WebSphere Application Server

Features

Employs a service orientation to dynamically integrate IT assets within and across enterprises.

Choreographs interactions between reusable services with a fully integrated Web services workflow engine.

Enables advanced transactional connectivity to coordinate interactions with multiple back-end systems across the network.

Provides intelligent, out-of-the-box compensation capabilities to rollback multiple transactions in reverse order if a failure should occur later in a business process.

Leverages business rules to create adaptive applications that can quickly respond to changing business conditions.

Allows the development of flexible applications with which users can dynamically interact by building and submitting queries at runtime.

Works with a highly integrated, Eclipse-based application development environment for building workflows, J2EE artifacts, Web services and sophisticated application adapters.

Delivers J2EE and Web services innovations to tackle some of today's toughest coding challenges.

Reduces time to market by promoting the reuse of services in new applications and by minimizing the disruption in existing applications when changes to individual services are required.

Includes agile deployment capabilities offering developers the tools to optimize performance without impacting source code.

Provides the ability to insatiate back-up server clusters autonomically without writing code.*

Increases application performance and flexibility with Dynamic workload management. This capability allows the system to monitor the workload on each server in a cluster and automatically route the work to a server with the lightest workload.*

• Denotes new capabilities available in WebSphere Application Server Enterprise, V5.0.2

Benefits

WebSphere Application Server Enterprise, Version 5, optimized for use with WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, Version 5, helps you:

• Simplify build-to-integrate tasks - reduce IT complexity, reuse existing resources, and automate business processes through a powerful but simplified build-to-integrate framework.
• Accelerate large-scale application development - leverage the latest innovations that build on today's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards to deploy a high performance e-business infrastructure designed to cut costs, build customer loyalties, promote business agility, and gain a competitive advantage.
• Enable real-time application flexibility - take advantage of dynamic application support that allows you to build applications that can adapt on demand to the ever-changing world of e-business.

Simplify build-to-integrate tasks
Companies today face a growing problem as they begin to explore new e-business initiatives. The past 40 years of IT evolution have left them with an enterprise-computing infrastructure that is heterogeneous, widely distributed, and increasingly complex.

Business logic and application data are scattered throughout the organization across multiple software assets. Much of the business logic resides in databases, packaged applications (such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems), or in back-end systems (such as IBM CICS) offering varying levels of transaction support. Other business logic can be found in existing Java and J2EE applications and Web services. Furthermore, companies face constant pressure to create new applications in order to cut costs, build customer loyalties, and gain a competitive advantage.

Instead of reinventing the wheel with every new application they build, companies need a way to reuse their existing software assets and to leverage the power of Web services in the development of new J2EE-based applications.

WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition help companies reduce IT complexity, reuse existing resources, and automate business processes through a powerful but simplified build-to-integrate framework.

• Service-oriented architecture reduces the complexity of large-scale application development and promotes reuse by offering a standard way of representing and interacting with virtually all software assets.
• Integrated workflow increases development productivity and promotes reuse by enabling developers to visually choreograph interactions between software assets.
• Advanced transactional connectivity capabilities help developers avoid custom coding by providing extended transactional support for the many challenges related to integrating existing software assets with a J2EE environment.

Service-oriented architecture
Building new applications that integrate business logic and application data within the organization and with suppliers, partners, and customers is critical to the success of today's organizations. However, this integration remains complex, expensive, and risky.

A service-oriented architecture leverages open standards to represent virtually all software assets as services including legacy applications, packaged applications, J2EE components or Web services. This approach provides developers with a standard way of representing and interacting with software assets without having to spend time working with unique interfaces and low-level APIs. Furthermore, individual software assets become building blocks that can be reused in developing other applications.

Using this new service-oriented approach to integration, WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition help reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of integration by providing a single, simple architectural framework based on Web services in which to build, deploy, and manage application functionality.

Integrated J2EE-based workflow
Once a developer has created services out of an organization's software assets, the next logical step is to use those assets as part of a business process. Integrated J2EE workflow capabilities offer developers intuitive, flow-based development tools, to take existing software assets and quickly define how those assets are used within a J2EE-based application.

For example, the visual workflow tools can be used to combine inventory information from a packaged ERP application and J2EE components from a previously built customer-facing application with new business logic to create a new Web-based order entry application. The reach of the application can then be extended by exposing it as a Web service for use by business partners or to allow manual intervention for exception handling. The result is faster development of new applications, improved consistency, and lower costs through the reuse of existing IT investments.

• Visual process editor (choreographer) - provides intuitive drag-and-drop tools to easily compose and choreograph application interactions and dynamic workflows among J2EE components, Web services, existing applications, and human activities. Developers can quickly and easily build, debug, and deploy complex applications using powerful workflow tools and advanced messaging capabilities to streamline and automate business processes. New services can be added, or existing services modified without affecting the other components in the business process.
• Human interaction - offers support for including activities that require a person to perform a task as a step in an automated business process. Specialized staff support allows the dynamic assignment of responsibilities based on existing organizational definitions. Worklists can be created to let the designated recipient know that their action is required.
• Event triggering - offers support for including asynchronous events such as Web services or human interactions to be included as part of business processes. Events can be used to trigger the start of a business process, or a business process can be configured to stop and wait for an external event to occur before resuming the process.
• Compensation pairs - provides transaction 'rollback' like support for long running, loosely coupled business processes that cannot be undone automatically by the application server. For example, the compensating transaction for an order that has already started manufacturing might be to put the complete item into inventory (rather than disassembling the item). Compensation pairs allow you to visually define, for each step in your business process, the associated 'undo' service.
• Flexible workflow design - provides developers with the ability to design workflows using a top-down, bottom-up, or meet-in-the-middle approach. Using top-down, developers can create skeleton processes that choreograph the sequence of events in a workflow without worrying about the underlying implementation. Building from the bottom-up, developers first create the individual components and then use them as building blocks to define a workflow. Meet-in-the-middle offers the flexibility of using both approaches at the same time.

Advanced Transactional Connectivity
Since its inception, the J2EE platform has made huge strides in providing enterprise level support for integration including support for messaging, security, and database access. The Java Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.0 standard begins to offer support for integrating with packaged and legacy applications. However, due to lack of adherence to data standards and limited transactional support, integrating with most back-end resources and legacy data can still be extremely difficult and risky.

WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition offer advanced transactional capabilities to help developers avoid custom coding by providing support for the many challenges related to integrating existing software assets with a J2EE environment.

• Dynamic application adapter support - offers the ability to build and deploy rich, open standards-based application adapters for popular Enterprise Information Systems such as SAP and IBM CICS.
• Last participant support - provides automated coordination for transactions that include two-phase commit resources and a single one-phase commit resource. This support eliminates hand coding in this scenario and allows you to include one-phase commit resources, common for many legacy and package applications, in real transactions.
• Activity session services - provide the ability to extend the scope of, and group, multiple local transactions. These local transactions can then be committed based on deployment criteria or through explicit program logic. This ability reduces the complexity of dealing with commitment rules and limitations associated with one-phase commit resources.
• CORBA C++ Software Development Kit (SDK) - used for integrating various C++ assets. This lets C++ clients invoke J2EE components using CORBA technology and also lets WebSphere applications incorporate C++ assets behind CORBA wrappers.

Accelerate large-scale application development
Companies today strive to respond with flexibility and speed to customer demands, market opportunities, and external threats. However, for most companies, the time, cost, and complexity of large-scale application development make this goal extremely difficult to achieve.

WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition leverage the latest innovations that build on today's J2EE standards to help you deploy a high performance e-business infrastructure designed to cut costs, build customer loyalties, promote business agility, and gain a competitive advantage.

• Optimize application performance - use powerful application profiling techniques, sophisticated deployment management, and advanced support for Web services to optimize performance and minimize downtime for applications that require highly available, high volume, multi-server environments.
• Enable 'next generation' development - leverage the latest innovations that build on today's J2EE standards to achieve greater control over application development, execution, and performance than ever possible before.
• Increase development productivity - take advantage of supported, pre-built, J2EE-based solutions to many of today's biggest programming challenges.

Optimize Application Performance
Increasingly, organizations are using Web applications both internally and externally to incorporate customers, partners and suppliers into their business processes. For these mission critical processes, application performance can make the difference between competitive advantage and failure to compete. WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition help you optimize performance and minimize downtime for applications that require highly available, high volume, multi-server environments, back-up clustering through powerful application profiling techniques, sophisticated deployment management, and advanced support for Web services.

• Application profiling - delivers powerful new capabilities that allow you to carefully optimize the performance of applications without any impact on source code. This capability offers a mechanism for specifying the access intent of persistent entity EJBs allowing them to interact with the runtime infrastructure, such as a database, differently depending on the access intent (for example read vs. update) of the application that calls it. The result is unprecedented control in defining strategies that dynamically control concurrency, pre-fetch and read-ahead.
• Deployment manager - addresses the needs of highly available, high volume, multi-server environments through enhanced workload management and dynamic caching, centralized security capabilities and performance management tools that distribute workload across multiple servers through sophisticated load balancing and clustering capabilities. The deployment manager also enables isolation of application servers to avoid single points of failure and provides first failure data capture to report and analyze problems as they occur.
• Advanced Web services support - offers advanced support for Web services including a UDDI Registry that acts as a repository that allows storage of business units that describe basic Web services and a Web Services Gateway that enables Web services invocation by users from outside the firewall with the benefit of robust security protection. Advanced Web services support also extends the Web Services Gateway by providing a programming model that allows you to use the gateway in large-scale Web services implementations to serve as a bi-directional control point for critical tasks such as validation, logging, transformation, auditing, and metering.
• Edge Components - delivers additional load balancing and caching capabilities based on WebSphere Edge Server. The load-balancing component provides a scalable solution for distributing and routing HTTP, servlet, and EJB requests. Custom advisors can be used to load-balance requests based on unique application and platform criteria. To extend the load balancing capabilities, consultant code can be used to optimize server performance within a Cisco or Nortel Networks infrastructure. Enhanced Caching improves response time by offloading back-end servers and peering links. Edge Side Includes (ESI) technology is a simple mark-up language for the dynamic assembly of Web page fragments, such as stock quotes and individual catalog prices. By leveraging ESI technology, dynamic content caching is extended by moving fragments from the Application Server to a proxy server that resides in the network.
• Back-up Clusters - available only in WebSphere Application Server Enterprise, customers can now automatically configure their system to back-up existing server clusters making them available automatically if the primary cluster fails--without having to write any code. If a cluster goes down, the workload is automatically sent to another cluster elsewhere in your network.
• Dynamic Workload Management - as part of IBM's commitment to grid computing and Adaptive Server Technology, this technology dramatically increases application performance and utilization of server resources by acting as an intelligent 'traffic cop' within an application server cluster. Traditionally, applications running on a cluster of servers are handled in a round-robin fashion; workload is directed to servers in a fixed sequence, regardless of which servers are busy. With WebSphere Application Server Enterprise, the system can monitor the workload on each server in the cluster and automatically route the application to one with the lightest workload.

Enables 'next generation' development
Ironically, J2EE's main advantage, its specification, can also be its biggest disadvantage for developers building applications that require them to have more control over their applications than the J2EE specification provides. For those developers, WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition enable 'next generation' development by leveraging the latest innovations that build on today's J2EE standards to provide greater control over application development, execution, and performance than ever possible before.

• Asynchronous beans - offer exceptional performance enhancements for resource intensive tasks by enabling a single request to be executed as multiple tasks or threads processed in parallel within the J2EE environment. Asynchronous scheduling facilities can also be used to process parallel processing requests in 'batch mode' at a designated time.
• Startup beans - allow business logic to be automatically executed when an application starts or stops. For example, they might be used to pre-fill application specific caches, initialize application level connection pools, or perform other application specific initialization and termination procedures.
• Scheduler service - helps minimize IT costs and increase application speed and responsiveness by maximizing utilization of existing computing resources. The scheduler service provides the ability to process workloads using parallel processing, set specific transactions as high priority, and schedule less time sensitive tasks to process during low traffic off hours.
• Object pools - increase application performance by allowing instances of objects to be reused, reducing the overhead associated with the instantiating and garbage collecting the objects. Creating an object pool allows an application to obtain an instance of a Java object and return the instance to the pool when it has finished using it.

Increase development productivity
The time required to roll out new applications is a key concern across all industries. One way to help improve developer productivity is to reduce the need for handcrafted solutions that can be time-consuming, costly, and difficult to maintain. WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition can improve developer productivity by leveraging the latest innovations that build on today's J2EE standards to provide supported, prebuilt solutions to many of these challenges.

Extended messaging - allows you to quickly create applications that integrate with other systems through a messaging infrastructure. This capability offers automated support for outbound (as well as inbound) messaging, allowing you to focus on business logic instead of complex messaging APIs. Handcrafting Java Message Service (JMS) code is no longer required. WebSphere Application Server Enterprise includes WebSphere MQ® and WebSphere MQ Event Broker (under limited terms and conditions) to further extend your Java messaging infrastructure to take advantage of both programs' qualities of service and to enable seamless integration with existing MQ infrastructures.

• Internationalization service - allows you automatically recognize the calling client's time zone and location information so your application can act appropriately. This technology allows you to deliver to each user, around the world, the right date and time information, the appropriate currencies and languages, and the correct date and decimal formats.
• Work areas - provides a 'global variable' like ability to efficiently share information across a distributed application. For example, you might want to add profile information as each customer enters your application. By placing this information in a work area via numerous application interfaces, it will be available throughout your distributed application and eliminate the need to hand-code a solution or to read and write information to a database.
• Cheat sheets - make new or complex tasks easy by providing a checklist for common development patterns. The cheat sheet invokes each step in the checklist and provides detailed online help for each step, as you need it.
• Best-in-class IDE - included with WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition is a fully integrated application development environment for creating and maintaining J2EE applications and Web services. Built on Eclipse V2 innovations and written to J2EE specifications, WebSphere Application Developer Integration Edition helps optimize and simplify J2EE application development with best practices, visual tools, templates, code generation, and the most comprehensive development environment in its class.

Enable real-time application flexibility
Maintaining competitive advantage in today's changing business environment requires companies to respond quickly to customer demands, market opportunities and external threats. Very often this means making frequent updates to e-business applications to reflect changes in market conditions or to provide access to strategic information. Unfortunately, these updates usually take a great deal of time. Time to bring down the application, time to make programming changes, times to test the new application, and time to redeploy.
To enable real-time application flexibility, WebSphere Application Server Enterprise and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition offer dynamic application support to enable you to build applications that can easily adapt to the ever-changing world of e-business on demand.

Business rule beans - offer a powerful real-time framework for defining, executing, and managing business rules that encapsulate business policies that vary based on changes in the business environment. For example, a simple business rule might be, 'If a customer's shopping cart is greater than $X, then offer a Y% discount.' Once the business rule is defined, a developer or a business analyst can update the business rule at runtime using a straightforward user interface without the need to bring the application or server down.
Dynamic query service - delivers unprecedented application flexibility by allowing you to dynamically build and submit queries that select, sort, join, and perform calculations on application data at runtime. Dynamic query service provides the ability to pass in and process Enterprise JavaBeans query language (EJB QL) queries at runtime eliminating the need, as with today's EJB 2.0 standards, to hard-code required queries into the deployment descriptors during development.