Collection of ideas and resources on WebSphere and IBM competitive position in the marketplace
IBM WebSphere Application Migration Toolkit has a new feature – it can migrate Tomcat applications and Tomcat configuration to the WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile. The tool is free to download and use for all.
In addition to Tomcat, the tool supports migration of applications from JBoss, WebLogic, OAS, and older versions of WAS into WAS v7 and v8.x.
A couple of weeks ago IBM released a beta of IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile. This is exciting news and brings a robust set of new features. Highlights of this beta update include:
A full list of changes can be found on the New and Noteworthy page of the wasdev.net site.
What I like about Liberty is that the server is so dynamic and lightweight, yet it has significant additional features that you wont find in other lightweight servers (Tomcat or VMware tc Server). Things like JMS, EJB Lite, MDB, JPA, web services, etc. And not only that, but also the ability to do profiling of the server, etc. See examples of such advanced tooling at the link above.
The other nice thing is that Liberty now has clustering and ability to manage multiple servers. All of this without the heavy add-ons, such as full RDBMS and Hyperic required by JBoss JON or tc Server. It is interesting that tc Server download size is 19 MB, yet the admin “console”, which is vFabric Hyperic is 418 MB download and is such a drag to install. Ever worse, in full production you would need to buy licenses of Oracle DB or Postgres to keep all of your admin data. None of those extra megabytes nor costs with Liberty!
I will post detailed comparison of capabilities of Liberty and JBoss and tc Server in near future.
Java Web application developers now have new option with the newly published beta of the WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile. The nicest thing about this is that unit testing your Java applications is now just as quick and easy with WebSphere as it is with Tomcat. This new Liberty profile has the disk and memory footprint similar to Apache Tomcat. And it starts and stops in about the same time – between 1 and 5 seconds – depending on the number of applications deployed.This new Liberty profile has OSGi support, JPA, JDBC, Web applications (JSP, Servlets, JSF), and few other things not found in Tomcat.
The other good news is that you now have a choice between the full featured Rational Application Developer and vanilla Eclipse + IBM WAS plugin. Considering that the license cost for the developer setup of Eclipse + IBM WAS plugin + WAS for Developers is $Zero, and deployment into production version of WAS or WAS ND is transparent, this really leaves no reasons to use Tomcat on your development machine.
Soloman Barghouthi
Eric Berg
Roman Kharkovski