New Application Migration Tool

Ideally, one of your J2EE applications deployed on one certified application server can be taken as-is and moved to another certified application server. However, that is almost never the reality. Whether it is caused by developers taking advantage of a certain vendor’s conveniences/optimizations or application artifacts generated by the container (web services stubs, compiled JSPs, etc.), there is usually something that ties your J2EE application to a particular platform. In WebSphere, we’ve acknowledged this problem and we are doing something to make it easier to move applications from competitive application servers to the WebSphere Application Server.

The Application Migration Tool is part of the IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit which provides assistance in moving your J2EE applications from competitive application server products to the WebSphere Application Server. This new tool is built on the IBM Rational Software Analyzer and uses its scanning capabilities to look for data specific to competitive application servers. It then provides a way to change and review this data so it can run on the WebSphere Application Server. In support of migrating applications to our server, changes can be made to java source code, JSPs, and deployment descriptors within an application.

The current version of the Application Migration Tool supports migrating J2EE 1.4 (and prior versions) applications from the Oracle WebLogic Server to the WebSphere Application Server. The tool focuses on several aspects of the application migration process including setting up the application classpath, converting WebLogic-specific classes, refactoring non-portable JNDI lookups, converting JSPs, deployment descriptors, and java package references to support industry standards, and creating the necessary artifacts for web services deployment (WSDL, service endpoint interface, mapping files, etc.). Additional manual steps may be required when migrating your application, but the tool will handle the most common migration actions. In short, the toolkit provides you with a fast path to move your applications to the WebSphere Application Server platform.

The Application Migration Tool is free and you can find download and installation instructions on the toolkit’s web page. The only prerequisite for the toolkit is an Eclipse IDE (3.4.2 or higher), which is also available for free. In addition, if you have an existing Rational Application Developer environment, you can install the toolkit into that environment. The toolkit is supported by IBM through either your existing support entitlement, or through a completely free forum.

If you are currently running J2EE applications in an Oracle WebLogic environment, I would encourage you to try out this migration toolkit to find out just how easy it is to move those applications over to the WebSphere Application Server platform. If you don’t currently have access to our application server, don’t let that stop you. Download the fully-functional WebSphere Application Server trial version or WebSphere Application Server for Developers edition and then begin the migration process.