WebSphere 5.0's new capabilities promise impressive payoffs for the enterprise, according to Candle Corp. Senior Architect Warren Macek. During the ebizQ webinar Best Practices for Optimizing IBM's WebSphere Application Server, he detailed numerous ways to ensure 5.0's peak performance.

Macek began the presentation -- part of ebizQ's Best Practices for IBM WebSphere Software series, sponsored by Candle -- with an overview of the new WAS 5.0 packages, components and administrative features that play an integral role in setting up and running WAS servers.

"It's important to get a good baseline of what all the various pieces are and how they work with each other and what comes with each package, and what development tools actually work with each package," he noted.

Good Things in Progressively Stronger Packages

Web Sphere Application Server Express includes a run-time version of the WebSphere Application Server; ways to build robust JSP and servlet pages include Java scripting and tag library support.

"It's very easy to use and provides rapid application development with a pretty light footprint," Macek maintained. "The key point here is that this is a new entry-level offering for non-Java programmers, because there is no EJB support in here."

The more advanced WebSphere Application Server (which replaces WAS 4.0's Advanced Single Server Edition) adds a full-featured J2EE application server, full EJB 2.0 support, task-oriented Web management capabilities, and a Deployment Manager for cross-application server configuration and support.

"The beautiful part about this is that with this base package, if you want to install any advanced editions, you can actually just overlay these advanced editions on top of this WAS package," noted Macek.

The WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment package (which replaces WAS 4.0 Advanced Edition package) adds clustering and workload management. The WebSphere App Server Extended Deployment package can detect runtime conditions and redirect workloads dynamically to other machines that are being underutilized.

"That's a very, very powerful feature that allows for extended enterprise performance," Macek observed. Support for CMP 2.0, SNMP support and the new scripting language SQL J are other key advantages.

WebSphere App Server Enterprise Edition (WAS-EE) offers APIs that developers can write code to and run-time and management features such as internationalization, local preferences, parameter service and application initialization startup service "useful for application invocation of your own services that you might want to run when your application server starts and stops."