Application services
IBM WebSphere Application Server provides essential services to ease the building of dynamic and flexible e-business applications. These services support and extend the open standards of J2EE and Web services, with a focus on application reuse and integration.
The WebSphere Application Server product provides class-loading modes, policies, and features to enable you to deploy and run your applications successfully.
The class-loader mode setting enables you to control whether application class loaders override classes contained in base run-time class loaders. By default, the WebSphere Application Server class loaders have a class-loader mode of PARENT_FIRST, which is the standard JDK mode and does not allow the application class loader to override classes. You must take care when using the PARENT_LAST class-loader mode to make all dependent classes available within the application or you might get LinkageErrors or other class-loader exceptions. For example, if you provide a newer version of the Xerces.jar file and your application is using XSLT, you must also provide a xalan.jar file within your application.
If your application component must support multiple locales, the localizable-text API can help both developers and administrators through central management of displayed strings. The developer separates strings into a message catalog, which is then translated into the other languages required. All message catalogs are then deployed with the application component. From then on, the administrator can add or update message catalogs centrally as required. For more information about internationalization support, see Internationalizing applications.