The connection management architecture for both relational and procedural access to enterprise information systems (EIS) is based on the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) specification. The Connection Manager (CM), which pools and manages connections within an application server, is capable of managing connections obtained through both resource adapters (RAs) defined by the JCA specification, and data sources defined by the JDBC 2.0 (and later) Extensions specification.

To make data source connections manageable by the CM, the WebSphere Application Server provides a resource adapter (the WebSphere Relational Resource Adapter) that enables JDBC data sources to be managed by the same CM that manages JCA connections. From the CM point of view, JDBC data sources and JCA connection factories look the same. Users of data sources do not experience any programmatic or behavioral differences in their applications because of the underlying JCA architecture. JDBC users still configure and use data sources according to the JDBC programming model.

Applications migrating from previous versions of WebSphere Application Server might experience some behavioral differences because of the specification changes from various J2EE requirements levels. These differences are not related to the adoption of the JCA architecture.

If you have J2EE 1.2 applications using the JDBC API that you wish to run in WebSphere Application Server 6.0, the JDBC CM from Application Server version 4.0 is still provided as a configuration option. Using this configuration option enables J2EE 1.2 applications to run unaltered. If you migrate a Version 4.0 application to Version 6.0, using the Version 6.0 migration tools, the application automatically uses the Version 4.0 connection manager after migration. However, EJB 2.x modules in J2EE 1.3 (or later versions) applications cannot use the JDBC CM from WebSphere Application Server Version 4.0.

Related concepts
Resource adapter

Related tasks
Configuring data access for the Application Client