LAS VEGAS — IBM Corp. has released a developer tool targeted at systems integrators who want to build tools for non-technical users and help customers implement service oriented architecture.
At its Impact SOA conference at the MGM Grand Conference Centre, held here, Big Blue announced WebSphere sMash, a development environment that supports dynamic scripting languages and users Representational State Transfer (REST) technology to let developers make widgets.
“It’s essentially a culmination of the work we’ve been doing in ProjectZero.org for a little over a year,” said Jason McGee, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for Project Zero. “You can build, essentially any kind of Web-based application but it’s certainly focused on what you might think of as modern Web 2.0 style applications, like mashups, integration of disparate sources of data, exposing things as REST, create some feeds and the like,” McGee said.
“WebSphere sMash will be the commercial version for deploying smash applications.”
Integrators and software developers are looking for “innovative technology that’s lightweight and easy to use,” said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development for WebSphere Smash.
“We’re bringing it to market strictly through partners,” Yusuf said.
WebSphere sMash uses the same technology as IBM Mashup Center, also announced at Impact SOA. Mashup Centre lets non-technical users make Web applications by dragging and dropping Mashup components. It is comprised of InfoSphere Mashup hub, which is the back end, and Lotus Mashups, the front end, said Larry Bowden, IBM’s vice-president for portals and Web Interaction Services.
Mashup Center has a browser-based tool that includes widgets, plus a catalogue for finding and sharing widgets and mashups. It also stores information feeds from corporate systems in RSS, ATOM or XML formats and users can merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats.
“If you really think of what mashups are, it’s the ability to take a set of services and combine them to create an entity, whatever that may be,” Hurwitz said, adding applications that combines Google Maps with real estate services would fall into this category.
“What you really need to think about is, if you mash things up together, you have to make sure that you have a container that they can fit into so it has the proper level of service,” Hurwitz said.
“You also have to have the ability to ensure that what you’re putting in there is really solid, that it’s a reusable service and it’s not a rogue piece of code. It really is a way to do a service oriented architecture, which is services that you combine together to create new value.”
One systems integrator exhibiting its wares at Impact SOA was MSI Systems Integrators Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska. MSI has no plans to make products using WebSphere sMash, but may do so if customers demand it, said Scott Lewis, MIS’s lead WebSphere architect.
Although IBM announced several SOA products and services at Impact SOA, Lewis is more interested in Big Blue’s hardware, such as the System p Unix servers.
About 6,000 partners and customers are attending Impact SOA, which wraps up Friday. A recurring theme is the use of SOA to provide a view of several different applications.
Nicolas Jabour, chief executive officer of New York-based systems integrator Prolifics, uses IBM WebSphere products to help insurance companies roll out SOA. He said many large insurance companies has several lines of business, which don’t interact with each other very well.
“They trip on their own size,” he said. “They cannot upsell and cross sell. They sell life insurance from one side and auto insurance from another.”
