WebSphere Application Server v2.1

Introduction

On 29 July 2008, IBM announced WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V2.1. WebSphere Application Server Community Edition is the IBM open source-based application server that supports the Java EE 5 standard. It's built on Apache Geronimo and integrated with best-of-breed open source technology such as Apache Tomcat, Apache Axis2, and Apache MyFaces. It's Eclipse based development tooling further accelerates application development. It's feature pack for Web 2.0 provides an IBM-supported solution for creating Ajax-based applications and mashups.

What's new?

Custom server assemblies:
Lightweight server assemblies may be created that contain only the functional components required by application(s).

Flexible admin console:
The admin console is now component-based to mirror the server capabilities. This allows the admin console to provide flexible administrative capabilities that will mirrors the capabilities of a custom server assembly.

GShell:
GShell is a command-line processing environment that can be used for the execution of Geronimo commands. GShell is an extensible environment and includes support for editing, command history, and tab completion.

Plan Creator menu:
The Plan Creator wizard is an admin console menu that will help you generate the appropriate deployment plan for the application you are deploying. The wizard currently works for web apps and supports the following features:

References: EJB, EJB Local, JDBC Connection Pool, JMS Connection Factory, JMS Destination, JavaMail Session & Web Service references declared in the web-apps are auto discovered and users are asked to resolve them by listing available Resources in the server environment to which they can be linked.

References declared inside the Java classes through Annotations are also auto discovered.

Simplified configuration of Security.

Clustering Support:
WADI can now be used to support clustering of web applications for Geronimo configurations which use the Tomcat Web Container.

Applications can be deployed to administratively-defined groups of Geronimo servers

Monitoring Console Plugin:
The monitoring console plugin provides monitoring support in the Geronimo admin console. The monitoring console can gather statistics and performance data from multiple Geronimo servers and graphically display this data to users.

Other:
Numerous additional consumability & ease of use enhancements have been made!

Get the detailed scoop on what's new here:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0807_jain/0807_jain.html

Download the code off of our developerWorks site and let us know what you think of our latest release!
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/was/wasce.html