Product of the Day: IBM WebSphere
Product: WebSphere Studio Application Develop V5Manufacturer: IBMURL: ibm.com/websphere
WebSphere Studio Application Developer, version 5, is a build to integrate, value-priced solution that allows businesses to accelerate development and integration of complex applications. It optimizes and simplifies J2EE application development with best practices, templates, code generation and leads with the most comprehensive development environment in its class.
Embedding the power of J2EE, rapid application development and broad team support for diverse enterprise application development organizations, WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5 features a robust, easy-to-use development environment for creating, building and maintaining dynamic Web sites, applications and Web services.
WebSphere Application Server V5 and WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5 represent a milestone in continuing the evolution to a single Web services-enabled, J2EE application server and tooling environment giving customers the four essential characteristics of an on demand operating environment.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer, v5 highlights:
J2EE development tools optimized for professional and team development
Performance profiling tools to help application developers optimize the application's performance early in the development cycle
A Visual editor for Java and an editor to map out and visually construct Web-based applications using a Struts-based model View-Controller framework
Integration of development and performance optimization tools with the WebSphere Application Server test environment
WebSphere Studio Application Developer is IBM's core application development environment for the creation and maintenance of J2EE applications and Web Services. Based upon the latest innovations from Eclipse technology and written to Java? 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specifications, Application Developer extends the open universal Eclipse Platform to help you:
Optimize and simplify J2EE application development by using best practices, templates, and code generation to quickly and easily create J2EE artifacts and database applications.
Concurrent support for J2EE 1.2 and 1.3 specifications so you can take advantage using new product features and migrate projects at your own pace.
Shorten time-to-market by creating new applications with Web services wizards to generate Web services the ground up or reuse existing development assets.
See immediate results of GUI design changes with the new Visual Editor for Java, which supports dynamic updates between source and visual design.
Improve application performance with profiling and tracing tools to detect, isolate, and fix performance issues early in the development cycle.
Extend and customize your development environment by seamlessly integrating with IBM and third-party plug-ins, so you can focus on what you do best--building applications.
Application Developer Version 5 supports the latest standards including J2EE 1.3, Eclipse Version 2; Version 7.2 of both Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux, and new Web services standards -- many of which IBM co-developed -- such as the precursor to Web Services Business Process Language (BPEL4WS). In addition, WebSphere developers can now visually construct Web applications using the Apache Struts environment, an open source framework that reduces the effort required to build, maintain and modify Web applications based on standard technologies such as Java Servlets, JavaBeans and XML.
Unlike competing software that forces companies to rewrite applications to a specific model, IBM WebSphere Studio Version 5 -- in an industry first -- offers the ability to develop Java-based Web services. In another industry first, IBM WebSphere Studio Version 5 can coordinate the flow of multiple back-end applications needed to complete cross-enterprise business transactions via Web services.
This means developers can retrofit and integrate older but still critical software assets as Web services, while writing new applications to standards-based and enterprise-tested Java. This avoids the expensive, time-consuming and flexibility-limiting effort of conforming to a proprietary framework such as Microsoft.Net.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer go beyond basic Eclipse technology to provide end-to-end support for J2EE application development and is optimized for WebSphere Application Server deployment. This scalable product can easily extend support for other IBM middleware and non-IBM application servers via plug-ins, or integrate with third-party tools seamlessly to meet your evolving development challenges.
By supporting the latest version of the Eclipse open source platform, IBM WebSphere Studio V5 can be personalized via more than 175 plug-ins by Rational, Interwoven, TogetherSoft, Macromedia, Serena, Instantiations, Sitraka, Genuitec and others. This makes IBM's tools the most feature-rich development environment in the industry and allows customers to choose from a wide variety of software providers to meet their individual development tool needs.
Other productivity features include performance analysis and tracing tools, automatic code generation, integrated debuggers, and built-in test environments to detect bugs early in the development process. Additional features are designed to help smooth the transition from application development to application deployment. Load-testing and application monitoring enable developers to assess how the applications will function in a production environment.
"For every dollar a customer spends on software, they spend five dollars to integrate that software, and IBM is dedicated to helping customers lower the cost of modernizing and integrating software acquired over the past three decades," according to Scott Hebner, Director of Marketing for IBM WebSphere. "With WebSphere Studio and Eclipse, IBM supports the industry's broadest range of languages, platforms, hardware devices and vendor integration, making it faster and cheaper for customers to integrate their assets through Web services.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer is a member of the award-winning WebSphere Studio product family. In addition to WebSphere Studio Application Developer, IBM also offers WebSphere Studio Site Developer and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition on Linux for your development needs.
Similar to its sister product and now available for Linux, WebSphere Studio Site Developer includes integrated support for Java, Web, database, XML, and Web Services development. This is a feature-rich and high value on-ramp for the WebSphere development experience. This product is most suitable for developers who need to build, test and maintain dynamic Web sites, but do not need to create EJBs. With Site Developer you can build robust Java applications, attractive Web interfaces and integrate your business applications with Web Services easier than ever before with support for XHTML, JDK 1.3, JSP 1.2, Servlet 2.3 and improved Web Services samples.
Site Developer has been designed to allow developers to quickly and easily build and test applications with built-in debuggers, a unit test environment with concurrent support for WebSphere Application Server V4.x, V5.0 or WebSphere Application Server-Express V5.0, codecompletion, samples and templates, tag libraries, a visual editor for Java and a an editor to map out and visually construct Web based applications using the same Struts-based Model View-Controller framework that is included in IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer product.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition (now available on Linux) is the perfect companion for creating built-to-integrate solutions. It includes all the features in WebSphere Studio Application Developer, and functions like flow choreography, JCA support, and others to help you deal with complex development challenges.
Business logic and application data are scattered throughout the organization across multiple software assets. Much of the business logic resides in databases, packaged applications (such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems), or in back-end systems (such as IBM CICS®) offering varying levels of transaction support. Other business logic can be found in existing Java and J2EE applications and Web services. Furthermore, companies face constant pressure to create new applications in order to cut costs, build customer loyalties, and gain a competitive advantage.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition can help companies to reduce IT complexity, reuse existing resources, and automate business processes through a powerful but simplified build-to-integrate framework.
Service-oriented architecture reduces the complexity of large-scale application development and promotes reuse by offering a standard way of representing and interacting with virtually all software assets.
Integrated workflow increases development productivity and promotes reuse by enabling developers to visually choreograph interactions between software assets.
Advanced transactional connectivity capabilities help developers avoid custom coding by providing extended transactional support for the many challenges related to integrating existing software assets with a J2EE environment.
For the first time, developers will be able to create fully automated Web services-based workflows -- the series of business processes needed to complete a transaction -- from virtually any software asset. Using a simple graphical interface, developers can transform any asset managed by WebSphere into a Web service and compose it into a fully automated transactional workflow. Companies can take a string of transactions -- such as checking the status of credit, inventory and shipping when processing an order -- and compose them as a Web service workflow and extend it to outside partners and vendors in a secure and managed environment. If any one phase of the transaction, such as the credit check, falls through, the entire workflow is automatically adjusted.
WebSphere is the market-leading Internet infrastructure software, or middleware, for creating, running and integrating e-business applications across a variety of computing platforms. Built on open standards such as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), XML and the new Web services standards, and endowed with IBM's core strengths of reliability, scalability and security, WebSphere server software and development tools are used by tens of thousands of customers and have shown 12 consecutive quarters of double-digit sales growth. For more information visit ibm.com/websphere.
For more information on Studio products, please visit us at ibm.com/websphere/studio.
email: potd@ssc.com
