News

J2EE development trends: Q&A with IBM’s Tom Rosamilia

• By Rich Seeley
• April 12, 2004

At the beginning of this year, IBM veteran Tom Rosamilia was named vice president, worldwide application and integration middleware development, IBM Software Group . He now heads IBM software development teams in more than 25 locations worldwide. ADT asked him what development trends he is seeing in Java, J2EE and WebSphere Application Server V6, which is due for release later this year. From his days working with Big Blue mainframes, Rosamilia sees ways that lessons learned in developing MQ Series, CICS and other IBM legacy technology can be applied to the J2EE platform.

Q: What new Java technology is being incorporated into the new release of WebSphere?

A: We have JMS support going in the next release of the WebSphere Application Server as an extension to the MQ family. We believe that people will be using a lot more of the messaging capability that’s going to be available through JMS.

Q: What is the significance of bringing JMS into the established MQ family?

A: People aren’t just dabbling in Java; they’re deploying mission-critical applications in J2EE. As they do that, they’re demanding the same kinds of things that CICS and IMS have been doing for years. What we’re giving them is the J2EE equivalent of those things, so that they can get these enterprise-class applications running and running well.

Q: In terms of JMS working with MQ Series, what can we expect to see?

A: One key piece is a fully standards-compliant version of JMS with rich capabilities. I expect people to be able to use this as an extension to what they can do today with MQ. People doing asynchronous messaging will find a great capability in the next version of WebSphere Application Server.

Q: From the mainframe days, IBM software such as MQ was considered bulletproof by IT shops. Are you trying to bring that kind of reliability into the J2EE world?

A: We feel that while we continually participate in standards, and we will continue to do that for sure, we also feel that there are good ways for us to apply our history and our legacy. Some of the people who wrote [MQ and other legacy technologies] are now working on the WebSphere Application Server. We have people who already did it once and can now apply it to a J2EE environment. We think that gives us an advantage.

Q: Is this a case where lessons that were learned in Cobol can now be applied to Java?

A: They certainly can, and not just for the language itself but also for the whole runtime environment that exists and the kinds of things you do with high availability, partitioning, or workload management or clustering -- all of the quality of service things we do to make sure applications are working well. The Workload Manager, for example, came from the mainframe. It came from running CICS Cobol applications, and is now being applied to WebSphere Application Server.