Search our
entire site
Enter your search
terms below, or visit
our search page

Search case
studies only
Enter your search
terms below:

For the table
of contents and
hyperlinks to
general topics
proceed to toc

IBMs TSpace

April 1998

IBM announces support for EJB
Big Blue to extend EJB compatibility to middleware and mainframe software

IBM at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week said it would standardize its programming model for IBM middleware and mainframe software on Sun Microsystems' Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification.

As first reported by InfoWorld (see "IBM scales up Java plans," Feb. 23, page 1), IBM will morph its San Francisco project into Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).

The company also introduced JCentral, a new Web search engine for Java known internally as a "kind of AltaVista for Java."

The product will catalog and search information such as code, applets, JavaBeans, newsgroups, articles, and tutorials for Java, and is designed to be a central Java resource for developers.

Meanwhile, EJB will not only provide unprecedented of integration across its various software architectures, but it will also open IBM software to third-party development.

"We are reformed monopolists," said Pat Sueltz, IBM's general manager of Java software. "And like reformed anythings, our relationships are kind of dysfunctional, but working."

IBM is fully supportive of Sun in its effort to build the Java specification, and the alliance is working.

"We have never seen an alliance yet that has worked," Sueltz said, in reference to the Unix wars.

Observers noted that Sueltz may have overlooked the Object Management Group's CORBA standard.

Furthermore, EJB is the only software architecture since the days of the 360 mainframe that will offer IBM a consistent programming model, according to Sueltz.

Meanwhile, Sueltz stressed that IBM is in Java for the money.

"We will cooperate on the specification but compete on the implementation," Sueltz said.

The company also has been responsible for a lot of the specifications in Sun's EJB, Sueltz said. Java Transaction Server is a CORBA-based Object Transaction Service implementation; the Java Messaging Service is based on IBM's MQSeries Messaging API. EJB's Session and Entity Beans are based on Session and Entity services in IBM's San Francisco framework, and IBM worked closely with Novell on the Java Naming and Directory Interface.

Meanwhile, Java is not yet a "write once, run everywhere" proposition, according to Sueltz.

"It's more like `write once, run many places,' but its getting there," Sueltz said.

IBM also announced it has developed a Java virtual machine for the OS 390.

IBM, in Armonk, N.Y., can be reached at http://www.ibm.com.

IBM will use the Enterprise JavaBeans standard to unite several of its disparate software architectures. San Francisco project VisualAge for Java Component Broker Servlet Express Transarc TX series