Web Sphere is an IBM brand name for products that implement and extend Sun's Java Two Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform.
Some of the information below predates the 2005 V6 release of Web Sphere (the Enterprise Service Bus ready version) and await cleaning up.
An Oct04 industry report on Web Sphere 6 shortly before its release can be found at www.networkworld.com 
The two main products are:
Websphere Application Server - a J2EE container
Web Sphere Studio Application Developer - a J2EE development IDE built on the Eclipse platform (see Eclipse Ide)
People often speak of "Web Sphere" as a product. When they do, they usually mean the application server.
Another well known product is Web Sphere Mq, formerly Mq Series, a messaging system product. Other products include the Web Sphere Edge Server (consisting of a Caching Web server, an HTTP load-balancer (called an HTTP "Sprayer") and the Andrew File System), Web Sphere Commerce Suite, Web Sphere Personalization Server, Web Sphere Business Integrator, and Web Sphere Site Analyzer.
Historical information
Web Sphere used to be associated with the Ibm Smalltalk product, but it would appear that Ibm Smalltalk is dead or dying (it's been impossible, in practice, to purchase the product for years). Ibm seems to believe that rearranging the names of their suites (apparently this falls under the rubric of "brand management") will help improve business. I've simply given up on them.
Web Sphere Enterprise Service Bus possibilities
It is not quite an ESB as yet, but take a look at a reference architecture at www-128.ibm.com
www-128.ibm.com
May05 it was said Big Blue is considering a product in this arena via Web Sphere. See www.datamonitor.com
Apr05 Web Sphere MQ Version 6 was announced and it merged the MQ messaging stack with the Web Sphere stack, paving the road for an offering in the area.
note the code name for the ESB component in Websphere 6 was JetStream. See 04 article at news.zdnet.com
Web Sphere 6 as a toolkit for BUILDING Enterprise Service Bus
In an updated redbook that focus on the use of Web Sphere 6, Big Blue is saying
"...you can use the service-oriented architecture (SOA) profile of the Patterns for e-business to implement an Enterprise Service Bus in Web Sphere Application Server V6."
link at www.redbooks.ibm.com
see link to previous version of redbook in the Enterprise Service Bus section that relates to Big Blue
Service Data Object (SDO) concept introduced in WS 6
It was previously named "Web Data Object". It is supposed to be an extension of the Java Data Object concept and unlike the latter, can pass information between J2EE tiers. from www-106.ibm.com
Web Sphere and Big Iron integration
An associated IBM product is Customer Information Control System, or commonly known as CICS, which now supports Enterprise Java Beans - see Enterprise Java Beans In Cics.
Integration with CICS via JCA and CICS-ISC www-128.ibm.com
has info on cross platform two phase commits (Distributed Transaction) within a Global Transaction
Building DB2-Based Web Services Using Web Sphere at websphere.sys-con.com
second part at wsdj.sys-con.com
It has been said in trade articles that Web Sphere can use Grid Computing technology to deliver cluster based solutions. Would be interesting to see this get adopted by commercial organizations.
JSR207 is the relevant specification for Java Platform Process Management. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) support is introduced in WS6, but I am unsure whether it was done in the JSR207 approach.
References on IBMway of Service Oriented Architecture
Why all the interest in SOA now? at www.websphere.org , www.websphere.org ,
Why the ESB will help you say "I don't care" at www.websphere.org
Moved from The Adjunct...
Websphere Commerce Suite
A commercial application to manage stores. This was deleted earlier, for whatever reason, probably because it was considered spam. But before you condemn the mentioning of commercial products, consider downloading the PDF, and take a look at Chapter 4 where some helpful information about the programming model used, which is in this case the MVC (Model View Controller).
There are many Commercial Products from which an individual might learn things which programming types consider uninteresting or elementary. Those who Would Like To Know can be helped by documents such as the Handbook referenced in the link above.
One might also look at chapter 3 which is about Runtime Architecture, to learn something of what it takes to install, support and maintain such an application.
I don't know what's been going on with this page, but I think you're misinterpreting things. Pages about commercial products are not inherently Off Topic, not at all. But the question is whether a page presents info about a product so as to be of reasonably general interest.
If [the readers of the page] need to investigate to get any idea at all, then the page has failed, and such a page could indeed be claimed to be nothing better than commercial spam. (Further, that makes for extremely poor marketing, too!)
On the other hand, a page about a commercial product that let the reader know in which ways the product is interesting could make it quite On Topic. It seems to me that something being an example of MVC is insufficient; that's like saying it was written in C++/Java -- the same is true of a hundred thousand other things, so that's more just a side point of interest if the product itself has already been pointed out to be of interest for a more central reason.
I know very little about Web Sphere stuff, but from the little I've heard, I would think it would be easy enough to describe things that make it interesting. -- Doug Merritt
Websphere is the worst J2EE app server I've ever worked with. It's bloated, sluggish and unfriendly. It fails in mysterious ways for mysterious reasons and produces mysterious error codes instead of useful exception messages. I recently looked up one of these mysterious error codes at IBM's web site and all it told me was to "see exception for more details". I suspect that Websphere is primarily a marketing tool for IBM's technical services department. Anyone who has to use it eventually sells their IT department to IBM.
You misunderstood the error code note; they mean, see "Ronald Exception", he's head of QA. :-)
Anyway, there you go, you've listed some very, umm, exceptional qualities, so that's surely of interest! -- Doug Merritt
Not Pro MS or pro Big Blue - but pro Business, the company that pay my salary
I do not know Web Sphere and I do not even know Java Platform, but I know a bit more about Big Blue track record (in the past), and had work relationships with real working level technical people there.
Big Blue had a reputation of taking care of customers, especially in the area of migration. Whereas their main opposition out to change things so you have to move up, most of the time (in the past) shops that did not want to change could run their assembler code routinees in newer OSs for decades.
In regards to Web Sphere, from my readings it is the number 1 of the big three J2EE supplier. In the beginning Web Sphere (like Visual Age before it) was a brand name of a mix of products, but the problems you still have with Web Sphere should be lesser than other J2EE alternatives. Now if you need interoperability (up with Big Iron and down with MS) and want to go semi-standard you do not have other options.
If you want to use Java Platform but don't need to use J2EE it becomes an entirely different story. I would be interested in EH views on what technical infrastructure he would build from scratch, if he have multiple sites in different countries and timezones that need to work together.
-- David Liu
If I had to build a technical infrastructure from scratch that had multiple sites in different countries and timezones I'd build a technical infrastructure that expressed all times in GMT. I'm not sure how those requirements relate to Websphere or J2EE, though.
I probably shouldn't share my views on Big Blue and Websphere, but what the hell. I've started to suspect that Websphere is purposefully cryptic because it helps IBM sell support/service contracts. All equivalent J2EE products suffer from the overly complex yet incomplete state of the J2EE spec. Websphere has the worst documentation and greatest additional complexity of all of them I've used (Weblogic, Oracle, Orion and JBoss).
-- EH
I find this very informative - www.gse-nordic.org -- Peter Lynch
Comments on Web Sphere in The Most Complex Which Can Be Made To Work
See original on c2.com