Topics: WebSphere

WebSphere introduction

WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is a server for deploying and managing applications on the web. It is a deployment environment for Java based applications (it is basically an environment for running Java code). For example, the eClient of IBM Content Manager uses Java Server Pages (JSPs). JSPs contain HTML and embedded Java code that is compiled and run by WAS, similar to PHP. WebSphere Application Server is actually part (or the foundation) of a huge range of products, called the WebSphere family of products.

WAS is built on the services of a web server to provide additional services to support business applications and transactions on the web. A common example of this is persistence support for user sessions that cannot be provided by only using an HTTP server. In general, WAS is able to facilitate a multi-tiered, web enabled environment that provides security, reliability, availability, scalability, flexibility and performance. WAS can, of course, serve static HTML and dynamic content.

Releases available:

  • WAS Express (Single Server): Designed to support only a single hardware server. For small companies or individuals.
  • WAS Base: intended for large production environments. Its purpose: A stand-alone, single machine, which is not scalable (1 process on 1 machine).
  • WAS Network Deployment (ND): offers specific high end functionality. Actually the same as the base version, but this version is scalable: it can be spread over several systems to offer load-balancing capabilities.
  • WAS Enterprise: the same as the ND version, but with added features. Nowadays it is also called the Business Integration Foundation version.
The admin console of WAS is also a WebSphere application, usually available through:
http://[server]:9090/admin
WAS 5 has a connection pooling feature, which can result in a significant observable reduction in response time, especially for database connections. It reduces the overhead of creating a new connection for each user and disconnting it afterwards, by using existing connections from a connection pool. WAS communicates with databases via JDBC, which is actually the driver for a database.



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