Hi!
Finally, here it is, the first blog about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 on System z. I tried to start this blog the other day on WikyBlog. It actually looked like a promising blogging system, where everyone can share knowledge, but in a blog-like way, like a community-blog, but it turned out that it did not fullfill any of that kind of requirements.
However, here we are now. On the old WikyBlog has been actually one post, that I, of course, won’t hide. The customer that posted this, wasn’t actually very happy about the first presentation I did about Web 2.0 on System z at the Technical Conference in Dresden.
But I’m happy that most of the people that joined the presentation were very satisfied with it and even wanted a video of it.
However, back to this particular customer. He said I didn’t fullfill his expectations at all, although the topic was interesting to him. He was asking exactly that question, that this blog is mainly about:
“What’s the sense of having e.g. WebSphere and Web 2.0 applications on System z, rather than on other platforms, also regarding other platforms of IBM, like pSeries with AIX + HACMP for high available applications?”
Of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t present and show all the things this customer expected to hear, but thank you for the feedback!
To answer this question in VERY short now, as an appetizer: WebSphere and Web 2.0 on System z benefit from the best quality of service an enterprise server platform can offer, and now with z10 we also have an extremly good performance in terms of CPU power.
I’ll go into details as I filling this blog step by step.
Regarding HACMP, the main difference is, that System z, especially in a parallel sysplex, has true memory datasharing and a recovery backup system, that actually acts in seconds, in case of emergency, but as said, lets go into details later.
So, which news can I offer to you? Actually the great MVC Frameworks JRuby on Rails and Groovy Grails are running in WebSphere on z/OS and we successfully tested them on our test-LPAR.
So, that also means that you can now write your J2EE applications with JRuby and Groovy and speed up development.
But that’s not all: Quercus, a PHP Java Interpreter by Caucho, is also succesfully running on WebSphere z/OS, and connected successfully with our DB2 on z.
There is also the Web 2.0 Feature-Pack for WebSphere z/OS in place, which will enhance WebSphere with a lot of nice and smooth capabilites regarding the lightweight Web 2.0 standards, like AJAX, REST, ATOM, RSS,COMET, Mashing and lets you use the features of the Dojo JavaScript toolkit within WebSphere, which IBM actively supports.
The default implementations of Perl and PHP are also supported on z/OS and run with the CGI (and FCGI, but Perl needs to be recompiled then) with IBM Http Server for z/OS.
You can even use Project Zero on z/OS now, which is a great environment for rapidly developing situtional applications in Groovy or PHP (the PHP is also a Java based PHP interpreter by IBM called P8).
Situational applications are interesting for z/OS, since it’s lacking GUIs for a lot of administrative tasks. CICS and IMS already offer an ATOM gateway, so it’s easy to connect to this back-ends with Project Zero. We also have a video for this in place, which I will publish soon.
If you develop .NET applications with C# and VB.NET you will be happy to hear that you now can keep on developing with Visual Studio the way you used to, and still can deploy that ASP.NET or ADO.NET applications in WebSphere z/OS with the Mainsoft cross-compiler.
What makes this interesting for Web 2.0 is, of course, that this is another story of integrating heterogeneous applications easily on one platform, and in addition, you can use the MS AJAX Toolkit for great looking and interactive GUIs.
I will go into details the next days on those things in this blog, so stay tuned. Additionally I’ll post HOWTOs in the Web 2.0 on System z WIKI.
Lots of things right? So, because this is so much information, I’ll do a pilot-workshop to get things clear. This workshop will take place on the 8th July in the IBM Lab in Böblingen, Germany. You can get further information, like the agenda, and register here:
http://www-05.ibm.com/de/events/fromzerotozhero/pilot/index.html
Luis Suarez, IBM Social Software Evangelist, will speak on that day too. He actually had an interview with the Forbes Magazin, since he manages his every day work life almost with no email. Great! Nice to see what Social Software can do for you.
You can actually visit his blog here:
http://www.elsua.net/
Martin Packer, a mainframe performance guru, will also come around. He wrote about his impressions from the Technical Conference on his blog:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/MartinPacker
The Web 2.0 on System z workshop with hands-on will take place in september, further information will be available soon, but you can already register if you are interested:
http://www-05.ibm.com/de/events/fromzerotozhero/web20/index.html
This workshop can actually be held everywhere and even inhouse, which makes it really flexible, so if you like this workshop to be held somewhere else, just contact me.
P.S.:
If you like to integrate your Cobol applications in this new environments, how about PERCobol ? A Cobol to J2EE compiler.
Or the good old NetRexx for your Rexx applications and scripts, since you can leverage Java with Rexx this way.
