IBM WebSphere Finally Supports Mainframe

Section: 01. Top Stories

By Tony Baer

IBM Corp has at last ported its WebSphere application server to its OS/390 mainframe, finally freeing its sizable mainframe user base from the heavy workload of writing custom code to integrate web applications with core mainframe services.

It's little surprise that a key ingredient of IBM WebSphere's success has been its support of existing IBM technologies - especially DB2 databases - plus the availability of bodies from IBM Global Services, which has built an e-business practice around WebSphere. If you're a confirmed IBM shop, WebSphere has long been your logical choice for web-enabling legacy applications.

But until now, running WebSphere on the mainframe was essentially like running a port of an open systems tool in a legacy environment. WebSphere 4.0 for z/OS and OS/390, released this week, adds native support for core mainframe services such as CICS, the transaction monitor that IBM claims runs 40 billion transactions every day. Specifically, WebSphere 4.0 allows Java application developers to plug into these transaction services without having to write custom code. WebSphere 4.0 does the same thing with other established mainframe building blocks such as Parallel Sysplex; IBM's RACF security and access control programs; and WLM, IBM's workload manager used for load balancing.

Version 4.0 is also the first release of WebSphere that is officially J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)-compliant. Not only that, but it's the "deepest and broadest" implementation of J2EE, claimed Scott Hebner, middleware marketing director for IBM Software. He said that IBM passed more J2EE compliance tests than any other appserver vendor, including all the mandatory tests and 70% of the optional ones run by Sun. For instance, IBM claims that its implementation of JMS (Java Messaging Service, one of the J2EE standards) is more mature than BEA's, its primary rival in the appserver space. For instance, IBM claims that BEA WebLogic lacks the ability to import transactions originating as MQSeries messages (IBM's market-leading messaging middleware). BEA was not available for comment at press time.

To place matters into perspective, IBM's J2EE fervor is rather recent. It admits to being slower in becoming J2EE-compliant than the other Java appserver rivals. "We took a balanced approach to supporting standards since we originally did not believe that J2EE was the only [important] platform," said Hebner. He claimed that other standards, such as XML-based UDDI and SOAP, were equally important. Hebner added that WebSphere supported all the J2EE essentials anyway. "We supported EJB 1.1 'minus,'" he said. For instance, while IBM supported essential EJB features such as session beans, until now it didn't support peripheral ones such as XML descriptors. "Our clients weren't using them [XML descriptors] anyway," he said.

The WebSphere 4.0 announcements were accompanied by an important upgrade to Visual Age, IBM's umbrella IDE (integrated development environment) used for developing many of the applications that run on WebSphere. For the first time, IBM is finally offering Visual Age as a suite, bundling all languages including C, C++, Cobol, and Java into the same package. In so doing, IBM is following the lead of other tools vendors, such as Microsoft, Rational, Sybase, and just recently, CA (CI No 4,116).