Chapter 3: WebSphere Development Tools

WebSphere Studio is a powerful, yet easy-to-use development environment for an entire development team. The WebSphere Application Server is built around open standards, so there is no technical requirement that WebSphere Studio be used when creating a WebSphere application, but there are significant advantages in doing so. This chapter will introduce WebSphere Studio and will explain the various editions that are available, and the functions that are available with each edition. The later chapters will explore some components of WebSphere Studio in more depth, but the primary purpose here is layout the landscape and provide a general overview of the WebSphere development tools.

We will start with a description behind the WebSphere Studio technology, and explain how the various editions are created and related. Each edition is a superset of the previous one, simply adding a number of new tools each time to provide additional function. Finally, we will discuss most of the key components that compose WebSphere Studio with an aim to provide a brief functional overview of each.

The Platform

The development process for any reasonable sized application includes many stages, with different types of tools required at each step along the way. The previously available tools from IBM, VisualAge for Java, and the old version of WebSphere Studio tool, provided specific support for different development activities.

VisualAge for Java was an integrated Java development environment; it allowed for the easy creation and testing of Java code, and included a WebSphere test environment for the unit testing of WebSphere applications. The previous WebSphere Studio tool was designed to facilitate the creation and editing of web pages, and included a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) page editor, and the ability to publish the contents of a web project to a remote site.

The problem was that while both these tools were great for their specific tasks, most development projects require more than just Java code or static web pages. Additional types of tools are needed, ranging from different editors, to profiling and performance analysis tools, to integration with multiple source code configuration systems.

IBM does not make tools for every niche market, which in the past led to a very difficult development experience for any project that included more than stand-alone Java and static web pages. Even when tools that are more suitable to the task at hand were available, the experience of exporting and importing projects and transferring data between the different tools was far from ideal. Every tool typically had its own definition of a project, its own user interface paradigm, and its own set of preferences and behaviors.

To address these problems, IBM created the Eclipse platform (an integrated development platform for building diverse applications), and then donated it to the open source community. WebSphere Studio is built on the Eclipse platform. As an open source platform, Eclipse has attracted the attention of many tool providers, and Eclipse-based versions of many common tools are already available, with more under development.

Eclipse is designed with dynamic integration of additional tools in mind, and this flexibility means that many industry standard tools can be tightly integrated with WebSphere Studio. The combination of an open source base, IBM's experience with application development tools, the tight integration with WebSphere, and the ability to use other best-of-breed tools in the same development environment, is designed to provide the developer with the best possible development experience.