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:
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:
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:
