IBM Beefs Up Web Enablement for i5/OS Bundle

Published: June 5, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you buy a new System i5 machine from IBM running i5/OS, you have access to a free stack of middleware that Big Blue calls Web Enablement for i5/OS. As part of its announcements a few weeks ago, IBM made some enhancements to this middleware stack.

The Web Enablement for i5/OS goes by the IBM product number 5722-WE2, and it now includes the company's WebSphere Application Server--Express V6.1 as its key foundation element. This iteration of WebSphere, of course, provides the Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 Java runtime environment (J2SE 5.0), which IBM has been promising as a more standard implementation of Java compared to the tweaked Java runtime that was created many years ago to specifically interface with OS/400 microcode and that scaled very well on large SMP machines. By moving to the standard J2SE 5.0 runtime, the Java virtual machine on i5/OS V5R3 and V5R4 has a much smaller memory footprint, which means it can be run on a skinnier machine. (The old JVM is also supported, if you like it.) The WebSphere Express V6.1 software also supports the Java 2 Enterprise Edition V1.4 specification as well. WebSphere Express V6.1 also has more support for Web services, and supports the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) that will allow Web applications to be integrated with telephony, chat, instant messaging, and video conferencing. This new WebSphere application server will be available on July 7.

The middleware stack also includes Integrated Domino Fax for i5/OS (5733-FXD), which incorporates all the latest Notes and Domino fixes and integrates with the latest Domino middleware. This software runs on OS/400 V5R2 or i5/OS V5R3 or V5R4 and integrates with Domino 6.5.4 and higher or Domino 7.

Additionally, in the same announcement, IBM has tweaked the Printer Services Facility for i5/OS so it can now support printer speeds up to 55 pages per minute, up from 45 pages per minute. This has nothing to do with Web enablement, of course, and it is a bit of a mystery why IBM brought this up in this particular announcement.