Connection management architecture

The connection management architecture for both relational and procedural access to enterprise information systems is based on the JCA specification. The Connection Manager (CM), which pools and manages connections within an appserver, is capable of managing connections obtained through both resource adapters (RAs) defined by the JCA specification, and DataSources defined by the JDBC 2.0 Extensions Specification.

To make DataSource connections manageable by this CM that works only with RAs, WAS v5.0 provides its own resource adapter. From the CM point of view, JDBC DataSources and JCA connection factories look the same. Users of DataSources do not experience any programmatic or behavioral differences in their applications because of the underlying JCA architecture. JDBC users still configure and use DataSources according to the JDBC programming model.

Applications migrating from previous versions of WebSphere Application Server might experience some behavioral differences because of the change from J2EE 1.2 requirements to J2EE 1.3 requirements. These differences are not related to the adoption of the JCA architecture.

Note that WAS does not support JDBC 3.0.