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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012 TrademarksWhat's new in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 of 16

What's new in WebSphere Application ServerV8.5Tom AlcottSenior Technical Staff MemberIBM

Skill Level: Introductory

Date: 20 Jun 2012(Updated Aug 2012)

IBM® WebSphere® Application Server V8.5 is a major release that offersdramatic run time improvements, plus simpler and easier ways to develop anddeploy applications. This article presents a high level glimpse of some of the newtechnical features and enhancements that make these improvements possible.

IntroductionThe new features, functions, and improvements in IBM WebSphere ApplicationServer V8.5 address the key areas of Developer Experience, Application Resiliencyand Operation and Control.

Likely the most notable new function is the WebSphere Application Server profilecalled Liberty, or more correctly, the Liberty profile. The use of the term “Liberty”is intended to denote the freedom that this new profile provides from a monolithicapplication server runtime. No doubt it’s a coincidence that WebSphere ApplicationServer V8.5 becomes generally available on June 15, 2012, which is also theanniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta (on June 15, 1215). Although thehistorical significance of the Liberty profile might not equal that of the Magna Carta,it’s hard not to be swept up in all the interest and excitement about this new feature!

Of course there’s much more to WebSphere Application Server V8.5 beyond theLiberty profile, including significant new features for administration and operationsstaff, such as the Intelligent Management functions from IBM WebSphere VirtualEnterprise that can minimize end-user outages, plus maximize operational monitoringand control of the production environment. There are also enhancements to theJava™ Batch function that was delivered in WebSphere Application Server V8, aswell as other functions to improve operations control and staff efficiency.

The sections that follow describe many of the major new functions you'll find in thislatest release of WebSphere Application Server.

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What's new in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 of 16

Developer Experience

New features and enhancements in this area include:

• Lilberty profile• OSGi Blueprint specification• Java SE 7• IDE options• Web 2.0 and mobile• Application migration

Liberty profile

Leading off the list of developer experience features in WebSphere ApplicationServer V8.5 is the Liberty profile. The Liberty profile is a new dynamic profile. Unlikethe traditional WebSphere Application Server static profile runtime feature, Libertyadapts to the requirements of the application in a very fine-grained manner, ensuringthat only the necessary application container functions are started. Doing so givesyou the “liberty” to deploy web applications with across-the-board requirements, andprovides all the required components, such as security, transaction management,connection pooling, and persistence via JPA or JDBC.

As Liberty is a dynamic profile, central to this dynamic runtime is a new kernelthat leverages OSGi to load the application-required API and runtime features.While WebSphere Application Server has had an OSGi-based runtime sinceV6.1, the Liberty profile in V8.5 actually leverages OSGi. The result is a smallapplication server process memory footprint – normally smaller than 60MB forweb applications -- which typically starts in less than 5 seconds.

The difference between the Liberty profile runtime and the traditional WebSphereApplication Server profile runtime is depicted in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. WebSphere Application Server profile runtime and Liberty profileruntime comparison

The API feature set in the WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Liberty profile isfocused on web-based applications and provides support for:

• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 4.0• Java Persistence (JPA) API 2.0• JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0• JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.2• Servlet 3.0• JAX-RS 1.1 (and JSON4J ).

Aside from the API features, additional runtime features include:

• OSGi Blueprint 4.2 container• Java Management Extensions (JMX)• Java Transaction API (JTA) 1.1• Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI)• Session Distribution via database persistence• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) .• Security, using a file-based user registry or an (LDAP) user registry• Web security• z/OS® security, supported by the z/OS System Authorization Facility (SAF).

If you're looking for even more web and enterprise application APIs, it’s reasonableto expect that the API and runtime features available for the Liberty profile will evolveover time.



The Liberty profile also provides a radically simplified server runtimeconfiguration. This enables the server instance to be configured easily (either insideor outside an Eclipse environment) with a single XML file covering all aspects of theserver, the applications, and the resources required by the applications. This makesit easy to share configurations across development teams and environments. Thesimplified single XML configuration for the Liberty profile is depicted in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Liberty XML configuration file

The Liberty profile also offers several options for installation. You can use eithera simple unzip, the IBM Installation Manager, or the WebSphere Application ServerNetwork Deployment V8.5 Job Manager to distribute and install Liberty binaries.

While a discussion of the Job Manager and Liberty is more of an operationsdiscussion than a development discussion, it is in the interest of continuity withrespect to Liberty that we discuss that now.

Jobs specific to Liberty configuration and application management have been addedto the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.5 Job Manager,including Liberty profile installation, as well as application installation, update, anduninstall. Consistent with the modular Liberty architecture, the Liberty runtime (andconfiguration) or the Java SDK, or applications running on a Liberty profile, can bedistributed either together or individually, both initially, or as an update, providing veryfine grained management. An example of this is depicted in Figure 3.



Figure 3. Liberty installation and update with the Job Manager

Other Job Manager jobs are available to start and stop Liberty servers, as well asto generate and merge HTTP server plugin configuration files from Liberty servers.In addition, the Liberty management jobs are also available from the WebSphereApplication Server Network Deployment deployment manager (in addition to the non-Liberty specific job types).

Finally, with respect to the Liberty profile, there’s also a great deal of flexibility inselecting a JDK for use on Windows®, Linux®, and Mac OS (Mac OS is supportedfor development only).

OSGi Blueprint specification

Beyond the Liberty profile another core enhancement in WebSphere ApplicationServer V8.5 is the addition of support for EJB Bundles to the OSGi Blueprintspecification in WebSphere Application Server V8.0. This enables OSGi applicationbundles to contain Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components. The enterprise beansin your OSGi bundles can be stateful, stateless, and singleton enterprise beansas well as message-driven beans (MDBs). Deployment and configuration of anOSGi application bundle that contains enterprise beans is similar to the existingWebSphere Application Server V8.0 capability using either the administrative consoleor the wsadmin scripting interface.

Java SE 7

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 also includes the option to use Java 7 SE, whichoffers a number of the Java SE API additions that were added via the OpenJDKproject, Project Coin:

• Comparison of a string literal in a switch; for example:case “one”: <do something>; break;)

• Binary integral literals (for example, 0b10011010) and underscores in numericliterals to help visual blocking (for example, 34_409_066).



• Simplified Varargs Methods Warnings (for example, @SafeVarargs annotationto remove warnings on safe varargs method declarations and invocations).

• Multiple try catch blocks specific to handling; for example:try { } catch(Exception|Error a) { handle(a); }.

• Improved type inference for generic instance creation. For example:Map<String,MyType> foo = new HashMap<String,MyType>();

becomesMap<String,MyType> foo = new HashMap<>();

.

Other improvements in Java 7 SE include:

• Non-blocking I/O 2 (NIO.2) provides additional application control over how I/Ooperations are handled, enabling better scaling.

• Automatic Resource Management (ARM) in which the Java compiler willautomatically close statements and connections to external resources, whichcan alleviate problems with error handling and resource control, thus avoidingresource leaks.

IDE options

There are also new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) options forWebSphere Application Server V8.5, beginning with the WebSphere ApplicationServer Developer Tools for Eclipse, which is an Eclipse plugin that delivers alightweight set of tools for developing, assembling, and deploying Java EE, OSGi,Web 2.0, and mobile applications to WebSphere Application Server, including theLiberty profile. The Developer Tools for Eclipse is freely available from the EclipseMarketplace with an option to purchase support.

In addition, IBM Rational® Application Developer V8.5 provides a completeenvironment for enterprise development for Java, Java EE, web, web services,SOA, OSGi, and WebSphere Portal designers and developers. Rational ApplicationDeveloper V8.5 extends the Java EE, OSGi, and Web 2.0 capability of the DeveloperTools for Eclipse by adding support for portlet and portal applications, SCAapplications, application static analysis, and application performance profiling, as wellas team debug and code control.

Web 2.0 and mobile

In WebSphere Application Server V8.5, mobile web application development isenabled using the Web 2.0 and Mobile Toolkit, which integrates the functionspreviously delivered in the WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web2.0 and Mobile. While delivery of this critical development capability has changed,what hasn’t changed is the ability to create and deliver mobile applications based onstandard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, which enableapplications to run in a mobile device browser with a native device look and feel.



Application migrationWebSphere Application Server V8.5 also improves upon the Application MigrationTool (AMT) that was delivered during the WebSphere Application Server V7 servicecycle. The AMT V3.5 is available as a free plugin for both Eclipse and RationalApplication Developer. Version 3.0 of the AMT adds support for the migration ofApache Tomcat applications to WebSphere Application Server, and also analyzessource code to find potential WebSphere version-to-version migration problems, suchas:

• Removed features• Deprecated features• Behavior changes• JRE 5, JRE 6, and JRE 7 differences• Java EE specification changes or enforcements.

The ability of the AMT to either make application changes or provide guidance onhow to make required changes results in application migration occurring two-to-three times faster than an unassisted migration. AMT V3.5 can be used to migrateapplications from WebSphere Application Server V5.1, V6, V6.1 — as well asapplications from Apache Tomcat, JBoss, Oracle® Application Server, and OracleWebLogic Server — to WebSphere Application Server V8.5, V8 and V7.

Application ResiliencyNew features and enhancements in this area include:

• Intelligent Management• Messaging

Intelligent ManagementThe biggest news under the theme of Application Resiliency is probably theintegration of the features from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise into WebSphereApplication Server Network Deployment V8.5. This merge allows for a singleWebSphere Application Server Network Deployment installation to deliver thetraditional Network Deployment functions, as well as WebSphere Virtual Enterprisefunctions. The former WebSphere Virtual Enterprise functions now in NetworkDeployment V8.5 are characterized as Intelligent Management features andencompass:

• Intelligent routing• Application edition management• Dynamic clustering• Health management

Intelligent routing

It’s easiest to start a discussion of Intelligent Management by referring to the mostvisible component, the On Demand Router (ODR), which is a specialized Java-



based proxy server that classifies incoming requests, and then dispatches therequests across the application server environment. The ODR and its function isdepicted in Figure 4, which for simplicty does not depict an HTTP server or ReverseProxy Server that is used to send requests to the ODR.

Figure 4. On Demand Router function

The ODR classifies incoming HTTP and SIP requests and then works in conjunctionwith other Intelligent Management “decision makers” to route workload in order toinsure that the highest priority is given to business critical applications. Requestsare prioritized and routed based upon administrator-defined rules, called servicepolicies, which are used to specify application response time goals.

Service policy response time goals need to be consistent with the responsetime that the application can deliver. Intelligent Management does not makepoorly written and architected applications run faster!

These goals are then used to distribute requests, as well as to control the number ofapplication servers associated with an application using the dynamic clusters functionof Intelligent Management. With dynamic clusters the WebSphere ApplicationServer decision makers can automatically scale up and down the number of runningcluster members as needed in order to meet response time goals for your users.You can leverage overload protection to limit the rate at which the On DemandRouter forwards traffic to application servers to prevent heap exhaustion, CPUexhaustion, or both types of exhaustion from occurring. The ODR can momentarilyqueue requests for less important applications so that requests from more importantapplications are handled more quickly.

A final note on ODR function and architecture, as with the omission of an HTTPserver from Figure 4, only a single ODR is depicted instead of the normal cluster ofODRs for simplicity

Application edition management



Application edition management enables management of interruption-freeproduction application deployments. Using this feature, you can validate a newedition of an application in your production environment without affecting users,and upgrade your applications without incurring user outages. You can also runmultiple editions of a single application concurrently, directing different users todifferent editions, as the ODR maintains not only traditional application state (forexample, HTTP session) affinity, but also application version affinity. The abilityto queue requests is also employed with the Intelligent Management applicationedition function if an “atomic” application update that allows pre-provisioning of anew application version, and an “atomic” update of all users from the old applicationversion to the new application version, is desired.

Health management

Intelligent Management provides a health management feature to monitor thestatus of your application servers, as well as sense and respond to problem areasbefore an outage occurs. You can manage the health of your application servingenvironment with a policy-driven approach that enables specific actions to occurwhen monitored criteria are met. For example, when memory usage exceeds apercentage of the heap size for a specified time, health actions can run to correct thesituation.

Aside from the predefined health conditions and health actions, both of these can becustomized for conditions and operational requirements specific to your environment.As an example, if a memory leak is detected, a replacement application serverinstance can be started, workload can be directed to the replacement applicationserver, the application server can be placed into maintenance mode, (meaning norequests are sent to it), all of which enables offline diagnostics (for example, threaddump, heap dump) to be performed either manually or automatically (as part of thehealth action). And yes, the administrative or operations staff can automatically benotified via email when the Intelligent Management runtime detects a problem.

MessagingAnother important aspect of Application Resiliency in WebSphere Application ServerV8.5 are the improvements to the WebSphere Application Server messagingengine, which is the embedded JMS provider in each application server instance.

First is the change from the use of long running or persistent database locks toshort locks by the active messaging engine on the SIBOWNER table. Instead ofpermanent locks, table ownership is periodically revalidated, which, in turn, permitsthe database administrator access to the tables used by the messaging engine,while at the same time insuring that only a single messaging engine is consumingmessages from a message queue, insuring message delivery ordering.

A number of changes have been made to provide for message engine instanceisolation from the application server. As a result, if the messaging engine in an



application server hangs, the messaging engine can be switched to anotherapplication server and the applications running in the application server with the“hung” messaging engine can continue to function. Another improvement related toisolation is the ability of the messaging engine to stop and restart when a databaseconnection error is encountered, rather than requiring a restart of the applicationserver JVM.

The messaging engine also can be automatically restarted (or re-enabled) if itenters a disabled state. This makes administration much easier in a large NetworkDeployment cluster because administratively determining the disabled messagingengine can be cumbersome in a large environment.

Another vexing issue, redelivery of poison messages after an application serverrestart has been dealt with in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 as well. This isaccomplished by persisting the JMS message re-delivery count, thus preventing apoison message from hanging a messaging engine (and application server), onlyto have the messaging engine (and application server) hang upon restart whenattempting to process the same poison message.

A new administrative command, recoverMEConfig, has been added in V8.5 toenable a messaging engine to recover messages from an orphaned persistentmessage store. As a result, in the event of a catastrophic loss of a physical server(or data center!), if the persistent message data is available, it’s now easy to recoverthe data from the persistent message store. When this new command is run, a newmessaging engine reads the UUID of the old messaging engine from the messagestore and assumes ownership of records associated with that UUID.

There have also been improvements to the messaging engine code base to betterleverage multiple core CPUs for quicker messaging engine start-up when a largenumber of messages and destinations are present.

While on the subject of performance, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the overallperformance improvements in WebSphere Application Server V8.5. Based uponour April 2012 SPECjEnterprise 2010 benchmark submissions (3), WebSphereApplication Server V.8.5 is 70% faster then WebSphere Application Server V8.0 onthe same hardware, as shown in Figure 5, which also depicts the SPECjEnterprise2010 performance for WebSphere Application Server V7 as well.



Figure 5. WebSphere Application Server SPECjEnterprise Performance

This improved performance is the result of many improvements across the boardin many application server components. In V8.5, performance improvements wererealized in:

• JDK (Java 7 SE versus Java 6 SE)• JPA 2.0 persistence layer• Web container• JSP engine• EJB container• Connection management for J2C/RRA• JMS messaging optimizations.

Another new Application Resiliency feature in WebSphere Application Server V8.5is the new capability to detect memory leaks, as well as the ability to mitigatememory leak impact when stopping application servers, which, in some cases, canactually prevent leaks by clearing application memory references in certain cases,as well as to receive leak warnings and get heap/system dumps when a leak hasoccurred.

Operation and Control

New features and enhancements in this area include:

• Selectable JDK• Security• Track admin changes• Java Batch



• Cross Component Trace (XCT)• Logging• Data Collector

Selectable JDK

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 introduces selectable JDK, which is managedusing the managesdk command to specify the JDK used by a WebSphereApplication Server profile. This enables management of an environment that iscomposed of both Java 6 SE and Java 7 SE, so some portion of your topologycan run on Java 7 SE while the remainder can run on Java 6 SE. The managesdkcommand can be used to switch to Java 7 SE or back to Java 6 SE, as needed. Java7 SE is an optional install in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 that can be usedwith either the Liberty profile or the full-functioned WebSphere Application Serverprofile.

Security

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 contains several OSGi Blueprint securityimprovements that are delivered as part of the EJB support in OSGi bundles,discussed earlier. These security improvements include:

• Configuration of bean security in the Blueprint XML file.• Specification of bean-level security in OSGI apps.• Setting method level security in OSGI apps.

Track admin changes

Another new administrative function is the ability to track administrativeconfiguration changes. This function leverages the Extended RepositoryCheckpoint function from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, which writes out a deltarepository each time configuration changes are saved to the WebSphere ApplicationServer configuration repository. The delta repository lists the “before” and “after”configuration elements which can then be used to track configuration changes.

Java Batch

The Java Batch function from WebSphere Application Server V8.0 has beenenhanced in V8.5 to include a Parallel Job Manager that controls parallel jobexecution, including the splitting and merging of jobs. This is a container-managedparallelization providing a “divide and conquer” approach for processing large recordvolumes, which significantly lowers batch processing elapsed time.

Another addition to Java Batch in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 is integrationwith external enterprise schedulers (such as IBM Tivoli® Workload Scheduler)for scheduling and monitoring (for example, IBM Tivoli Composite ApplicationManager (ITCAM) of batch workloads. These additions further improve the batchprogramming, batch container, and batch job management functions alreadyavailable in Java Batch, such as job scheduling and job status checkpoint restart.



Cross Component Trace (XCT)

A completely new administrative function in WebSphere Application Server V8.5 isCross Component Trace (XCT). XCT enables the correlation of log and trace entriescreated by multiple threads or processes on behalf of the same request, and XCTcan augment log and trace entries with a requestID that you can view and filter usingHPEL (Listing 1).

Listing 1. XCT with request ID added[3/18/11 14:50:17:391 EDT] 00000018 W UOW= source=com.ibm.somelogger.QuickLogTestorg= prod= component= thread=[WebContainer : 1] requestID=AAP+k9s6JZ9-AAAAAAAAAAA hello world

XCT can add records to your log and trace files so you can see how work related toeach request branched between all involved threads and processes (Listing 2).

Listing 2. XCT request and response tagging[3/23/12 14:01:40:615 CDT] 00000032 XCT I BEGIN AAP+k9s6JZ9-AAAAAAAAAAA00000000000-cccccccccc2 HTTPCF(InboundRequest /HelloWorld/ RequestContext(828937987))[3/23/12 14:01:40:678 CDT] 00000032 XCT I END AAP+k9s6JZ9-AAAAAAAAAAA00000000000-cccccccccc2 HTTPCF(InboundRequest RC=200 RequestContext(828937987))[3/23/12 14:01:50:381 CDT] 00000032 XCT I BEGIN AAP+k9s6JZ9-AAAAAAAAAAB00000000000-cccccccccc2 HTTPCF(InboundRequest /HelloWorld/ RequestContext(435283455))[3/23/12 14:01:50:443 CDT] 00000032 XCT I END AAP+k9s6JZ9-AAAAAAAAAAB00000000000-cccccccccc2 HTTPCF(InboundRequest RC=200 RequestContext(435283455))

XCT can also be used to view that detailed information on HTTP and JMS requestsand responses to easily debug complicated application problems. The XCT improvesyour ability to diagnose and debug software problems in order to minimize andeliminate application downtime. The XCT log viewer, which is available for the IBMSupport Assistant, can render log and trace content from multiple log and trace filesgrouped by request (Figure 6).

Figure 6. XCT Log Viewer



Logging

High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) has been improved in V8.5 and it nowhas log and trace entry extensions, enabling you to filter entries by applicationname, by request ID, or by other custom fields. HPEL log and trace entries can nowbe extended with name value pair “extensions.” As an example in Listing 3, the JavaEE application name has been added as an extension (called appName) to all logand trace entries created on threads associated with an application.

Listing 3. HPEL Application Name Extension Example

logViewer.sh -includeExtensions appName=ACMEShovels –format advanced...[12/10/11 10:52:01:500 EST] 000001c6 1 UOW= source=com.acme.SomeLoggerthread=[WebContainer : 6] org= prod= component= appName=[ACMEShovels] This is a trace entry from the MyShovels application

When viewing HPEL log and trace, entries can be filtered by appName, requestID, orany other extension via the HPEL logViewer command.

Data Collector

The latest version of the IBM Support Assistant provides a Data Collector, which canquickly collect diagnostic files or run traces that are predefined for WebSphereApplication Server components. This allows for local viewing of diagnostic filesor, optionally, sending the files to IBM product support swiftly, shortening the timerequired to resolve a problem.

Conclusion

IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5 is a major release that offers dramatic runtime improvements, plus simpler and easier ways to develop and deploy applications.This article presented a glimpse at some of the new features and enhancements tohopefully encourage you to explore what else this new release has to offer.



Resources• Minimum supported Java levels• SPECjEnterprise 2010 Results• Configuring the Memory Leak Policy• WebSphere Application Server V8.5 product information• Liberty Profile• WebSphere Application Server V8.5 trial download• IBM developerWorks WebSphere

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/wsbroker/redirect?version=phil&product=was-nd-dist&topic=rwlp_restrict

http://www.spec.org/jEnterprise2010/results/

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/wsbroker/redirect?version=phil&product=was-nd-dist&topic=ttrb_configmemleak

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/features/

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/wasdev/entry/home?lang=en

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ws/was/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/



About the author

Tom Alcott

Tom Alcott is Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) for IBM in theUnited States. He has been a member of the Worldwide WebSphereTechnical Sales Support team since its inception in 1998. In this role,he spends most of his time trying to stay one page ahead of customersin the manual. Before he started working with WebSphere, he wasa systems engineer for IBM's Transarc Lab supporting TXSeries.His background includes over 20 years of application design anddevelopment on both mainframe-based and distributed systems. He haswritten and presented extensively on a number of WebSphere run timeissues.

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012(www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml)Trademarks(www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/)

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