IBM Takes Wraps Off WebSphere Studio Tools

IBM

IBM officials said on Tuesday that the company launched a new version of WebSphere Studio Application Developer for Linux and WebSphere Studio Site Developer, a new tool for creating and managing e-business Web sites. IBM also introduced three new toolkits for building wireless, portal and voice applications within the Eclipse open-source tools platform, on which WebSphere Studio is based.

In conjunction with other software and tools vendors, IBM launched the Eclipse open-source project last November, delivering an Eclipse 1.0 framework into which developers can plug traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) so they don't have to toggle in and out of different tools as they work on one application. So far, 20 vendors have tools supporting the framework, and IBM said it expects that five more will deliver tools for Eclipse by the middle of this year.

The new Linux version of WebSphere Studio Application Developer includes an integrated test environment supporting Red Hat and SuSE Linux, version 7.1 or higher, according to IBM. WebSphere Studio Site Developer features integrated Java, XML and Web services development environments plus wizards and templates to facilitate development.

The new Everyplace Toolkit, WebSphere Portal Toolkit and WebSphere Voice Tookit extend the WebSphere Studio product through the Eclipse Platform. The toolkits are slated to be available in May.

The Everyplace Toolkit enables Web developers to create wireless apps and portal apps, or portlets, with HTML, wireless markup language (WML) and compact HTML (CHTML), according to IBM. Portal Toolkit allows developers to create, test, debug and deploy Web applications as portlets using samples and templates to guide them. The WebSphere Voice Toolkit enables developers to write voice apps--such as voice recognition and text-to-speech--using VoiceXML and the WebSphere platform. VoiceXML is the industry standard for voice app development, according to IBM.