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, ensures consistency each time the application is deployed or WAS configuration is required. Scripting lends to auditing and version control and the ability to do in minutes what could take a human hours - and without human-induced errors. As administrators, our key goals are to deploy new applications and update existing applications and Application Server configurations rapidly without error. IBM has provided administration tools that can run automation scripts. There are two main tools used for automation—one is called wsadmin which uses the Jython and Java Application Control Language (JACL) languages, and ws_ant which uses Ant which is an XML-based Java build language. The wsadmin tool can be used for both deployment and configuration of all areas of WebSphere, whereas ws_ant...