One of IBM's most popular product lines, WebSphere has become a key weapon in IBM's move into the next generation of Web-enabled enterprise development tools for e-business. In fact, it's a whole bunch of weapons, as IBM has organized many of its relevant technologies around the WebSphere brand: the core WebSphere applications servers and tool sets plus the entire MQSeries product line of messaging products.
There are so many products revolving around this central brand that it can be pretty overwhelming to click to one of our download lists here and find page after page of products and variations on products, plus the supporting tutorials and demos.
Fortunately, all that stuff falls into just a few groups, which I will now explain to you so you can more easily find exactly the download you want to try out—especially important since some of these downloads are a couple hundred megabytes....
Part The First: WebSphere Application Server
It all starts with the Application Server—so you've got something to run everything on when you're done, right?
The WebSphere Application Server is a Java engine—the latest one, Version 5, supports the very latest version (1.3) of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Versions run on most key operating systems, including Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, IBM's own AIX, flavors of everybody's Linux, and even IBM's mainframe OS/390—which means apps you develop can run pretty much unchanged on the WebSphere app server running on any of these platforms.
Web Services? We got your Web services right here—in Version 5, which incorporates support for SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and all those other Web services standards buzzwords.
So what are those 15 versions listed on the download page?
Well, you've got two variables. First, there's the Goldilocks variant: the standard, full-featured WebSphere Application Server; then there's the supersize Application Server Enterprise for all those who just can't get too much scalability; and at the other end the Application Server—Express, a trimmed-down, easy-listenin' version that focuses on serving up dynamic Web sites.
The other dimension is what operating system/platform you want to run it on, and that accounts for most of the other variants you see listed, because as I said, WebSphere and its Java engine have been adapted to every robust OS you can think of.
Part The Second: WebSphere Studio
Tools—where're my tools? Right here, in WebSphere Studio. Actually, call it the WebSphere Studio Family of development tools, and it's one of those families that needs a big dining room table at dinnertime. Fortunately, all these tools are organized into two major groupings. And even more fortunately, all of the newer stuff is based on IBM's WebSphere Studio Workbench, which is a toolbase into which everything plugs or through which everything coordinates. It's how they can mix and match tools to produce toolsets targeting particular needs. This Workbench is based on the open-source Eclipse tool platform, which IBM created (see "What's Eclipse?" in this issue).
Mama Bear in this family is WebSphere Studio Site Developer, a suite of tools for the complete Web site development team—content authors, graphic artists, programmers, and Webmasters. Accordingly, it's got so many features you need a cheatsheet to keep them straight: graphics tools, project tools, visual layout tools, deployment tools, scripting support, wizards of various sorts, J2EE support, and the ability to generate Web applications from database queries and from Java beans. It's also got something called Flow Composition tools, which I've decided I'm not even going to try to figure out, let alone explain. There's also an Advanced version of Site Developer, which adds Web services and some nifty XML development tools.
Papa Bear is the WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which IBM literature describes, eloquently, as "a premier, end-to-end J2EE application development tool... (that) represents the next generation of IBM offerings that make building e-business applications easier and faster." Extracting the meaning out of that marketese, I explain that Application Developer adds lots and lots of tools for developing and working with business logic, plus the kind of testing, deployment, and integration tools you've got to have when your paycheck's riding on whether you can get it up and keep it up.
Specifically, it adds tools for building server-side components such as servlets, Java beans, and EJBs, client-side components such as HTML and JSPs, and integration components like Java Connector Architecture (JCA) so you can tap into that fat, tasty database back at headquarters.
Again, there are versions of each of these based on your hardware and software environment.
There is also VisualAge Enterprise Suite, an earlier set of tools that is gradually being superceded by successive editions of WebSphere Studio—so don't worry about it.
Part The Third: Everything Else
Once you've got this basic family tree down, everything else you see on the download pages is supporting material, add-ons, tools aimed at specific targets, and an enormous number of tutorials, demos, samples, examples, technical papers, and Webcasts, plus the entire MQSeries messaging system. There's lots more in other categories as well -- commerce servers, content managers, edge servers, every possible category of computing you can think of, IBM has products and services for. The main thing to remember is that when you click on one of our download links and see a long list of similarly named downloads, just stay focused on picking your main components first, then once you've gotten the hang of the core products, you'll be ready to go shopping among the extras. At least you won't get as easily lost.
Cloud Computing
