Extending the Liberty profile

We can expand the capability of the Liberty profile using product extensions. We can write our own Liberty features, and install them onto an existing Liberty profile server, or we can package them for delivery to the users.

This section describes how to develop features for a product extension, how to install features to the built-in "usr" product extension, and how to use the features in an application server. The Liberty profile provides various SPIs we can leverage to extend the runtime environment. The Java API documentation for each Liberty profile SPI is detailed in the Programming Interfaces (APIs) section of the information center, and is also available as a separate .zip file in one of the javadoc subdirectories of the ${wlp.install.dir}/dev directory.

For an overview of writing product extensions for the Liberty profile, see Product extension.

For full details of how to extend the Liberty profile, see the following subtopics:

Subtopics

• Develop a Liberty feature
  A Liberty feature consists of a feature manifest file, and one or more OSGi bundles. The OSGi bundles contain classes and services that provide a particular capability when the feature is installed onto a Liberty profile server.

• Packaging and installing Liberty features
  We can package and install Liberty features to the Liberty profile.

• Embedding the Liberty profile server in the applications
  We can use the SPIs provided by the Liberty profile to configure, control, and monitor a Liberty profile server in the applications.

• Create Liberty servers from custom configurations
  We can create a server from a custom configuration for any environment that you require.