Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used.
Othello. Act II. Sc. III.

IBM has been at the forefront of the Linux assault on corporate computing for some time. One of the highlights of their involvement has been the formation of the Open Source Eclipse project. To help spur the adoption of a common framework for web development tools, IBM donated substantial amounts of the foundation code for WebSphere Studio.

As a development framework designed to build the most sophisticated dynamic e-business services, WebSphere is entrenched with full J2EE and EJB 2.0 functionality. This translates the ability to develop applications using constructs like Message Driven Beans (MDB) and Container Managed Relationships (CMR). That's pretty lofty stuff when many developers are struggling to deal with simple Java servlets. While all the buzz is still about beans, IBM's own research puts 54% of e-business adopters still working only in HTML for basic web hosting.

As a way to begin looking at the plethora of programs that make up the WebSphere family of workstation and server software, openBench Labs chose to start with what appears to be the simplest branch of the family: Homepage Builder. WebSphere Studio is designed to support all stages of B2B web development. While best known for its Java application server, there is also a web authoring and design tool dubbed Homepage Builder for generating HTML that competes with Microsoft's FrontPage.

As a  a GUI-driven suite of applications to create and manage web pages, Homepage Builder is just one of many packages. On the highend of these tools are sophisticated packages such as Go Live from Adobe and Dreamweaver MX from Macromedia. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the simple but very intuitive FrontPage from Microsoft.

Immediately, there came the requisite whine about emulators and their slow execution. It's an interesting point, except Wine is not an emulator. Wine simply adds an API layer above X Windows to accept and return Win32 API calls on a Unix or Linux system. As a result, Wine only enters the performance equation when a program is making Win32 API calls. For a well written Windows program, the added overhead of Wine should be quite minimal. The real performance issue is the efficiency of the algorithms used in the application.

This is precisely what we encountered during all of our tests, which we ran on a Dell Optiplex GX110 equiped with a 600MHz P-III processor and 512MB of RAM. For openBench Labs, performance of Homepage Builder on Linux simply was not an issue. Our bête noire was program functionality.

Despite all the rationale that Wine is not a performance issue, it remains an unnerving red flag. Given that mindset, the initial experience with the Homepage Builder WYSIWYG editor leaves much to be desired. The problem centers on a very Windows-like open file popup menu. The popup menu presents the Linux file system as logically divided over 3 logical volumes: C:, D:, and E:. These three volumes turn out to be the users home directory (C:), a directory /opt/hpbuilder4/system that contains the Homepage Builder executable files (D:), and the main file system / (E:). Worse, the default location is a nonexistent folder in the user's home directory.

That nonsense aside, the WYSIWYG editor does make building a page a relatively painless task. That's especially true if you are using version 6.0 of Homepage Builder. Unfortunately, if you are running Linux, the only version of Homepage Builder that is available is version 4.0. As the version numbers suggest, the Windows version has significant enhancements not found in the Linux version. More troubling, there are several quirky display characteristics in version 4.0 that boarder on outright bugs. 

 The Linux package, version 4.0, comes replete with over 2,000 ready-to-use images, sounds, page templates, and Java applets. As a result, there is virtually no need to start with a blank page. But before you get overly excited with this treasure trove, note that version 6.0 of Homepage builder comes packed with 5,000 extra goodies.

For a web page design tool, both versions come with an excellent script editor which handles both Javascript and VBscript. Most competitive tools have only the most rudimentary tool for composing or editing scripts. The Homepage Builder script editor come with a library of objects and methods, as well as a collection of script templates for common actions.

Unfortunately, in today's world of hyper-dynamic web pages the one element that both versions lack is a smart plug-in that knows about Flash graphics. There is a generic plug-in that will embed a Flash .swf image; however, this plug-in cannot automatically size the image for display nor can it set any of the characteristic values of the Flash file. What's more no part of the Flash image is visible in layout mode so it is necessary to switch in an out of the web browser on Linux to adjust the image manually. On Windows it's a tad easier in that the preview mode can be used to garner visual bearings.

Despite what they think in Redmond, the tasks in building a web site go beyond simply laying out HTML pages. Creating graphical design elements to be placed in the page is at least half the battle.

Given that reality, there are several more parts to both versions of Homepage Builder. Both packages come with a version of WebArt Designer. Functionally similar to Microsoft's Photo Editor or Gimp on Linux, WebArt Designer provides the ability to create logos, buttons, and compound images by "stacking" images in WebArt Designer parlance.

WebART Designer is quite an impressive application on its own, let alone as a bundled add-in feature. With it, the user can draw vector-based shapes such as lines,  ellipses, rectangles,  polygonal lines, and curves. In addition it can be used to transform, align, adjust, and augment text display.  And of course there are a plethora of  special effects to light,  blur, swirl, and emboss images.