Enhancements and capabilities

Improving WebSphere Application Server's capability offering is something that IBM is very good at. Each new release offers more support for the ever changing JEE specification and industry/community-provided Java APIs. IBM evaluates customer and industry feedback when building new versions of the WAS. These considerations influence how WebSphere supports JEE applications.

Details of new capabilities have been included in this chapter as it is important to have knowledge of what WebSphere actually supports. This is not a book on architecture; it is about administering WebSphere Application Server. However, in your job as a WebSphere administrator, you will need to provide a WebSphere environment designed by architects to support applications built by developers, who will have incorporated new JEE features in the application(s) requiring deployment. You will find yourself setting up resources to support these new APIs. You will also often find yourself debugging applications, which may not be running correctly due to conflicts of APIs packaged in the application with those already provided by WebSphere within its internals.

Note

If you require an in-depth view of what's new in WAS 8, it is recommended you visit the official WAS 8 features page at the following URL: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/features/. It is also good practice to review the product data sheet, which can be downloaded from the aforementioned URL.

Support for industry standards

Architects require common standards. Because IBM continually welcomes and supports new development and design approaches within the JEE application community, it gives architects the confidence that any inter-communicating systems they design for WAS 8 will communicate and work with external systems with much less effort.

An enterprise will contain many third-party systems and interfaces. By using WAS 8, companies can feel confident that their design approach will be consistent with other industry solutions, standards, and practices. This allows for quicker integration due to the fact that systems will require less design and development to interface the third-party products and systems, that is fewer barriers to integration and interconnectivity.

The following table gives a summary of key standards that WebSphere 8 supports:

Standard	Description
Java EE 6 programming model	Compliance with the latest Java EE specification, which delivers ease of use and productivity enhancements. Updates also include performance, security, and reliability enhancements delivered by the IBM Java SDK 6.0 (J9 2.6).
OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative)	WAS 8 has updated optimized support for applications, which are designed to use OSGi, and it supports integrated bundle support. OSGi is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language. It implements a complete and dynamic component model allowing application components to be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated, and uninstalled without requiring a reboot. It also allows an application to be dynamically extended. WebSphere implements the OSGi framework within the installation process and internal configuration.
Web 2.0	WAS 8 provides Web 2.0 to SOA connectivity allowing Ajax-based clients and mash-ups to leverage external web services, internal SOA services, and JEE assets across the enterprise. Web 2.0 in itself is not a technology, rather a change in the approach in which software developers implement standards, models, and APIs, and the way in which end-users use web-based applications. It is hard to get exact agreement on the definition of Web 2.0, but we see it every day in the rich applications coming forth and making our web experience more dynamic. JEE vendors provide features and APIs that make Web 2.0 programming easier by removing some of the hard boundaries between web-based systems and APIs; hence, Web 2.0 is often mentioned as part of the feature set of an application server like WebSphere.
Java batch	Reuse existing skills to quickly and cost-effectively develop, deploy, and manage batch applications.
IBM SDK	Security, performance, and reliability enhancements to IBM SDK 6.0.
Service Component Architecture (SCA)	As part of the larger SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Foundation which is incorporated into all of the IBM software brands, SCA (Service Component Architecture) capable products, such as the WebSphere Application Server, allow architectures to benefit from the decoupling of service implementation from the details of the infrastructure. Put simply, SCA is a set of specifications which describe a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture. SCA extends and complements previous approaches to implementing services, and builds on open standards such as Web Services. What this means to larger organizations is that their Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementations can leverage SCA with WebSphere since its design adheres to and supports industry-recommended best practice.
Communications Enabled Applications (CEA)	CEA provides a new style of application to the community. It leverages the JSR 289 standard for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) support and provides template JavaScript widgets out-of-the-box, which are fully customizable via CSS and can be embedded into existing web and Java applications.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)	SIP is an industry standard suite of protocols that can be used to establish, modify, and terminate voice sessions, and is often seen in call-me now applications. Simply put, it is a standard by which voice and video media services are incorporated into JEE applications running on WAS.
JPA (Java Persistence API)	JPA provides a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) standard and ORM (Object Relational Mapping) for data persistence among applications. JPA was defined as part of the EJB 3.0 specification as a replacement for the EJB 2 CMP Entity Beans specification. Most of the persistence vendors have released implementations of JPA, confirming its adoption by the industry and users, including Oracle TopLink, Oracle Kodo, JDO (Java Data Objects) and of course the well-known Spring Hibernate.
SAM (Simple Asynchronous Messaging )	SAM, otherwise known as "extension" provides interfaces to the IBM Messaging and Queuing middleware products using a set of libraries and some client-side code referred to as XMS. The IBM Message Service Client is an Application Programming Interface (API) that is consistent with the Java Message Service (JMS) API and is often used with client technologies like PHP. Applications using SAM can exchange messages between other Message Service Client applications with minimal effort, which allows Open Source web-based programs to benefit and easily co-exist with IBM messaging.
SDO (Service Data Objects)	Service Data Objects is a newer model for data access developed jointly by IBM and BEA (now Oracle), and standardized with the JSR235 standard, providing a common framework for data application development. Developers no longer need to be familiar with technology-specific APIs. By employing SDO, they can access data from multiple data sources, including relational databases, entity EJB components, XML pages, Web services, the Java Connector Architecture (JCA), and JavaServer Pages (via Java Servlet API).

New features

There have been many internal product improvements for efficiency in both resource management and administration time saving. The following table gives an overview of new enhancements to WAS realized in version 8:

Feature/Capability	Description
Monitored deployments	New monitored directory-based application install, update, and uninstall of Java EE application.
HPEL	New High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) problem determination tools and enhanced security and administration features to improve administrator productivity and control.
Updated installation process	New simplified install and maintenance through IBM Installation Manager to improve efficiency and control.
Workload efficiency	Run the same workload on fewer servers, creating savings of 30 percent due to updates in the performance for EJB and web services.
Improved performance and high availability with WebSphere MQ	Messaging is a key part of any enterprise both in Java's JMS and IBM's specific messaging platform called WebSphere MQ. WAS continues to provide ease of integration with MQ.
Security hardening	Security domains have been improved to offer more secure protection for services provided by WAS. Simplified exchange of user identity and attributes in Web Services using Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) as defined in the OASIS Web Services Security SAML Token Profile Version 1.1. SAML assertions represent user identity and user security attributes, and optionally to sign and to encrypt SOAP message elements. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business and web service standards. Web Services Security API (WSS API) and WS-Trust support in JAX-WS to enable customers building single sign on Web services-based applications. The WSS API supports Security token types and deriving keys for signing, signature and verification, encryption, and decryption.
Security auditing enhancements	Auditable security events are security events that have audit instrumentation added to the security run time code to enable them to be recorded to logs for review. Enhanced cookie support to reduce cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and also better support for security, for example, SSO (Single Sign On) and LPTA (Lightweight Third Party Authentication). Enhanced security configuration reporting, including session security and Web attributes. Additional security features enabled by default. Security enhancements required by Java Servlet 3.0. Java Authentication SPI for Containers (JSR 196) support, which allows third-party authentications for requests or responses destined for web applications. Configure federated repositories at the domain level in a multiple security domain environment.
Performance improvements	JPA L2 cache and JPA L2 cache integration with the DynaCache environment. New caching features functionality for servlet caching, JSP, web services, command cache, and so on.
Improved migration support	Better support for migrating applications deployed to WebSphere Application Server 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0. The command line tools and GUI wizard have been improved.
JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)	New and upgraded providers for database connectivity support for JDBC.

Reference table for supported standards

The following table is a quick reference, listing the new standards mentioned previously as adhered to, or provided, by WebSphere Application Server v8:

Standard	Level	Description
JEE	6.0	Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, or Java EE.
EJB	3.1	Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology is the server-side component architecture for the JEE Platform.
Servlet	3.0	Servlet is a Java class in Java EE that conforms to the Java Servlet API and often generates HTML from Java code.
JCA	1.6	Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) for connecting to legacy systems outside of JDBC.
JSP	2.0	Java Server Pages (JSP) allows HTML pages to have Java code embedded for dynamic HTML generation.
JSF	2.0	Java Server Faces and uses Apache MyFaces 2.0 implementation.
JPA	2.0	Apache OpenJPA 2.0 implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA).
JTA	-	Java Transaction API (JTA) is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs.
SIP	1.1	Voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP).
JMS	-	Java Message Service (JMS) is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs.
JMX	-	The Java Management Extensions (JMX) API is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs.
JDBC	-	Java Database Connection (JDBC) is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs.
RMI	-	Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs.
JavaMail	1.4	JavaMail APIs provide a framework for building mail client applications.
JAF	1.4	JavaMail API requires the JavaBeans Application Framework (JAF).
SSL	3.0	Secure Sockets Layer.
SOAP	1.2	SOAP is a specification for the exchange of XML-based information in distributed environments.
XPath	2.0	XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document.
XSLT	2.0	XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. XSL is a style sheet language for XML.
XQuery	1.0	Intelligent XML search API.
JAX-WS	2.2 (partial)	Java programming language API for creating web services.
JAX-B	2.2	Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) is a Java technology that provides an easy and convenient way to map Java classes and XML schema for simplified development of web services.
CDI	JSR 299	Support for Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) .
JAX-RS	-	API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) is one of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) APIs .