Earlier this year I took on the role of Chief Architect of the WebSphere foundation and have been busy with the team since then working on the development of our next release. We launched the first fruits of our labour last week through our new WASdev community site: the WAS V8.5 Alpha. This is an early glimpse of what's coming next in WAS and it is heavily focussed on making the WAS runtime and tools the best environment possible for developing and testing web applications. At the heart of the Alpha is a new dynamic profile of the WebSphere runtime that we've called the WAS Liberty Profile. Rather than being a static profile of runtime features, Liberty adapts to the requirements of the application and ensures - at a really fine-grained level - that only the necessary application container functions are started. It gives you the freedom to deploy web applications with wide-ranging requirements and provides all the pieces they need (like security, transaction management, connection pooling, persistence through JPA or JDBC, and so on) without pulling in any more than they need. And it provides fidelity with the full-profile WAS runtime to which applications are deployed in production because the containers and services started by the Liberty profile are the same.
One of the key innovations in Liberty is a new kernel that processes the specific "features" required by an application to load the required container(s) and WebSphere platform services: WAS has been an OSGi-based runtime for many years (since WAS V6.1) but, with the Liberty profile in the WAS V8.5 Alpha, we've moved beyond simply modularity and gone to town on exploitation of dynamic OSGi services. This is what delivers the tiny runtime footprint and a WAS server that starts up in a couple of seconds. And this is only one aspect of what's new for developers - we've also dramatically simplified server runtime configuration so that a test/debug WAS server instance can be configured easily, either inside or outside an Eclipse environment, with a single XML file covering all aspects of the server, the applications and the resources required by the applications. If you've ever looked at a WAS configuration and wished you could treat it more like a development artefact - storing the configuration in an SCM system, versioning or diffing it, sharing it between developers - well now you can. While the server config can be as simple as a single XML file, there are also flexible ways to compose a configuration from fragments that are aggregated through include statements.
The WASdev home page lists "8.5 Reasons why the WAS Liberty Profile is awesome". For more details, including an overview of the new simplified server config, take a look at the Introduction to the Liberty Profile article I posted to WASdev.
And did I mention that its free? And so, now, are our most popular web development tools which we're making available as Eclipse features (in addition to being bundled inside RAD). You can get all this from WASdev downloads page.
But enough talk....lets see how quickly we can download the tools, the WAS server, configure a server instance, install a simple app and bring the whole thing up. I'll assume you already have the Eclipse IDE for Java EE but if not you can get that from the Eclipse site. The only other thing you need is an IBM ID for the downloads - if you don't have one then simply register for one here.
OK. Open up your Eclipse IDE (3.7 or 3.6.2), start your stopwatch and follow these steps:
I've been busy spreading the message about Liberty since we started the WAS V8.5 Alpha - you can take a look at my slides from the WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin, where we launched the Alpha:
And if you happen to be in Mumbai on Oct 19 or 20, come and hear me talk about Liberty at the IBM Software Universe.
One of the key innovations in Liberty is a new kernel that processes the specific "features" required by an application to load the required container(s) and WebSphere platform services: WAS has been an OSGi-based runtime for many years (since WAS V6.1) but, with the Liberty profile in the WAS V8.5 Alpha, we've moved beyond simply modularity and gone to town on exploitation of dynamic OSGi services. This is what delivers the tiny runtime footprint and a WAS server that starts up in a couple of seconds. And this is only one aspect of what's new for developers - we've also dramatically simplified server runtime configuration so that a test/debug WAS server instance can be configured easily, either inside or outside an Eclipse environment, with a single XML file covering all aspects of the server, the applications and the resources required by the applications. If you've ever looked at a WAS configuration and wished you could treat it more like a development artefact - storing the configuration in an SCM system, versioning or diffing it, sharing it between developers - well now you can. While the server config can be as simple as a single XML file, there are also flexible ways to compose a configuration from fragments that are aggregated through include statements.
The WASdev home page lists "8.5 Reasons why the WAS Liberty Profile is awesome". For more details, including an overview of the new simplified server config, take a look at the Introduction to the Liberty Profile article I posted to WASdev.
And did I mention that its free? And so, now, are our most popular web development tools which we're making available as Eclipse features (in addition to being bundled inside RAD). You can get all this from WASdev downloads page.
But enough talk....lets see how quickly we can download the tools, the WAS server, configure a server instance, install a simple app and bring the whole thing up. I'll assume you already have the Eclipse IDE for Java EE but if not you can get that from the Eclipse site. The only other thing you need is an IBM ID for the downloads - if you don't have one then simply register for one here.
OK. Open up your Eclipse IDE (3.7 or 3.6.2), start your stopwatch and follow these steps:
- Go the WASdev download page to install the WAS Liberty Profile tools into Eclipse. This gives you a rich set of web development tools along with the ability to launch and control instances of the WAS Liberty Profile server. For Eclipse 3.7, its as easy as dragging the install button from that page onto your Eclipse IDE title bar.
- Accept the license terms (I'll take the liberty of assuming that, under these "beat the clock" conditions, you have already squared this with your friends in the legal department) for the install to proceed. The total size of the tools being added to your Eclipse environment here is less than 3M.
- Restart Eclipse. The tools are now installed - we can use these to now install the WAS server runtime itself for use testing and debugging applications. This is going to download and install a whole WAS Liberty profile server. Sounds scary? It isn't - the whole runtime is just another 25M and there's no additional installation program required.
- Now we need to deploy a web app to this server and run it. You can download this simple StopWatch WAR file and import it into Eclipse.
- In Eclipse: File > Import WAR file. Click Next. Enter the location of the WAR file on your filesystem and make sure the Target runtime is set to WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha Liberty Profile. Click Finish.
- In the Project Explorer, right click on the new StopWatch project and choose Run As > Run on Server.
- The WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha Liberty Profile should already be highlighted. Click Finsh.
- Stop the Clock!
I've been busy spreading the message about Liberty since we started the WAS V8.5 Alpha - you can take a look at my slides from the WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin, where we launched the Alpha:
And if you happen to be in Mumbai on Oct 19 or 20, come and hear me talk about Liberty at the IBM Software Universe.
1 comment:
I have folloews the steps and everthing was perfect. The server was ready within 6 seconds on my laptop.
What I understand is the components are activated when they are needed. So will it cause some delay in the first time they are used?
thanks a lot.
Post a Comment