IBM's software chief speaks out on his company's strategy on Java, web services, XML, tools, etc. He understands important points even architects fail to grasp at all: "I write an application in Java and the application logic is written in Java. Nobody would write an application in XML. It doesn't make a lot of sense. You want to define data elements and interfaces in XML, it makes things interoperable by using XML." Sadly there are too many people who do it backwards.

On P2P as B2B: "Our model is business, not consumer. ... [P]eer-to-peer computing, inside a firewall or in a closed b-to-b environment needs to be scalable, secure, reliable, recoverable, and therefore the peer relationships between systems are server based. And server based peer-to-peer computing has been with us for decades, and that's principally what we do, is server based peer-to-peer computing."

On WebSphere: "[it is a session service control mechanism] that provides in a commercial world, management for a set of application functions, that provides control of the scheduling of tasks and processes and the attachment of users or threads to those processes..."

IBM Systems Journal may provide additional insight on these issues.