Claiming the lines between web application development and deployment tools are blurring, IBM Corp yesterday announced it will merge its Net.Commerce catalog and content, and Payment Suites under the WebSphere brand. It has also moved its code bases for its development and deployment products up to a 3.0 release.
IBM says future releases of Net.Commerce and Payment Suite will be renamed WebSphere Commerce Suite. The WebSphere HTTP server becomes the underpinning of Net.Commerce. WebSphere’s Java servlet engine is incorporated into both suites and Payment Server in its next release will run as a servlet in WebSphere.
The WebSphere Java application server 3.0 includes integrated support for Enterprise Java Beans, Java Servlets and Java server pages. Access control can now be applied to each individual application in 3.0 rather than at a directory or user level. IBM also boasts improved XML, failover, clustering and management support. That’s the $7,500 per processor Enterprise edition. An $800 Standard version lacks EJB integration. An $8,000 add-on performance pack includes additional caching functions for high- throughput web sites.
WebSphere Studio 3.0 for writing, debugging and implementing applications includes what IBM claims is the first graphical lay- out tool for dynamic HTML pages, HTML, Java server pages, JavaScript and automatic update of links as changes are made.
The $3,000 VisualAge for Java 3.0 enterprise edition programming tools for writing Java applications includes new stored procedure builder for DB2 and support for SQLJ the Java flavor of SQL.
