App Dev and Integration

As with every other area of IT this year, application development was about doing more with less. Tools such as BEA’s WebLogic Workshop Integration and M7’s Application Assembly Suite combined visual tools with powerful capabilities, allowing experienced developers to accomplish more in a shorter time frame and less experienced developers to tackle more complex tasks. Progress was also made in “front-end integration,” with Altio, Digital Harbor, and Laszlo Systems fleshing out their rich Internet application platforms, which pull data from back-end sources and present it to a smart, Internet-enabled client instead of a dumb browser. We’re eager to see Flex — Macromedia’s upcoming offering in this space — in the first half of 2004.

Certainly, there was a lot of activity on the Web services front in 2003. Major J2EE application server vendors BEA, IBM, and Sybase polished their tools for creating and deploying Web services (see Platforms), and other tools and platforms for Web services integration — from vendors such as Sonic and Systinet — continued to evolve. But the biggest sign that Web services rubber is finally hitting the road was the maturation of solutions for monitoring and managing services during run time, from vendors including Actional, Confluent, and Grand Central Communications. The next generation of these WSI (Web services intermediary) solutions continues to address real-world needs such as service contracts and exception handling.

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Developer Tools

Compuware DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1
Compuware
Very Good (8.3)
Cost: $1,495
Bottom Line: This Visual Studio companion adds .Net memory analysis and enhanced .Net source-code analysis to what was already a commanding suite of tools for the professional Windows programmer. The wealth of capabilities will take time to master but will repay developers working across the full range of Microsoft programming technologies.

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Eclipse 2.1 SDK
Eclipse
Very Good (8.2)
Cost: Free
Bottom Line: This IDE (integrated development environment) boasts powerful extension capabilities, including a clever extension architecture that reduces launch time and accommodates internationalization. The promise of so much power does put Eclipse in danger of feature-creep, and new users may need some time to get used to the IDE.

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IBM WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer 5.0
IBM
Very Good (8.1)
Cost: $7,500 per CPU; $3,499, WebSphere Studio Application Developer (minus mainframe support)
Bottom Line: This product blends a top-of-the-line Java, J2EE, Web services, XML, and Web-development environment with enterprise development support, including Cobol and PL/1. It's sometimes sluggish in Windows XP but provides excellent capabilities for those who create, maintain, and extend enterprise application assets.