WebSphere Application Server

WebSphere Application Server provides a fast, flexible and simplified environment for application development and administration along with new intelligent management capabilities for enhanced resiliency. From business critical and key enterprise-wide applications to the smallest departmental level applications, WebSphere Application Server offers the highest levels of reliability, availability, security and scalability.

For developers and businesses that need a lightweight, simple to use and yet powerful application server for increased developer productivity and for use as a lightweight production server for application workloads, WebSphere Application Server V8.5 provides a simplified and lightweight runtime for web applications. Extremely fast restart times coupled with its small size and ease of use make the Liberty profile a great option for building web applications. It is also a great option for production servers where minimizing resource utilization is a primary requirement.

Highlights:

Installation and deployment of the Liberty Profile

To simplify end-to-end test, simple scripts are provided to create a "packaged server" consisting of an application, a Liberty profile server runtime, and its configuration in a single archive for "unzip" deployment of a complete solution. The Job Manager optionally provides the ability to centrally distribute and deploy packaged Liberty profile server applications, and provide lifecycle management of those servers. Administration through the Job Manager provides the following key features:

Integrated tools

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) support in OSGi applications

Take advantage of enhanced modular application development by assembling OSGi applications from reusable bundles that contain EJB assets. The enterprise beans in your OSGi bundles can be developed from scratch, or you can include existing EJB assets and migrate them to use OSGi modularity with minimal code changes. Stateful, stateless, and singleton enterprise beans are supported.

Your OSGi application can also contain message-driven beans (MDBs). You deploy and configure an OSGi application that contains enterprise beans in a similar way to deploying and configuring a J2EE enterprise application, by using wsadmin or the administrative console.

Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit

This toolkit provides developers with ready-to-use components to extend service-oriented architecture by connecting web services, SOA services, and Java Enterprise Edition objects into interactive desktop-web and mobile web user interfaces. With this toolkit applications developed initially for desktop browsers can now be adapted and deployed to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 is designed to ensure industry-leading levels of resiliency and availability. New Intelligent Management capabilities deliver application availability, elasticity, and qualities of service programmatically instrumented and executed to ensure the highest possible levels of end user availability. Additional resiliency capabilities help to drive down total cost of ownership while improving overall qualities of service.

Intelligent Management

Intelligent Management capabilities extend the traditional application server with new technologies to enhance resiliency and virtualization capabilities. Autonomic capabilities are provided to sense and respond to problems within the application server and autocorrect or route around these problems before end users experience an outage. Previously, these enhanced resiliency capabilities were available separately by using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, they are now included within the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.

Highlights:

Application Edition Management enables interruption-free application rollout. Applications can be upgraded without incurring outages to your end users.

Application Health Management monitors the status of your application servers and is able to sense and respond to problem areas before end users suffer an outage.

• Proactively deal with application and application infrastructure issues before they become acute problems
• Monitor health conditions of your infrastructure and execute associated corrective actions

New Intelligent Routing improves business results by ensuring priority is given to business critical applications. Requests are prioritized and routed based upon administrator defined rules.

• Manage in-bound transaction (workload) requests in real time
• Route work to the application server that can do it best
• Streamline processing through the system for higher priority requests
• Ensure that in-bound requests do not overwhelm backend application resources

Dynamic Clustering can proactively provision and start or stop new instances of application server Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) based on workload demands. It provides the ability to meet Service Level Agreements when multiple applications compete for resources.

• Allow workloads to be classified, prioritized and intelligently routed
• Enables application performance monitoring
• Resource adjustments are made if needed to consistently achieve service policies

Messaging infrastructure resiliency enhancements

• Improvements to the recovery of messaging engine errors. When a recoverable database error is detected by the High Availability Manager, the messaging engine is stopped and the standby messaging engine is started automatically. The other applications running in the application server are not affected by the failure of the messaging engine.
• Enable the messaging engine to restart after a failure. When a messaging engine fails due to recoverable database problems, it is disabled and failed over to another messaging engine in the cluster.
• Improvements to service integration bus performance. Improved messaging engine startup time by loading the destinations concurrently in a multicore architecture.
• Recovery of the messaging engine confirmation from the message store. With the new recoverMEConfig command, the recovery of the persistent data of the messaging engine from the message store is made possible if the configuration data on which the previous messaging engine was running is not available.

Enhanced memory leak detection and protection

It monitors application and module activity and performs diagnostic actions when an application or an individual module stops and helps to increases application server availability.

WebSphere Application Server offers world-class security and control to help businesses confidently reduce costs and increase business agility. WebSphere Application Server's rich support for security specifications and granular security controls help administrators productively secure application environments their businesses depend on.

WebSphere Batch enhancements

WebSphere Batch offers an enterprise level managed batch execution environment that enables the entry, execution, and management of Java batch processing. It provides an infrastructure for batch processing to allow sharing of business logic with online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. This helps to lower cost by reducing risk and management effort, supplies an "always-on" business experience by eliminating offline batch windows, and delivers enterprise qualities of service required by mission-critical batch applications. Previously, these enhanced WebSphere Batch capabilities were available separately by using WebSphere Compute Grid, they are now included within WebSphere Application Server. WebSphere Batch highlights include:

• End-to-end batch management of jobs running across disparate execution environments
• An optimal OLTP uptime experience through continuous interleaving of batch and interactive (OLTP) processes
• Parallel processing using Parallel Job Manager, where large problems can be partitioned, governed, and processed in parallel across a collection of server resources while hiding the complexities of multithreading and management
• Near real-time batch processing with ad-hoc and event-driven batch invocation, in addition to scheduled batch invocation
• Integration with enterprise schedulers, such as Tivoli Workload Scheduler
• Goal oriented Service Level Agreement (SLA) management via workload manager integration

Support for IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition V7.0

This IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) provides a full-function SDK for Java that is compliant with the Oracle Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 7 application programming interfaces (APIs). With IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition V7.0, you can develop and deploy Java applications at the Java 7 API level and continue the "write once, run anywhere" Java paradigm at the Java API level. The SDK contains the Java application Runtime Environment and other tools that enable developers to create Java applications.

Automatic Resource Management (ARM) with Java V7.0

ARM is a set of features in Java V7.0 in which the Java framework will automatically close statements and connections to external resources for you, which can alleviate problems with error handling and resource control in your applications. As a result, your applications can focus less on resource management tasks, and you can optimize their logic for meaningful transactions.

Configuring bean security in the OSGi Blueprint XML file

You can configure bean security in the Blueprint XML file by including an access-constraint element in a bean declaration. Only users that are in the role specified by the access-constraint element can access the methods of the bean.

High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) log viewer tool enhances filtering using log and trace record extensions

Use the LogViewer command-line tool to filter records based on the content of log and trace record extensions. The application server automatically creates an appName extension for each log and trace record related to a Java EE application, indicating the name of that application. The application server also automatically creates a requestId extension when cross component trace is enabled for each log and trace record created during the processing of certain types of requests (for example, HTTP or JMS requests), indicating the unique ID of that request. You can add custom extensions to HPEL log and trace entries using the LogRecordContext API.

Cross Component Trace (XCT)

XCT enables correlation of log and trace entries. Use the cross component trace facility to identify the root cause of problems across components. XCT annotates log and trace entries so that log entries that are related to a request that is serviced by more than one thread, process, or even server are identified as belonging to the same unit of work. This enhancement enables administrators and support teams to follow the flow of a request from end-to-end as it traverses thread or process boundaries.

Improved troubleshooting using IBM Support Assistant Data Collector

The IBM Support Assistant Data Collector for WebSphere Application Server tool focuses on automatic collection of problem data. It also provides symptom analysis support for the various categories of problems encountered by IBM software products. Information pertinent to a type of problem is collected to help identify the origin of the problem under investigation. The tool assists you by reducing the amount of time it takes to reproduce a problem with the proper RAS tracing levels set, as well as by reducing the effort required to send the appropriate log information in to IBM Support.

Enhanced administrative audit options

WebSphere Application Server enables you to audit any changes made to your application server configuration using repository checkpoints. When enabled, a security audit record is created for every change to your configuration. Repository checkpoints represent saved images of the repository before configuration changes are made. You can configure a checkpoint to back up copies of files from the master configuration repository. A full checkpoint is a complete copy of the entire configuration repository. A delta checkpoint is a subset snapshot of the configuration repository that is made when you change a product configuration. Use a checkpoint to restore the configuration repository back to a prior state.

Redbook - WebSphere Application Server: Planning, Concepts, and Design
This IBM® Redbooks® publication discusses the concepts, planning, and design of WebSphere® Application Server environments.

The following minimum operating system and hardware requirements must be met on the server to support the basic installation and use of WebSphere® Application Server.