Tuesday, December 22, 2009

2009 WebSphere Application Server Highlights

This blog post isn't meant to "market" our app server portfolio; although I worry it may come across that way. I wanted to take a look back at 2009 and talk about some of the technologies that matter to our application server customers in case you missed the announcements. Feel free to ask questions on specific items if you don't understand the value you can derive from these technologies.

Building upon the WAS V7.0 release, three feature packs were delivered - Communication Enabled Applications (CEA), XML, and Service Component Architecture (SCA). These feature packs are free add-ons that extend the value of your application server product to support innovative and valuable programming models. CEA adds the ability to do common telecommunication scenarios without having to understand underlying SIP technologies (just add a widget to a page to get click to all for example). XML delivers XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 allowing data and document centric applications to benefit from these W3C standards resulting in simpler, more functional and reliable applications. SCA simplifies composite application assembly and management, supports OSOA standards, and allows applications to more quickly adapt to changing business requirements based upon OSOA standards.

Two other major features were delivered on top of the application server - Optimized Local Adapters (OLA) and SAML. Optimized Local Adapters offer a high speed message connection between the application server on z/OS and native language programs with full quality of service. SAML adds OASIS SAML Token Profile to standard JAX-WS web services providing for end to end security with token propagation along with a Java library that allows you to work with SAML tokens.

Two alphas of feature packs were also delivered. We shipped our Apache OpenJPA based JPA 2.0 implementation in the JPA 2.0 Feature Pack. We also delivered early support for the OSGi Blueprint specification and Apache Aries extending the value of OSGi componentization and dependency injection into WebSphere applications via the OSGi Applications Feature Pack.

Finally, four service packs were delivered for the 7.0 release (the latest being 7.0.0.7).

We also delivered the application server in Hypervisor Edition (doing things you'd want a virtualized image to do correctly). Fixpacks delivered throughout the year added support for VMware and AIX/PowerVM. We also delivered the WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance which allows you to securely and reliably manage your virtualized environment in your own private cloud.

We also allowed WAS to be consumed in two different ways. We announced an easy to download and free WebSphere Application Server for Developers. We also provided Amazon EC2 images to allow you to consume WAS in the public cloud.

We also provided for easy migration of applications from competitive application servers via the Migration Toolkit.

What a year 2009 was. I'm sure 2010 will be just as fruitful.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi again Andrew! Great features of WAS. On thing that my customer's always complain is about monitoring. I know the Tivoli brand has the ITCAM for JEE Application Server for a more complete monitoring solution. But do you think it's fare WAS to have a simple trap and alert mechanism to notify administrators about potential problems situations?! Thank you again!