IBM today announced WebSphere 4.0 (available June 30), which can allegedly handle twice the number of transactions as BEA for the same cost. Webshere 4.0 will have free development licenses and feature: J2EE 1,2 certification, JCA support, EJB 2.0 message driven beans, EJB dynamic reloading, caching, web based administration, and more.

Read the Websphere 4.0 information page.
Read the original Press release.

Just wondering if WAS4 is using the same Apache SOAP code as the WSTK. Also do SOAP requests go through the Apache HTTP server or direct?

Thanks for any enlightenment
Alex Thomas

I think it just packages the same SOAP code from Apache. And it goes through Apache HTTP Server.
Coz, IBM has contributed to Apache SOAP project, which is a previous alphaWorks project in IBM.

Hmmm... it says that there will be a developer edition available. Anyone know how functional it will be (the only limitation that was pointed out was that it's going to be a single-server version)?

Yes, I believe that statement is correct.

According to the press release at:

http://www-4.ibm.com/software/info/websphere/news/ibmnews/pr010530.html

"WebSphere Application Server Developer Version, the industry's first developer-only application server with support for J2EE, XML and Web services development. By not charging developers to build applications in a J2EE, Web services-enabled environment, IBM is furthering its leadership in the Web developer community. "

"WebSphere Application Server Developer Version — free, available June 30"