Thursday, September 25, 2008

Need help with WebSphere scripting..?

In WebSphere 7.0 the main focus from administration perspective is on making things easy to manage in a complex environment. Over next few days I will be sharing my views on various such features like highly scalable management topology, business level application, properties file based configuration etc. I think one of the most important features for administrators in WebSphere 7.0 is the new jython script library.

WebSphere scripting is a detailed subject with lots of capability. I have had administrators often ask me - "I am new to WebSphere .. or I used to use console UI but now we want to automate all of our WebSphere administration. Where do I begin? .. or I know my script command works but how can I confirm that it covers all the scenarios or topologies?". The jython editor in Rational Application Developer goes a long way in boosting productivity of WebSphere script developers. The script library that we ship with WebSphere 7.0 is another good source for administrators trying to automate WebSphere administration tasks. The script library contains a number of good scripts for common administrative functions such as -
  • Application management: install, uninstall, update, start, stop
  • Server/Cluster management: create, delete, update, start, stop server or cluster. Need a quick example to set a server JVM property or trace specification? You will find it in there.
  • Resource Manipulation: create/manipulate resources for JDBC, J2C, JMS and so on
  • Security configuration: manipulate authorization for users and groups
You can call these scripts from your script code or just copy them and modify any way you want. I encourage you to take a look at these scripts to see how they check preconditions before executing commands or perform exception handling etc. Automation is a big factor in WebSphere administration and we are striving hard to make it easier for our administrators.

- Ajay

5 comments:

Scott said...

I am very excited about this, but we're still on 6.0.

1) As an administrator, where do we find Rational Application Developer?

2) Where do we find the sample scripts? Are they installed somewhere when Deployment Manager is installed?

Ajay Apte said...

1) Rational Application Developer is a licensed product from IBM that provides tooling support for WebSphere. It is an eclipse based IDE that can be used to develop and deploy Java EE applications to WebSphere application server. Please visit the link above to learn more about it.

2) The script library is in WAS_HOME/scriptLibraries directory in V7.0 installation - where WAS_HOME is the location where WebSphere product is installed.

Anonymous said...

The jython scripting was added in 6.1 (if not 6.0) it is not new to 7.0.

Ajay Apte said...

Jython has been part of wsadmin scripting since V5.1. Jython is not new but the jython script library is. We've introduced it in V7.0

Joe Hayes said...

This is outstanding!
Question - I see you mentioning that the script library will be included with RAD.
Any chance it will also be included in ASTK?
Sorry in advance if this is stupid question, I'm only now beginning to look into WAS 7.