In the November issue of WebSphere Developer's Journal, Stefan Van Overtveldt tells WSDJ editor-in-chief Jack Martin that WebSphere Application Server 5.0 is "the next generation of application server," and that it offers broad support for open standards and Web services, and fosters increased developer productivity. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:

Stefan Van Overtveldt on Web services:

...We've adopted what I would probably call the broadest support for Web services standards out in the industry. That includes a large number of the functions that are defined in J2EE 1.4, which we will be shipping already in WAS 5.0.

The first theme is creating a comprehensive built-in integrated platform - having the application server become more and more an integration server where you can rapidly build applications, define workflows between applications, etc., and link those applications into existing apps as Web services or true connectors.

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We see Web services as really the next step in the evolution to open platforms. While J2EE defines the open way of building applications that can run on multiple platforms, Web services really defines an open way to have applications interoperate.

In WAS 5.0, we provide a full Web services infrastructure - not just support for SOAP and WSDL and UDDI. We also actually provide a private UDDI repository. We provide a Web services gateway, which allows you to provide access to your internal Web service applications to the outside world in a secure and managed environment, or vice versa - provide a managed interface for internal Web services requesters and outside Web service provider applications.

On the competition:

…We're very clearly ahead of Microsoft, from an implementation perspective. At the same time, together with Microsoft, we continue to very aggressively drive the third revolution of Web services standards, with things like Business Process Execution Language for Web services and Web services transactions, Web service coordination, etc., all of which, by the way, are supported via the Preview mode in WAS 5.0.

On SMB customers:

There is a new addition to the WebSphere family, called WAS - Express. This product is really optimized for the SMB environment or for departmental use. Its focus is on ease of application development through support for things like server-side Java scripting, wizard-driven development, and the fact that we provide a very large number of sample and template applications that you can use to very rapidly build out a solution.