[153446]

This is a strategic post reflecting on the viability of MyEclipse Blue within (for example) a Fortune 100 company already using the IBM Rational Tools (ex. RAD/RSA) in support of WebSphere v.6.1 deployments.

To narrow the discussion, let’s focus on four (4) of the WebSphere v. 6.1 capabilities:

* Java Server Faces Widget Library (JWL) – http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/cweb_jwl.html

* Web Services Feature Pack – http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg21264563

* EJB Feature Pack – http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=404&context=SS7K4U&dc=D600&uid=swg21287579&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct404websphere

* Web Services 2.0 Feature Pack – http://www-306.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/featurepacks/web20/features/

Discussion Context
IBM has evolved into a pattern where WebSphere (Rational) tooling support lags behind the GA Application Server release cycle.

Questions
Is Genuitec, with the MyEclipse Blue product, simply providing a standard set of MyEclipse tooling with WebSphere server integration tacked on?

Is the MyEclipse Blue offering intended to provide tooling specific to WebSphere capability – such as the four examples above?

Is the intention to actually create a competitive product with one or more of the $4,000 IBM Rational IDEs? That is, to beat IBM to market with integrated tooling support for their WebSphere Application Server feature packs?

In The Meantime
For the moment, it would be helpful to know which (if any) of the four capabilities listed above will be supported with the first MyEclipse Blue Edition.

(If you would like to take this discussion off-line: MarvinToll@gtcGroup.com )

[stuart_wildcat]

From what I can gather the tools in MyEclipse Blue are going to provide features that are very “forward looking”. By this I mean that it doesn’t appear (although I’m no expert) that the Blue edition will be going back and providing things that have not been there before.

These are the things I would suspect will and will not be in the Blue edition (and I would welcome any corrections from MyEclipse support):

Will be present:
– JAX-WS web service support. Note that currently WAS 6.1 doesn’t support this “out of the box” and you have to install the “Web Services Feature Pack” to get this.
– EJB 3 & JPA Entity ORM. Note that again WAS 6.1 doesn’t support this OOB and you need to install the “EJB 3 Feature Pack” to get this.

What I doubt will be supported:
– JAX-RPC web services which are currently the default web services in WAS 6.1 without the feature pack.
– EJB 2.1 CMP Entity mapping. Tried to do this with XDoclet recently and doesn’t seem to work.

My big question is if Blue clients will realize that some of the support that you get for some of these things requires that you have a “Feature Pack” installed in your WebSphere environment. Now these are fully supported feature additions provided by IBM but I know how nervous people get about their production environments. To me some people will feel like “feature pack” sounds too cutting edge and may not want to go that route. If that is the case then the Blue edition will not provide as much parity with RAD.

I expect the Blue edition will be extremely attractive once the next version of WAS supports some of these things without any additional extensions.

[Arebus]

Thanks for providing this information. That took lots of time to find it. Just what I need. I appreciated your help! Thanks a million!

[Author]

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