Echospace 'TurboCharger' Aims to Ease WebSphere Customization

by Alex Woodie

One of the knocks many OS/400 shops have against IBM's WebSphere Application Server is its performance. Unless you've got plenty of power, WebSphere will run like a dog, or not run at all, they say. Last week, Echospace and its partner Key Information Systems announced a new product called WebSphere TurboCharger, which aims to eliminate at least part of the WebSphere performance conundrum: the time and effort users expend in customizing their WebSphere environment.

In PC terms, TurboCharger can be thought of as a "skin," or an interface layer, that let's you customize the look and feel of a particular application, in this case WebSphere Application Server Version 4.x on all supported WebSphere platforms, including OS/400, Windows, Unix, and Linux. The company says it's working to support WAS 5.0, the latest release of the Java-based application server.

Echospace says that TurboCharger gives users several benefits, including a more intuitive interface, making it easier to customize the position and layout of WebSphere "portlets" on a page, allowing individual portlets to be refreshed without refreshing the entire page, and making portlets load much quicker.

TurboCharger "drastically" reduces the effort required to modify the position of a portlet or the number of columns on a page, Echospace says. Whereas standard WebSphere installations require between four and seven different pages to make these modifications, TurboCharger lets the user do these instantly, cutting the customization time by 200 to 400 percent, the company claims. A side benefit of making this customization process easier, the company says, is that users who would otherwise not modify their portal, because it was too hard, can now adjust their software to meet their workflow needs.

Additional performance gains are had by letting users maximize or minimize specific portlets, without causing the overall page to refresh, the company says. For portlets written in TurboCharger's underlying technology, called SinglePage, this can increase performance by as much as 300 percent, depending on the amount of data and frequency of page refreshes in WebSphere, the company says.

Echospace president Ed Mohebi says he is proud to be contributing to WebSphere's usability. "We feel the dedicated user community will find that WebSphere TurboCharger improves their total experience with WebSphere," he says.

WebSphere TurboCharger was developed by Echospace, in Lynwood, Washington. Echospace is relying on its partner Key Information Systems, in Woodland Hills, California, for sales and marketing support. Pricing for TurboCharger is $2,995 per server. For more information, go to www.echospace.com or www.keyisit.com.

Sponsored By S4I SYSTEMS

A Great Way to Clean-up with an Exciting End of Year Offer! Reclaim & reorganize disk space with S4i DASD-Plus. A cost-effective alternative to upgrading your DASD or iSeries is to get that space back and track DASD consumption. S4i offers tactical & strategic tools to automate this process & analyze your DASD with surveys & reports to communicate your biggest DASD consumers & forecast future DASD growth. Get in one more project this year and, if you mention this ad, you can purchase S4i DASD-Plus and pay nothing until January 2004! Call 800-231-5280 or Click here for a free trial! Visit www.solution400.com