WAS v8.5 > New features
What is new in this release
WebSphere Application Server is a proven, high-performance transaction engine that can help you build, run, integrate, and manage dynamic business applications. This release introduces key enhancements to help succeed in the current dynamic and competitive marketplace by introducing the new lightweight Liberty profile and by offering breakthrough advances in developer productivity, application server resiliency, and improved operational efficiency.
WAS v8.5 excels as the foundation for a service-oriented architecture with the following main benefits:
- New Liberty profile: a lightweight application foundation
The Liberty profile is a highly composable, fast to start, ultra lightweight profile of the application server that is optimized for developer productivity and smaller, simpler production server deployments.
- Fast, flexible, and simplified application development
Use the new Liberty profile to jump-start application development, and speed project completion. We can download the Liberty profile from the WASdev community page, or using the Installation Manager.
WAS v8.5 extends its rich application development and deployment environment to also provide the following enhanced capabilities:
- EJB support in OSGi applications
- Support for WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition V7.0 as an optional pluggable JDK
- Support for Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit to extend enterprise applications to mobile devices
- Support for a new migration toolkit to help not only migrate the applications, but to identify and resolve application problems before migration
- Enhanced
resiliency
Take advantage of enhanced resiliency of the application server to automatically detect and respond to certain failure scenarios. Improvements include automatic detection of certain types of memory leak and improved fault tolerance in service integration bus resiliency to handle the failures of the messaging infrastructure.
- Integrated tools
WAS now provides integrated tooling to help are develop, assemble, and deploy the applications to WAS v8.5 and includes a rapid-deployment feature for testing applications in the v8.5 runtime environment.
- Improved operations, security, control, and integration
Improve operational efficiency and controls for managing complex environments in a way that is less time consuming and resource consuming. Take advantage of the benefits of the option to select and switch between IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0 or 6.0 as well as powerful new batch capabilities. Enhancements for problem determination include cross component tracing (XCT), improved log and trace filtering, and support for IBM Support Assistant Data Collector. We can achieve richer application security with greater flexibility and more granular control using enhanced security with administrative audit features.
New feature:
The new features that are described in this topic are current as of the original release of the product version. Changes in this documentation related to service releases are marked with fix pack icons.
This version offers robust improvements, whether you are new to the product or making the transition from a prior release. Use this topic to obtain a high-level summary of the new features in this release. To learn more about the new and changed features in key areas that affect your specific roles in your business, see the information about what is new for installers on distributed operating systems, administrators, security specialists, developers, and troubleshooters.
New Liberty profile: a lightweight application foundation
WAS includes the Liberty profile that is optimized for both operational and developer productivity. Key operational benefits include, but are not limited to, the following capabilities:
- Ultra lightweight modular runtime environment, with an install size of under 50 MB
- Incredibly fast startup time
- Java EE and OSGi application deployment support for web applications
- LDAP registry support
- Deployment, as a package, of an application and configured server
- Managed, centralized deployment to many nodes of a packaged application and server
- Platform support for distributed platforms, z/OS , and Mac OS
The Liberty profile currently supports a subset of the following parts of the full WAS programming model:
- Web applications
- OSGi applications
- JPA
Familiar WAS enterprise qualities of service, such as security and transaction integrity, are enabled as required.
-
This profile supports two models of application deployment:
- Deploy an application by dropping it into a "dropins" directory.
- Deploy an application by adding it to the server configuration.
Because it is composable, each Liberty profile server is usually configured to include only the capabilities that are needed by the applications that it serves. This approach keeps each deployed server small and agile.
- The job manager provides the ability to distribute and deploy a Liberty profile server and applications, and start or stop embedded resources. Administration through the job manager provides the following key features:
- Support for central administration through job manager host target jobs. We can submit job manager jobs that support the full lifecycle of Liberty profile resource deployment from initial install, to updates, to uninstall. A deployment manager is not required, although we can use the job manager function available on a deployment manager to administer the Liberty profile and its resources.
- Quick installation of the Liberty profile. We can extract the Liberty profile resource and simply run the install Liberty profile resource job. There is no requirement to run a formal installation tool, such as Installation Manager, to use Liberty profile resources. Liberty profile resources are packaged as compressed files that are ready for use after extraction.
- Support for flexible sharing of resources such as a SDK, runtime binary files, server configuration, and application binary files among many server instances.
- Non-destructive update enables easy installation of new versions of any resources. We can switch are between old and new resources, or run concurrent versions of resources.
- No requirement for agent on target hosts, which reduces administration costs.
Fast, flexible, and simplified application development
WAS includes the following key new features and enhancements to ease, simply and extend the application developer experience:
- The Liberty profile
- Support for OSGi programming model enhancements, including EJB support
- Support for IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0
- Integrated support for WAS Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit
- New migration suite of tools to prepare, analyze, and migrate WebSphere applications and other competitive applications
- The Liberty profile provides a simplified and lightweight development and application-serving environment for web and OSGi applications.
Familiar WAS enterprise qualities of service, such as security and transaction integrity, are enabled as required. Key benefits include, but are not limited to, the following capabilities:
- Free and frictionless download for development purposes
- Ultra lightweight modular runtime environment, with an install size of under 50 MB
- Incredibly fast startup time: under 5 seconds for simple web applications
- Simplified configuration for quick time to productivity
- Availability of WAS Developer Tools as Eclipse plug-ins for broad tooling support
- Platform support for distributed platforms, z/OS, and Mac OS
- Because it is composable, each Liberty profile server is usually configured to include only the capabilities that are needed by the applications that it serves. This approach keeps each server small and agile. The Liberty profile includes support for the following capabilities:
- Blueprint
- JDBC
- Java Management Extensions (JMX)
- JPA
- JavaServer Faces (JSF)
- JSP
- SSL
- Security, supported by either the basic user registry or a LDAP user registry
- Servlet
- Web application bundle (WAB)
- Web security
-
Take advantage of enhanced modular application development by assembling OSGi applications from reusable bundles containing EJB assets. The enterprise beans in your OSGi bundles can be developed from scratch, or we can include existing EJB assets and migrate them to use OSGi modularity with minimal code changes. Stateful, stateless, and singleton enterprise beans are supported. Your OSGi application can also contain message-driven beans (MDBs).
We can deploy and configure an OSGi application containing enterprise beans in a similar way to deploying and configuring a Java EE enterprise application, using wsadmin or the dmgr console.
-
This IBM SDK provides a full-function SDK for Java that is compliant with the Java SE 7 APIs. With IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0, we can develop and deploy Java applications at the Java 7 API level and continue the "write once, run anywhere"Java paradigm at the Java API level. The SDK contains the Java application Runtime Environment and other tools that enable developers to create Java applications.
WAS supports IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0 as a pluggable JDK. Java 6 is installed with the product and used by default. We can optionally install Java 7 support and then enable it using the managesdk tool.
-
The WAS Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit simplifies the addition of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) rich desktop and mobile user interfaces and Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services to Java Web applications. Web 2.0 capabilities, such as Ajax and REST, help application developers to create more connected, interactive applications, that result in higher customer satisfaction, user productivity, and enhanced decision making. New mobile Ajax components enable developers to create mobile web applications that run on devices such as smartphones and tablets.
-
Enjoy faster application migrations using the extensive set of tools to help plan for and implement application migrations. The IBM WAS Migration toolkit is a suite of tools and knowledge collections, provided at no charge, to and cost-effectively migrate to WAS V7, V8.0 or V8.5, whether from a previous version of WAS or competitive application servers including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Application Server, JBoss Application server, and Apache Tomcat. This toolkit provides a single solution for identifying, analyzing, and resolving application code quality and compliance requirements. We can obtain this migration toolkit from the developerWorks IBM WAS Migration Toolkit page.
Integrated tools
WAS v8.5 includes:-
Accelerate developer productivity through integrated and optimized developer tooling. Rational Application Developer v8.5 provides a complete environment for enterprise development for Java, Java EE, web, web services, SOA, OSGi, and Portal designers and developers. Use this environment to develop, assemble, and deploy the applications to WAS v8.5, and test the applications using a rapid-deployment feature in the v8.5 runtime environment.
The IBM WAS Developer Tools for Eclipse, v8.5 is a lightweight set of tools for developing, assembling, and deploying Java EE, OSGi, Web 2.0 and Mobile applications to WAS, including the Liberty profile.
Enhanced resiliency
WAS v8.5 provides enhanced user availability and application server resiliency with resiliency enhancements for the service integration bus.
- Improvements to the recovery of messaging engine errors
- Enable the messaging engine to restart after a failure
- Retain the count of failed deliveries after the messaging engine is restarted
- Enhanced memory leak detection and protection
- Improvement to the messaging engine to prevent holding long running database locks
- Improvements to service integration bus performance
- Recovery of the messaging engine configuration from the message store
-
When a recoverable database error is detected by the high availability (HA) manager, the messaging engine is stopped, and the standby messaging engine is started automatically, if available. The other applications running in the application server are not affected by the failure of the messaging engine.
-
When a messaging engine fails due to recoverable database problems, it is disabled and failed over to another messaging engine in the cluster, if configured for high availability. In the event the active messaging engine does not responding to the database, the standby messaging engine is able to take ownership of the database because the active messaging engine holds only short duration locks. This action also ensures that only one active messaging engine can access the database at a given time. The disabled messaging engine is automatically enabled after a specific time and is available for failover.
-
When a message delivery fails, the messaging engine attempts to redeliver the message repeatedly and the delivery count increases incrementally each time. The redelivery count is persisted to the message store and is made available for the messages even after the messaging engine is restarted.
-
WAS provides top down pattern-based memory leak detection, prevention, and action by watching for suspect patterns in application code at run time. WAS has some means of protection against memory leaks when stopping or redeploying applications. WAS v8.5 monitors application and module activity and performs diagnostic actions when an application or an individual module stops. This feature helps in increasing application up time with frequent application redeployments without cycling the server.
-
When the messaging engine uses a database as the message store, we can configure the messaging engine to acquire short duration locks on the database; thereby, preventing it from holding long running locks on the database. The new locking mechanism also helps the standby messaging engine to acquire the database ownership when a JVM, hosting the messaging engine in a highly available clustered environment, becomes unresponsive until a specified period of time.
-
Improved messaging engine startup time by loading the destinations concurrently in a multi-core architecture. The concurrent loading is possible if the message store is configured with the database which supports parallel reads by multiple threads. The performance improvement is directly proportional to the parallel processing capability of the database and the capacity of the system on which the messaging engine is running.
-
We can use the recoverMEConfig command to restore the configuration information of the messaging engine from the message store in case the configuration files are lost or corrupted.
Improved operations, security, control, and integration
WAS v8.5 includes the following highlights for greater security and for enhanced operations and control for application development, management, and problem determination.
- Improved operations and control
- Option to select and switch between IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0 or 6.0
- Enhancements for Java batch support
- OSGi Blueprint security improvements
- Support for OSGi application console
- Support for the Service Component Architecture (SCA) OASIS programming model implementation
- Support for Derby 10.8
- Simplified problem determination
- Cross component trace (XCT) enables correlation of log and trace entries with minimal cost
- Enhancements to log and trace filtering using application name, request ID, or custom extensions
- Improved troubleshooting using IBM Support Assistant Data Collector
- Enhanced security for administrative configuration audit tracking
Improved operations and control
-
WAS provides support for the IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition v7.0 as an optional pluggable Java development kit (JDK). Java 6 is installed with the product and used by default. Use the managesdk tool to optionally install and enable Java 7. We can optionally switch between using Java 6 or Java 7 to best meet your business needs.
-
WAS provides powerful new batch application features. Enhancements include support for parallel batch processing to reduce batch job elapsed time, memory-overload protection for batch workloads, integration of workload scheduler to submit batch work from scheduler products like Tivoli Workload Scheduler, and numerous xJCL and programming model improvements to increase application development flexibility.
-
We can configure bean security in the Blueprint XML file of your OSGi applications, so the methods of the bean can be accessed only by users assigned a specified role. We can configure bean-level security, so that a single role is associated with all the methods of the bean, or we can configure method-level security, where different roles are associated with specific methods.
-
The dmgr console provides pages used to examine or debug a specific set of OSGi bundles running on an application server. We can, for example, view and explore the package and service dependencies between the bundles in an OSGi application.
-
WAS v8.5 adds support for the SCA OASIS programming model implementation. WAS v8.5 provides partial support for the following OASIS specifications:
- OASIS SCA Assembly Model Specification 1.1
- OASIS SCA Policy Framework Specification 1.1
WAS v8.5 supports OASIS policy attachment, but does not support OASIS policy set definitions.
- OASIS SCA-Bindings specifications:
- SCA JMS Binding Specification 1.1
- SCA Web Service Binding Specification 1.1
- OASIS SCA-J Common Annotations and APIs Specification 1.1
WAS v8.5 also supports EJB binding, POJO, JAXB and SDO as data types.
-
Connect the applications to the latest versions of a wide array of industry-leading databases to enable maximum deployment flexibility. WAS v8.5 has been tested with and includes the Derby 10.8 database.
Simplified problem determination
-
Use the cross component trace facility to identify the root cause of problems across components. XCT annotates log and trace entries so that log entries related to a request that is serviced by more than one thread, process, or even server are identified as belonging to the same unit of work. This enhancement enables administrators and support teams to follow the flow of a request from end-to-end as it traverses thread or process boundaries.
-
Use the HPEL LogViewer command-line tool to filter records based on the content of log and trace record extensions. The application server automatically creates an appName extension for each log and trace record related to a Java EE application, indicating the name of that application. The application server also automatically creates a requestId extension when cross component trace is enabled for each log and trace record created during the processing of certain types of requests (for example HTTP or JMS requests), indicating the unique ID of that request. We can add custom extensions to HPEL log and trace entries using the LogRecordContext API.
-
The IBM Support Assistant Data Collector for WAS tool focuses on automatic collection of problem data and is now included as part WAS v8.5. It also provides symptom analysis support for the various categories of problems encountered by IBM software products. Information pertinent to a type of problem is collected to help identify the origin of the problem under investigation. The tool assists customers by reducing the amount of time it takes to reproduce a problem with the proper RAS tracing levels set, as well as by reducing the effort required to send the appropriate log information in to IBM Support.
Extended repository options
-
WAS v8.5 enables you to track changes made to the application server configuration using checkpoints made through the extended repository service. A full checkpoint is a complete copy of the entire configuration repository. A delta checkpoint is a subset snapshot of the configuration repository that is made when we change a product configuration. Use a checkpoint to restore the configuration repository back to a prior state. To determine what has changed in the configuration, we can extract from a delta checkpoint to obtain the before and after versions of the files that were saved.
Related concepts:
Web resources
New features overview for administering applications and their environments
New features overview for securing applications and their environment
New features overview for developing applications
New features overview for monitoring
New features overview for tuning performance
New features overview for troubleshooting
Reference:
API documentation
Deprecated, stabilized, and removed features
What is new for installers
What is new for administrators
What is new for security specialists
What is new for developers
What is new for troubleshooters
Related information:
Administer the batch environment
WASdev community downloads page
WAS V8.5 Concepts, Planning, and Design Guide