This version offers many new and exciting improvements, whether
you are new to the product, or making the transition from a prior release.
WebSphere Application Server is a proven, high
performance transaction engine that can help you build, run, integrate and
manage dynamic business applications. It excels as the foundation for a Service
Oriented Architecture, with these main benefits:
- Simple, rapid development and deployment
Improve time to value and make the most of existing technology skills,
with easy to use features designed to get you to production fast.
- Secure and scalable SOA runtime
Rest assured applications and data are safe, and that you can eliminate
lost business opportunities with near continuous uptime for mission-critical
applications.
- Extensible communication services
Increase your return on investment and improve the flexibility of your
business by making application services more reusable and accessible to new
users, in new ways.
- Effective application management
Focus resources on innovation instead of maintenance and reduce the
costs of managing your environment, with effective, easy to use management
tools.
The following topics catalog the most notable new and changed features,
routing you to appropriate information for learning more about each one.
Skip ahead to the details that interest you, or continue reading this
topic to obtain a higher level view first.
Simple, rapid development and deployment
Improve
time to value and make the most of existing technology skills, with easy to
use features designed to get you to production fast. Key features include:
- WebSphere Application Server Toolkit, to help you create, test and deploy
applications, including a rapid deployment feature for testing applications
in the Version 6.0.x runtime environment
- Tight integration with Rational tools for additional application building
functionality
- Java Server Faces, a framework that eases the development of Java based
Web applications
- Service Data Objects, a data-centric, disconnected, XML-integrated, data
access mechanism that provides a source-independent result set
Secure and scalable SOA runtime
Rest assured applications
and data are safe, and that you can eliminate lost business opportunities
with near continuous uptime for mission-critical applications.
- J2EE 1.4, which makes it easier to develop and deploy applications using
industry standard tools
- Web Services Security, with broad support for Web services security specifications
and architectural support for plugging in and extending the capabilities of
security tokens
- High Availability Manager, which provides
better scaling so more concurrent users can access an application. This can
help reduce administrative and licensing costs for companies and provides
better flexibility to quickly bring additional user resources on board.
- A unified clustering framework that brings
workload balancing, dependability, and other benefits to the application servers
in your heterogeneous environment
Extensible communication services
Increase your
return on investment and improve the flexibility of your business by making
application services more reusable and accessible to new users, in new ways.
- Powerful messaging engine. JMS support enables applications to exchange
messages asynchronously with other JMS clients by using JMS destinations (queues
or topics)
- Extensive Web services support, which makes it easier to integrate applications
inside the enterprise as well as externally with customers, partners and suppliers
- Tight integration with WebSphere MQ for diverse environments
- Ability to plug in the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus for service mediation
Effective application management
Focus resources
on innovation instead of maintenance and reduce the costs of managing your
environment, with effective, easy to use management tools.
- Web based administrative console
- Java Management eXtensions (JMX)
- Tivoli Performance Viewer
- Tight integration with Tivoli software
Improved platform consistency
This
is the first release in which all platforms have been made available at the
same time, with the same feature-functionality. Common code and delivery
enhance the mobility of applications. You can now deploy your applications
on the platforms best suited to your needs, without delay or trade-off.