Integration of sMash with WebSphere Application Server

[gregsmit]

Hello everyone,

In our near term plans, we are investigating how we could go about integrating sMash with WebSphere Application Server. Here, our goal is to be able to run sMash apps inside of WAS and WAS-ND.

There are actually several ways that we could do this, so we've been floating them around. But we'd really like feedback from the community on how this integration might meet your needs and what the requirements for such a solution would be.

We've started a wiki page with the options and some discussion here:
http://www.projectzero.org/wiki/Develop ... ntegration

First, a little background: What we have heard from some users of sMash is that, while they like the programming environment, and they are excited by how quickly they can create applications with sMash, they can't use sMash in their production environments. When asked why, it turns out that the the IT organization of the company of these users have strict guidelines for the platforms that can be used for production applications -- Which means they are not allowed to deploy anything that is not running on WAS.

We'd like to remove this barrier for these users, by allowing them to develop and test their sMash applications using just the sMash runtime, but then deploy those same apps into WAS environments. Both the developers and IT organizations win.


So -- what we'd like to hear from you is what your requirements are for sMash apps running in WAS. Feel free to tell us anything, but here are some specific questions, just to get the discussion started:

1) Do you think this is useful? Would this help you get acceptance of sMash apps in your organization?
2) What would you consider to be your minimum functionality for deploying your sMash app into WAS? What features of WAS do you really want to take advantage of?
3) On our wiki page, we list a couple of ways to integrate sMash in to WAS -- What do you think? Any preferred approaches?
4) If you are one of the users in the situation mentioned above -- what are your IT oganization's requirements for apps that are deployed in WAS?
5) Anything else you want to tell us about sMash running in WAS...

Thanks,
Greg

[cboulang]

Hi Greg,

as mentioned in another of my post, I've been an early developer of ServletExpress, remained a developer/application architect around WebSphere (AS) several years.
Stopped developing several and only get fun developing back with PHP and sMash 2 years ago.
I'm sure that some people are saying that it is difficult to deploy sMash in production, because of the IT standards of those (large) enterprises,
preventing to run anything else that heavyweight app-servers with tons of procedures, and years of technology qualification.
BUT
a) IT operations are changing
But I see also in those large enterprise that ultra agile environments cannot be contained for ever to developer's workstation.
Internal production environments are running those type of agile frameworks now and will soon be extended to customer facing production environment.
I do expect that farms (sorry Cloud) of smash will deliver

b) Development is changing
The way Web 2.0 is getting pervasive into enterprises, is hopefully impact widely development procedures leading to new granularity for "components"
and therefore new requirements for production platforms. And back to qualification of new environments.

back to your questions :
1/ Now I don't think so.
2/ Minimum is really about being integrated into a wider system/operation management. I guess I heard many times that taking advantage of unified HTTP/SIP from WAS into sMash would be an excellent idea, even if it requires a little more of integration and changes :-)
3/ Good choice of sidecar. I would have hate to see Project.Zero being just another Pack of WebSphere Application Server.
4/ N/A
5/ Project.Zero does change the perception of many people on IBM and on the Websphere brand (MQ, heavyweight J2EE, ...). Let's continue to change.

Chris

[gregsmit]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. We also agree, that IT operations (and developers) are changing -- its one of the reasons we created the lightweight model used in sMash.

We would prefer that our model were readily accepted -- I guess we are doing this integration for those environments where that is not the case yet.

We are looking for a way to help the transition for those customers.

Cheers,
Greg