Automation

Automation doesn't come for free; it requires some effort from the administrator, yet the rewards are great. Being able to automate an application deployment allows for the control of naming standards and ensures consistency each time applications are deployed or WAS configurations are made. Scripting also lends to auditing and version control and the ability to do in minutes what could take a human hours, without human-induced errors. As administrators, our key goals are to deploy new applications and update existing applications and administrative configurations rapidly without error. WAS comes with administration tools that can run automation scripts. There are two main tools used for automation—one is called wsadmin, which uses the Jython or JACL (Java Application Control Language) languages and the other is ws_ant, which uses Ant an XML-based Java build language. The wsadmin tool can be used for both deployment and configuration of all areas of WAS, whereas ws_ant is mainly...