IBM's WebSphere - Express Product Line Receives Rave Reviews

By: Mario Morejon

As part of its WebSphere product family, IBM is offering a new development product called WebSphere Express priced specifically for midmarket companies.

More than 600 ISVs and solution providers are already signed up to sell the offering, and IBM is counting on them to introduce WebSphere Express to IT departments that have a relatively small staff or that lack the expertise to develop complex Web applications themselves.

IBM said constant feedback from business partners ultimately drove the product's design. Even after the WebSphere Express release in December, partners are helping create tech releases and tech previews for demos, the company said. Throughout the first quarter, IBM said it plans to focus on training, product briefings and overall support to help ISVs and solution providers market the product.

WebSphere Express is about one-third the size of the full WebSphere application server, and it resides on top of a scaled-down version of that product. Because of its smaller footprint, WebSphere Express can be embedded and customized to work in low-end servers or even desktops. IBM offers integrators two OEM options for the software: one in which the application server comes with the integrated development environment (IDE) and one that includes only the scaled-down application server. The latter option would enable ISVs to wrap their own authoring tools around WebSphere Express and sell it as a complete solution, but integrators are likely to find that many midmarket companies will prefer the first choice because the IDE and administration interface are built into one tool.

At the heart of WebSphere Express lies the open-source Eclipse tool. The Eclipse project, initiated by IBM, is a development environment that allows programmers to integrate any development tool by creating a plug-in for it. Aside from acting as a development tool, the Eclipse IDE can be used to deploy applications and administer the application server.

WebSphere Express requires minimal administration support. The installation procedure is straight-forward and contains autosensing features that can detect previous installations of application servers or Java development APIs. WebSphere Express supports JDBC-compliant databases, including SQL Server and Oracle, and can run natively on Windows 2000, Linux and OS/400.

The product's programming model is based on Java, HTML, tag libraries and XML. The development environment includes a Java Server Pages debugger, image editing tools, Web authoring tools and a Java editor.

Through the WebSphere Express development environment, solution providers can create dynamic Web sites, Web interfaces for databases and simple Web services. The product is well suited to migrating hard-to-maintain legacy applications that have been developed in different environments, using multiple languages. Since WebSphere Express uses a single view for an entire application, legacy modules can be converted into components and tested without having to leave the environment. Because Eclipse is driven by plug-ins, components can be built and packaged to be sold separately to help customers build applications faster. Similarly, solution providers can take parts of applications that were created for one customer and turn them into components that can be sold to another customer.

The software includes a number of sample programs that help solution providers understand what sort of applications can be developed in WebSphere Express. These include a document management application, a shopping cart, address book and login templates that walk developers through the process of building WebSphere Express applications using various wizards. Although the sample applications were not fully developed, engineers examined most of the wizards, the coding environment and the application server administration interface. The demos clearly detailed the steps needed to write a rather complex application and how to tie it all together.

Aside from white papers and discussion groups, IBM offers chat-based support, interactive Ask-the-experts realtime chat on specific dates or community-based help. What's more, solution providers that pay $500 for the WebSphere Express partner pack get five licenses to resell to their customers as well as extensive marketing campaign support and customized seminars and demos.

Not only does the WebSphere Express development environment manage multiple programming languages and multimedia files, but it also can be used to administer the WebSphere application server. IBM has created an impressive product, and the Test Center recommends it.