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.

Geronimo is a lot of different programs woven together to make a single server, including Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ from Codehaus, JOTM and ASM from ObjectWeb, CGLIB and MX4J from SourceForge and Jetty from Mortbay. IBM has supported the Tomcat server on the iSeries, but has been mum about Geronimo, mainly because it is going right after WebSphere and the enhanced support of Linux on the iSeries and i5 servers as well as the relatively low cost of Power4 and Power5 processors activated for running Linux, customers who might have been thinking about WebSphere on OS/400 may instead opt for WebSphere on Linux or Geronimo on Linux inside their iSeries and i5 servers. Customers will get to choose based on the merits of the two platforms--which is what a competitive market is all about. You can find out more about Geronimo at http://geronimo.apache.org.