Talk:IBM WebSphere Application Server

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Administrator benefits

Many businesses run multiple server farms but wish to consolidate them into a single smaller server farm. This is because most server farms are underutilizied or over provisioned. The boxes are typically running at 10% load which is quite costly and is not flexible. For example, one server farm goes hot and maxes out while the farm in the next room is still basically idle at 10%. XD allows administrators to define a single cluster (a node group) then monitor the workload and dynamically decide which boxes in the node group should host which application in order to meet these goals. If application A has a current response time of 1.5 seconds, XD will move resources away from applications B and C to increase the power dedicated to A and decrease its response time. XD can also predict that A will likely exceed its response time in 10 minutes based on a trend and react in anticipation of the event. This greatly simplifies the life of an administrator and allows the machines to be more efficiently used than a conventional multiple, independent farm of farms approach. XD also offers options to generate various email alerts when conditions are exceeded. It can also restart servers when they appear to have a memory leak, or after X requests.

Developer benefits

WebSphere Partition Facility

Traditional Java EE applications work well for a large class of applications. The class can be broadly categorized as applications that run in a stateless symmetric cluster in front of a database:

• All the cluster members can perform any task at any time.
• The application is stateless.
• The application is modal, such that it only performs work synchronously in response to a client request which can be received using http://IIOP or JMS.

There are other applications that do not work well in such an environment, for example, an electronic trading system in a bank. Such applications typically use performance enhancing techniques such as partitioning, multi-threading, and write-through caching. These are applications that can exploit asymmetric clustering. An asymmetric cluster is essentially the opposite of a symmetric cluster:

• Applications can declare named partitions at any point while they are running, partitions are highly available, mobile within the cluster, and usually only run on a single cluster member at a time.
• Incoming work for a partition is routed to the cluster member hosting the partition.
• The application is amodal. Partitions have a lifecycle of their own and can start background threads or alarms as well as respond to incoming events whether they are IIOP/HTTP or JMS/foreign messages.

WebSphere XD offers a new set of APIs called the WebSphere Partition Facility (WPF). These APIs allow applications that require an asymmetric cluster to be deployed on a Java EE server.

ObjectGrid

The ObjectGrid is the first piece of the IBM distributed caching framework. V6 of XD shipped with support for local Java object caching as well as peer-to-peer caching with asynchronous data push/invalidation. It is designed as a small footprint, to install customer extensible framework for caching objects. All aspects of the core framework have plugin points. This allows customers to add function as well as allow IBM to extend it in future product levels. It is designed to run independent of WebSphere. This does not mean it won't integrate with WebSphere 6.0 XD -- it will. But it will also work on older versions of the application server, Tomcat servers, and competitive application servers. In a very limited sense, memcached performs some of the same functions as ObjectGrid

ObjectGrid is intended to compete against the other distributed cache products on the market. It currently requires only a 1.4 level JDK from any vendor. Version 2 of the ObjectGrid is currently under development for shipping in XD 6.0.1. It will add significant function to the component as well as widen JDK level support. The intent is to allow customers to build large grids of JVMs into which they can connect applications and store objects at various qualities of service. The grid is being designed to scale to thousands of JVMs and hold a large quantity of data.

Compute Grid

Also known as WebSphere Batch, WebSphere XD also offers a Java Batch processing system called Compute Grid. This was first introduced in XD version 6.1. Compute Grid is deployed as an additional feature of a WebSphere Network environment. It provides a number of features that help you create, execute and manage batch jobs. The features include: an XML-based job control language (xJCL), batch programming model, job scheduler, and batch container.

• Todd, I couldn't find the moved content in your talk archives. Oh wait...there it is right here on THIS talk page at the bottom of the page in a collapsed view. Stephen Charles Thompson (talk) 17:33, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

WebSphere Liberty Profile z/OS was recently created but I'm not seeing how it warrants a dedicated article. A brief section on the liberty profile and how it differs from ND would be appropriate here though. Even the title doesn't make much sense since Liberty Profile is runable on multiple platforms including Mac, Windows, and multiple Linuxes in addition to z/OS.--RadioFan (talk) 11:21, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Are there no objections to this selective merger?--RadioFan (talk) 14:35, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Since there have been no objections, a highly selective merge has been completed.--RadioFan (talk) 22:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

At least for Websphere 7 the mentioned supported technologies are incorrect. Haven't checked the remaining information offered and dismissed the page as irrelevant at first sight. Websphere 7 is Java EE 5, not Java EE 6 as can be found in IBM's online reference: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v8r5/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/ae/rovr_specs.html 2001:980:5966:1:CC20:2A1E:FE2A:3BBD (talk) 19:59, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

This looks to have been corrected - hopefully soon after the comment above! Ian Robinson (talk) 10:49, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

It seems liberty version is year.xxx.yyy.month of release, and not quarters. Zephyr59710FR (talk) 14:59, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

IBM may call it a 'Web Application Server' but it is still a Java enterprise application server; hosting separate (EJB) application and web servers, plus additional middleware. The wording in the article makes it seem like applications rolled out on the server is always 'web' related. In fact, once can just create Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) to serve as the 'back end' for different kinds of applications or purposes. Even if applications are not architected this way very much, any more, this can still be done. And in fact even if this application server does serve web pages or web API's in it's embedded web server, the application server can still be used for business logic. As well, this can be used to host message queues with it's embedded MQ software, DB pools, etc. In short, the description of it seems more based on company advertising presentation rather than a proper description of what it is. Theshowmecanuck (talk) 21:53, 23 August 2025 (UTC)