Great overview of WebSphere Application Server V8.0

Tom Alcott put together a great overview of version 8.0 of the WebSphere Application Server. Take a spin through his article on developerWorks.

He covers the Java EE 6 standards, additional integrated programming models (OSGi, Service Component Architecture, Java Batch, Communications Enabled, and XQuery/XSLT 2.0), additional feature packs (Web 2.0, dynamic scriptiong), system management improvements including installation, high availability, logging, recovery, security and migration.

Well worth the read.

System Test Team Reports Available on developerWorks

Have you been wondering what the WebSphere system test team has been up to lately? Visit our wiki for access to our collection of test reports. The test reports document results from representative product scenarios that have been validated by IBM system test groups. They cover testing we've done with WebSphere Application Server v7.0, the v8.0 Alpha and Betas, and several Feature Packs.

For example, in a recent report, "Leverage Business Level Applications (BLA) to Improve Management and Operational Capabilities Over Stand-alone Java EE Applications", Feng Yue Li from the WebSphere system test team describes a test scenario that focused on the use of shared libraries within BLAs. She explains how she verified that shared library relationships between BLA composition units work properly when a new version of the BLA asset is rolled out and describes how command assistance can be used with BLAs.

In another recent report, "Test Infrastructure: OSGi FeP and JEE applications", tester Tam Dinh outlines a scenario in which the WebSphere system team deployed, exercised and stressed WebSphere Application Server V7.0 OSGi Feature Pack using three OSGi applications and three JEE applications in a WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment cell.

We'd like to hear your feedback about our work and your ideas about how our testing can be improved. Visit our developerWorks test team wiki and let us know what you think.

WebSphere Application Server Administration Using Jython

I recently had the opportunity to review the recently published WebSphere Application Server Administration Using Jython from IBM Press and thought I would share my opinions on this book. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was provided a copy of the book to review at no cost to myself.

After spending a considerable amount of time teaching myself Jython and learning to administer WebSphere Application Server using it, I wish I had a copy of this book when I first started writing Jython scripts for WebSphere Application Server administration. The authors do a great job of both introducing the reader to the Jython language as well as introducing the reader to the WebSphere Application Server administrative objects.

The WebSphere Application Server Administration Using Jython book is brilliantly structured, first the Jython language followed by WebSphere Application Server administration. The book is also full of practical examples.

An excellent resource for both novice and experienced WebSphere Application Server administrator, this book has earned itself a spot on my bookshelf and in my list of my recommended books for folks interested in automating their WebSphere Application Server administration.

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.

WebSphere Application Server trial version

A while back Andrew mentioned the WebSphere Application Server for Developers product. This offering is essentially the WebSphere Application Server Base product licensed for free use in development environments.

To complement this offering, we also recently announced a trial version of the WebSphere Application Server. Like the above mentioned version of our application server, the trial version provides the WebSphere Application Server Base product, but the included license allows you to run the server in a production environment during the 60 day trial period.

If you are interested in getting a free look at the WebSphere Application Server but are worried your usage would not adhere to the license agreements in the WebSphere Application Server for Developers offering, give this new trial version a try.

WebSphere Application Server V7.0 New Features

I've noticed that alot of folks are coming to this blog looking for a high level overview of WebSphere Application Server V7.0 (searching for things like websphere 7 features, websphere v7) and finding somewhat related articles, but never a quick overview of the major new functional areas. So, on the first birthday of V7.0, here is a quick overview.

Our themes for the release were Simplification for Developers, Intelligent Management, High Performance Foundation for SOA, and Innovation that Matters.

Simplification for Developers

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V7.0 supports the important new standards for JDK 6.0 including JDBC 4.0, Java EE 5, EJB 3.0 and JPA, Web Services, new SIP RFC's, messaging, and Portlets (JSR 286). While many of these annotation driven ease of use enhancements have been available for some time as V6.1 feature packs, V7.0 ships all of the Java EE 5 standard fully certified. The ease of use comes from two things. First, annotations allow you to easily configure EJB's and web services within the application code. Second, most configuration is defaulted which means you only have to configure exceptional cases. Rational Application Developer (RAD) Assembly and Deploy tooling comes in the box which is a subset of RAD for WebSphere which is first class tooling for all of these new features.

Intelligent Management

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In addition to the existing WAS 6.1 management infrastructure, WAS 7.0 adds two new topology options via Administrative Agent and Flexible Management. An administrative agent allows management of multiple standalone application servers on the same machine reducing runtime footprint and start-up cost of administration. Flexible management supports the Job Manager which can handle asynchronous administration job queuing across multiple WebSphere cells which allows scaling to very large and complex environments especially geographically distributed environments. WAS V7.0 introduces the concept of Business Level Applications (BLA) which defines multi-component applications allowing administration of applications that have a scope larger than a single war or ear. Also included is the Centralized Install Manager (CIM) which allows centralized installation of fix packs, refresh packs, and interim fixes from the deployment manager to all nodes in the cell. Update Installer and Install Factory where also updated.

High Performance Foundation for SOA

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I have blogged about the performance improvements in general, on web services, on EJB 3.0/JPA, and 64-bit. With runtime provisioning based on OSGi, we also now start components selectively helping with start-up time and footprint. Our Dynacache engine has been updated and is explained here. Security is always important in the foundation and with V7.0 -- you'll see more fine grained security domains, security auditing, and a DMZ hardened proxy. We also continue to protect investments in WAS with supporting mixed older versions of the application server across a cell providing support for applications running on version of Java EE as old as 1.2.

Innovation that Matters

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We continue to innovate beyond V7.0 through the use of feature packs. Feature packs allow you to absorb innovative enhancements before the next version of the application server. Web 2.0 (through the Web 2.0 Feature Pack) support includes Web 2.0 to SOA connectivity, Ajax messaging and the Ajax development toolkit. Service Component Architecture - SCA (through the SCA Feature Pack) support includes service composition and service deployment/assembly that allow binding existing web, EJB, and native SCA services into a composite SOA application. Communication Enabled Applications - CEA (through the CEA Feature Pack) allows you to add access communication services without expertise in communication technologies - such as web widgets for Click to Call and Call Notifications. XML applications (through the XML Feature Pack Beta) that use XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 allow you to unleash the power of declarative XML data programming and improve the functionality/ease of use over XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0.

Want to try WebSphere Application Server V7.0 as a developer for free? If so, go here and download it today.

It's hard to cover such a large release in a short blog entry. I'm sure I missed some major features. If you spot one, let me know and I'll update this post.

Information Center for XML Feature Pack Beta Posted

In software development, it's not just about creating the runtimes and API's and install images. As a customer, information to help understand how to use the features of any product is as important or more important than the product itself. This is why we've spent so much time on creating samples for the XML Feature Pack. Today we go a big step further by releasing the XML Feature Pack Information Center.

The Feature Pack for XML Information Center is comprehensive documentation on the XML Feature Pack. The content of this documentation is live and can change as we get more information articles. If there are features you have questions on, please let me know and I'll ensure we consider updates for future updates. Also note that we have moved the Javadoc for the API to this information center.

WebSphere Application Server for Developers - Now downloadable, No charge

Want to try out WebSphere Application Server V7.0 for development? Check!
Want to do it without having to order a CD? Check!
Want to do it without having to work with purchasing? Check!
Want to do it by yourself as a developer? Double Check!

I talk to many developers who want to install WebSphere Application Server for development, but every license is tracked and installed by their operations team on some remote server. Working with the operations team and (gasp) purchasing would take more time than the time to write the application they wanted to write. So they go off and download some other runtime and later port the application back to WebSphere Application Server or abandon the project altogether.

This won't be the story after today. Go here to download a no-charge copy of WebSphere Application Server for your development needs.

From the download page:

Download WebSphere Application Server for Developers, a no-charge offering that satisfies the need for a no-cost WebSphere Application Server development runtime for projects that don't warrant the expense of a priced and supported runtime on the developer desktop. Reduce testing effort and develop with confidence using a runtime environment that is identical to the production runtime environment your applications will eventually run on.

Enjoy!

WAS XML Feature Pack Demo #4 - More XSLT 2.0 Features and Compilation

I released the first demo two months ago introducing the XML Feature Pack:

Demo 1 (Part 1, Part 2).

Two days ago I released the second demo showing how to use XPath 2.0 in an end to end J2EE application:

Demo 2 (Part 1, Part 2).

Yesterday I released the third demo showing how to use XSLT 2.0 in an end to end J2EE application:

Demo 3 (Part 1, Part 2).

Today, I'll wrap up the demos with demo 4 which talks to about XSLT 2.0 schema awareness, validation and various other XSLT 2.0 features we've added to round out the XSLT 2.0 standard support. Finally, I show a demonstration of how to use the pre-compilation support added in the Beta refresh.

Demo 4 - XSLT 2.0 Features (Part 1)

Direct Link (HD Version)

Demo 4 - XSLT 2.0 Features (Part 2)

Direct Link (HD Version)

WAS XML Feature Pack Demo #3 - End to End XSLT

I released the first demo two months ago introducing the XML Feature Pack:

Demo 1 (Part 1, Part 2).

Yesterday I released the second demo showing how to use XPath 2.0 in an end to end J2EE application:

Demo 2 (Part 1, Part 2).

In this third demo, I expand upon this same basic application to show how to use XSLT 2.0 in an end-to-end J2EE application. In the demo, I show some of the new valuable features of XSLT 2.0. I show how to bridge the gap between Java and XML processing by showing binding of Java data to the XSLT stylesheets and calling user defined Java extension functions as part of the XSLT processing. As compared to the XPath 2.0 example where data was stored in JavaBeans then JSP formatted to the user, this sample directly transforms data from XML to XHTML user presentation. Also, I show how some of the Java logic used in the XPath 2.0 example can be recoded in simpler XSLT 2.0 temporary trees and stylesheet functions.

Demo 3 - End to End XSLT 2.0 (Part 1)

Direct Link (HD Version)

Demo 3 - End to End XSLT 2.0 (Part 2)

Direct Link (HD Version)

WAS XML Feature Pack Demo #2

As announced last week, I have created three new demos for the WAS XML Feature Pack.

I released the first demo two months ago introducing the XML Feature Pack:

Demo 1(Part 1, Part 2). Remember to click, view in HD.

In the second demo, I expand upon this same basic application to show how to use XPath 2.0 in and end-to-end J2EE application. In the demo, I show some of the new valuable features of XPath 2.0. Also, I show how to bridge the gap between Java and XML processing by showing binding of Java data to the XPath queries and calling user defined Java extension functions as part of the XPath processing. Finally, I show how to gather data from the returned XPath sequence cursors and how to integrate that data with Java beans.

Demo 2 - End to End XPath 2.0 (Part 1)

Direct Link (HD Version)

Demo 2 - End to End XPath 2.0 (Part 2)

Direct Link (HD Version)

IBM again leads Oracle (and everyone else) on SPECjAppServer2004 performance and cost

I recently had someone email me on a performance topic and they referenced WebSphere Application Server's SPECjAppServer leadership. They actually didn't know that IBM regained total leadership in this benchmark late last year. Maybe the fun of the holidays didn't allow folks to notice? I wanted to post this update, so if other folks missed it they would notice.

In these times of tough economic conditions, it's really important to focus on total cost of ownership and ways to improve efficiency. IBM's continuous leadership in performance proves we care about performance as it relates to end to end J2EE enterprise computing scenarios. This increased performance means you can host more workload and applications on the same resources that you used before. Our performance engineers are continuously improving performance of your applications and we use SPECjAppServer to demonstrate those improvements.

Sometimes people ask me how SPECjAppServer matters to them. It's this continuously increasing performance that matters to them. Originally SPECjAppServer helped the J2EE programming model transition from a programming model to a capable enterprise ready programming model (stressing basic performance and scalability). Now, SPECjAppServer leadership helps customers know the middleware they are buying from IBM is helping them improve their efficiency.

This view is a technology view (leadership at 22634.13 JOPS), however it has business impacts as well. That result was achieved at roughly one half of the cost of our closest competitor. That just acquisition cost. If you consider the power savings on top of that you're not only being more green, but saving green.

Again, great work by the WebSphere Application Server performance team!

Disclaimer: SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to measure the performance of the newest generation of high-performance computers. Its membership comprises leading computer hardware and software vendors, universities, and research organizations worldwide. For complete details on benchmark results and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, please see www.spec.org. Competitive claims reflect results published on www.spec.org as of January 23, 2009 when comparing SPECjAppServer2004 Total JOPS on all published results.

EJB 3.0 Performance Improvements in WAS V7.0 (up 23%)

EJB 3.0 was actually available for some time on top of WAS V6.1 in the Feature Pack for EJB 3.0, but now it exists in WAS V7.0 as well.  EJB 3.0 in my mind is all about making the developer's life simpler (annotations, test outside of container, etc.) along with giving us a better model for more performant persistence.  You can see all new features added to EJB 3.0 in WAS V7.0 (including performance features) in Kevin's blog post.  Given this is the second major release of EJB 3.0 for WebSphere, performance of EJB 3.0 on WAS is top notch.  You'll also see that we've recently added an implementation using the standard JPA caching functions to allow caching via WebSphere eXtreme Scale (Formally known as WebSphere Extended Deployment Data Grid) which is a distributed in-memory data grid.

In working on persistence performance in WAS V7.0, we used the Apache DayTrader application with some IBM tweaks.  There are two versions of DayTrader of interest (1.2 which uses EJB 2.1 and 2.0 which uses EJB 3.0).  There are other changes as well to move DayTrader 2.0 to Java EE 5, but most don't have deep performance impacts.  Really, the big change from a performance perspective is the implementation of the persistence layer.

The results of all of the new WAS V7.0 features is a very performant EJB 3.0 implementation that outpaces the EJB 2.1 performance by 23% as shown in the below chart.  This is a rather impressive improvement considering the EJB 2.1 implementation has been grooved by years of leading IBM benchmark results in SPECjAppServer.  It is also worth noting that the below chart is EJB 2.1 to EJB 3.0 heads up (actually both are measured on WAS V7.0).  If you are migrating from WAS V6.1 or earlier the percentage improvement would be far greater.

Again, I'm interested in feedback from users who have tried the new engine.

Web Service Performance Improvements in WAS V7.0 (up to 3x)

Two weeks ago, I said I'd be doing a weeklong series of posts on WAS V7.0 performance.  A week late, but here we go.  I guess I can say I delayed until WAS V7.0 was generally available, which it is now (trial download here)!  WAS V7.0 should be available by other supported download methods as well.

There are many impressive areas of performance improvements in WAS V7.0, but I'll start with the one nearest and dearest to my heart - Web Services.  In the past, I talked about web services performance through the years.  I mentioned a possible follow-up blog post on what Feature Pack for Web Services performance.  I never followed up on that (hrm, a theme in my slow blogging), but now that the same code is available in WAS V7.0, I will.  In fact, we've made even more improvements to web services performance in WAS V7.0 that would truly make the "performance through the years" chart from my previous blog post much more impressive.

WAS V6.1 supports the J2EE 1.4 JAX-RPC web service programming model.  Last year, we added Java EE 5 support for the JAX-WS web service programming model (expanded functionality, standards support, easier programming model, and enhanced management support for services) through the Feature Pack for Web Services.  While WAS V7.0 continues support of both the JAX-RPC and JAX-WS programming models so that existing JAX-RPC web services applications deployed on previous versions of WebSphere will run on V7 unmodified, the development and performance resources were almost exclusively dedicated to the JAX-WS work.  We encourage customers to move to this new programming model to take advantage of the new features as well as the significant performance gains.  Many customers I know of have moved to the Feature Pack for Web Services already, but now that it's natively supported in WAS V7.0, I expect even more customers to make a move from JAX-RPC to JAX-WS.

The chart below compares WAS V6.1 JAX-RPC performance to WAS V7.0 JAX-WS performance.  JAX-WS web services significantly outperform JAX-RPC web services for all message payload sizes shown.  For a 3k(input)/3k(output) message size, JAX-WS achieves a 70% higher throughput and for 10k/10k message size JAX-WS achieves over 2x higher performance.  For 10k/3k, 10k/10k, 100k/100k JAX-WS achieves over 3x/2.5x/2.5x higher performance, respectively.

There are many reasons for these performance gains, but the most significant one is the optimized data binding using JAXB in JAX-WS.  JAXB provides JAX-WS the framework to unmarshal XML documents into Java objects or marshal Java objects into XML.  We have done very impressive optimizations in our JAXB implementation to achieve these performance gains, well beyond what most JAXB implementations can do with StAX or SAX.  Getting high performance XML parsing combined with JAXB's full support for XML Schema is an impressive accomplishment.

Some things that matter to you specifically:  This is a primitive benchmark as it only measures web services performance (no business logic).  Therefore, your application using web services will not go 2-3 times faster just by switching to JAX-WS and JAXB, but it should markedly improve.  Specifically the additional latency involved in exposing business logic to web services and XML should go down by 1/2-2/3, which in many scenarios is substantial.  Also, even though you can handle XML yourself in JAX-WS by getting the data as a stream or DOM, it's best if you use JAXB as you'll get the most performance benefit of our optimizations.

I'm interested in feedback from users that have tried the new engine.

WebSphere Application Server Version 7.0 Performance Highlights

We recently announced WebSphere Application Server V7.0. Over the next week, I will be sharing some of the performance highlights of our teams' work improving existing usage scenarios as well as performance grooving of new V7.0 features. Here are some of the areas I plan to discuss.  Let me know if you'd like to see other areas and I'll work to include them as well.

• General Java EE
• Web Services including JAX-WS and WS-* standards support
• Persistence including EJB3 and JPA
• Startup Time and Memory Footprint
• Security including Java SE, Admininstration, Java EE, and new features
• Java SE Performance
• Hardware exploitation (64-bit, Multicore, Virtualization)
• Support for SIP based communication in our convergence sevlet container

"My Tasks" in WAS V6.1

Here's a handy little feature in WebSphere Application Server V6.1: "My Tasks" in the console. In a nutshell, it allows you to quickly customize your console navigation to only include the navigation options that you care about. You start by selecting "My Tasks" as your view:









Assuming you've never been here before, it prompts you to add your first task. Clicking that options gives you a lit of navigation options. You can either choose an entire category (like "Applications") or a sub-category (like "Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure"):



















After clicking Apply, voila! You now have a customized navigation that only shows what you care about.

The new drop of the Web Services feature pack beta is available

It can be downloaded from the Early Programs site.

The beta, like the eventual GA version of the feature pack, is an optionally installable package. If you need the latest web services standards, you can add them onto WebSphere Application Server V6.1. If you don't, you can ignore it.

The latest beta is basically a fully functional version of the feature pack that is going through additional testing now. The feature pack has support for:

• Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM)
• Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing)
• SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)
• Web Services Secure Conversations (WS-SC)
• Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS 2.0)
• Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB 2.0)
• SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ 1.3)
• Streaming API for XML (StAX 1.0)

That's right - it's like Christmas morning for early adopting Java developers!

What the heck is a core group bridge?

Core groups were introduced in WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V6.0, and my impression is that they are still not well understood by customers. Part of the reason why is that, by default, a single core group is created for the entire cell and all new servers are added to that core group, which means users can go quite awhile without ever needing to know anything about the core group concept. It's not until you try to create large-scale topologies that core groups become a critical component in the configuration. The one sentence definition of a core group is that they are a group of processes that talk to each other to maintain knowledge about each other's state for purposes of failover/HA.

But what about a core group bridge? A core group bridge is a communication vehicle between multiple core groups, either within a cell or between cells. One interesting scenario where a core group bridge is handy is when you have a cell for your proxy server in a DMZ and a cell for your application servers on the other side of the firewall. You want your proxy server to know about the state of the application servers for obvious routing purposes. How do you do this? Via a core group bridge.

I've been trying to learn more about core groups recently and a colleague pointed me to a good article on developerWorks that provides a good introduction to core group bridges entitled Core group bridges 101. I highly recommend it for anyone working with large topologies or trying to create communication between cells.