I've been getting a little Motown-ish lately. My little boy loves the stuff; he's got great taste in music. And given the rather heated debates both here at MC and all around the industry, it felt right to set the mood with one of the greatest anti-war protest songs of all time.

Because this isn't a war, folks. Lately, I've been somewhat demonized by folks who take my architectural preferences to be opinions about specific products, and that's simply not the case. When it comes to product choices, your selection is a business decision and should be ultimately guided by whether or not the tool does what you need it to do, not by how it does it. But at the same time, you should treat any tool purchase as a partnership, and as such you need to go into it with both eyes wide open. And to that end, I'm going to spend this column talking about my architectural opinion of Java.

This month, I'll present some background and recent information about the latest and greatest version of the Windows desktop operating system: the "Windows Client Operating System," or "Longhorn."

Last February, IBM took a look at what the Internet had wrought and discovered that 76% of all email sent through the Internet could be considered spam. In addition, one in every 46 emails (about 2%) contained a virus, a Trojan horse, or some other form of malware.

Moribund. That's the apparent state of the AS/400 cum iSeries cum i5 market, if you read the trade journals. Recent article topics have included the dismal financial performance of IBM's midrange group, reports of colleges that participate in IBM's Partners In Education (PIE) program canceling iSeries classes for lack of students, and the outsourcing of IT and programming jobs. Add to that the relative dearth of i5 advertising compared to the other platforms (even within IBM's product line) and you have a compelling argument that the i5's days are numbered. It's enough to make us old-time data processing guys (now called the IT department) cringe. Unless your retirement is coming up soon, you should make some career plans or you, too, may become a dinosaur.

The AS/400 is dead, the iSeries is dying, and before long, so will OS/400 and i5/OS be dead.

We have been hearing this dreck for years, and this prediction has yet to come to pass. You do have to wonder though if it isn't a realistic possibility, given IBM's latest moves toward services and away from hardware (like the recent PC division sale) and the dwindling financial performance from the midrange division. But I can't help believing that the recent design changes that have resulted in the convergence of the alphabetSeries boxes into the i5 line adds longevity to the OS/400-for-i5 variant. But what if the doomsayers are correct? What if the demise of our beloved box is all but certain? Let's look at the core function of OS/400--its rock-solid database DB2--and examine potential exit strategies should the unimaginable occur.

While IBM and its Business Partners may be the leading vendors of solutions that manage back-office functions, they have failed to overcome Microsoft's dominance of front-office software. However, IBM is not giving up on the departmental computing market. Indeed, with its latest Workplace announcement, Big Blue is stepping up its assault on Microsoft and other vendors that sell workgroup computing solutions.

There has been much discussion recently of the demise of RPG and native DB2 and even of the IBM midrange itself. RPG's detractors point to everything from the high number of Java programmers graduating from school to the infamous burger flipping ad to IBM's Developer Roadmap, which has been interpreted as a call to Java. SQL has been hyped as the next great tool for application developers, with its powerful data access capabilities and its perceived ease of use. And when questioned on things like performance and maintenance, the adherents of the Java/SQL strategy quickly fall back to the rallying cry of platform independence. Some go so far as to position the new i5 as the end of the storied IBM midrange line that included the S/38 and the AS/400. To them, the i5 is little more than just another database server in your server farm.

Microsoft's release of the XP Service Pack 2 (XP SP2) last month created a bit of a stir: The security patch was significant, relatively comprehensive and--for many users--automatically downloaded. Part of the stir was a result of the automatic nature of the download.

Some educational institutions had to shut down access to the Microsoft download site because returning students with new XP computers overwhelmed local college networks with the automatic update to their machines. IT administrators claimed that bandwidth speed was cut in half during the most critical registration period of their academic year. Clearly, in the future, the method by which Microsoft delivers updates needs some better coordination with these and other large institutions.

Hidden in the news, however, has been the effect that XP SP2 is having on pre-existing applications and services that resided on XP computers prior to the release of the update. Of significance to IT is what Microsoft has done to TCP/IP and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC).

Microsoft says that all users who connect to the Internet (and who doesn't?) should be aware of these changes to their system. But most users today treat TCP/IP like electricity, and RPC--a process by which another computer can start a program on a user's machine--is normally and legitimately used only by a few that have advanced custom-written applications. So what has Microsoft done to these important services?

In case you missed it, on July 2, 2004, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) released a "vulnerability note" that said, "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to [Internet Explorer's] security model.... It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different browser."

Last Monday, a federal judge rang down the opening gavel in the antitrust lawsuit that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed against Oracle Corporation. That lawsuit seeks to block the software vendor from acquiring its long-time rival, PeopleSoft. While nobody knows how the judge will ultimately rule in this case, one thing is certain. The lawsuit is sucking other IT vendors into its vortex and leading them to act in ways that are making the enterprise applications market an increasingly complicated place.

IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' WebLogic J2EE-compliant Java application servers were just served notice from the open source development community last week as the Apache Software Foundation announced the Geronimo Java application server. Apache Geronimo, which was started in August 2003, is now an official Apache project and the foundation of open source developers hopes to have Geronimo certified as an official J2EE application server by the end of the third quarter of this year.

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Over the past several weeks, this newsletter has gone through the eServer i5 and i5/OS V5R3 announcements, giving you the feeds and speeds on the new hardware, the new features of the software, details on pricing for components, and the reaction from the OS/400 community. This week, I want to get down to the nitty gritty: how the new i5 iron compares to last year's iSeries iron in configured machines.

By Jack Loftus, News Writer 28 May 2004 | Search400.com

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	IBM is head of the class when it comes to infrastructure software vendors. Over the past year, Big Blue has been able to widen its lead over its nearest competitors, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Inc. , according to Boston-based Summit Strategies Inc.

by Alex Woodie

Just like the seasons, hope springs eternal in the iSeries reseller market. Business slows to a trickle when customers sense a pending server announcement, but when that day finally arrives, there's a sudden flurry of activity and optimism. IBM's eServer i5 announcement on May 4 was no different, and today distributors, resellers, software vendors, and other business partners are gearing up to provide users what they regard as the most powerful and flexible OS/400 servers Rochester has ever created.