WAS 7.0 New Features and Functions
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•IBM WAS V7 is a major release that offers dramatic run time improvements, plus simpler and easier ways to develop and deploy applications.
•WAS V7 provides complete support for the Java EE 5 specification, including the Web services and EJB 3.0 functions.
•WebSphere Application Server V7 also introduces support for Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 6
•Dependency injection - Developer productivity is further enhanced when it’s time to override the defaults, since this can be accomplished quickly and simply using annotations rather than writing code. Annotations are used in conjunction with a programming pattern known as dependency injection.
•Java Persistence API - Another aspect to the simplification of the programming model in Java EE 5 is the ability to develop EJB components as Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs). Simplifying EJB development even further is the Java Persistence API (JPA), which enables entities to be created using annotated POJOs. Aside from making EJB development and usage even easier, this also enables Java SE developers to quickly learn Java EE and develop enterprise applications.
•Web services - The improvements to the Java EE 5 programming model are not limited to EJB development. Web services development is also greatly simplified via annotations.
•Another important new systems management capability in V7 in the area of Web services, in addition to the programming model improvements, are Web service policy sets that are the mechanisms provided by WebSphere Application Server V7 for centrally defining various quality of service polices that you might want to apply to Web services that are already deployed. There are two types of policy sets: Application policy sets and System policy sets.
•JAX-WS implementation in WebSphere Application Server V7 also provides support for SOAP 1.2, as well as for generic XML or HTTP as a protocol binding, which enables the creation of WS clients and WS providers that do not use SOAP for their wire level message format.
•Another important addition in WebSphere Application Server V7 is its support for Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), an improved method for sending binary attachments. MTOM is the preferred attachment mechanism for non-Java EE-based Web services, so support for MTOM improves the interoperability between Java EE Web services and non-Java EE Web services.
•Portlet 2.0 API - WebSphere Application Server V7 also introduces support for the Portlet 2.0 API, also known as the Portlet JSR 286 specification.
•Intelligent provisioning - It selects only the run time function needed for an application, reducing both memory footprint and application server startup time. WebSphere Application Server examines each application at application installation time to generate an activation plan; at run time, the server starts only those components that are required by the activation plan.
•WAS V7 contains support for a Web/JDBC application scenario in which only the Web container and core run time components are started. This is in contrast to V6.1, in which the EJB container, SIP container, and Web services runtime would also have been started.
•The above capability can also help to reduce the memory footprint, and is designed for extension by other WebSphere products that run on top of WebSphere Application Server.
•Additional run time footprint reductions are delivered in the form of the Java SE 6 implementation that ships with WebSphere Application Server V7.
•The shared class cache that was introduced in IBM's Java SE 5 implementation has been improved so that the cache can now be persistent. As a result, the cache can survive a shutdown and restart of all WebSphere processes on a server. This lead to a significantly faster application server startup times.
•Another improvement in IBM's Java SE 6 is the use of compressed references (or pointer compression) in 64-bit WebSphere Application Server JVMs. The use of compressed references can provide a very significant reduction in the process footprint of a 64-bit JVM, when previously compared to a 32-bit JVM. Prior to IBM's Java SE 6 implementation, it wasn’t unusual for a 64-bit heap to be 1.7 to 2 times the size of an equivalent 32-bit heap.
•Flexible management is a new feature in WAS V7 that separate most of the administrative components from the application server runtime. Now, each application server is no longer a single point of management. This is accomplished with a separate administration process for (base) WebSphere Application Servers known as the administrative agent. This help to reduce the cost of administering large deployments in several ways.
•The job manager is another aspect of flexible management that is available in WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V7. Its feature is for WAS V7 remote administration and scheduling of administrative functions.
•Messaging - Beyond the Web services improvements in WebSphere Application Server V7, there are also improvements to a related SOA component: messaging. New administrative wizards for System Integration Bus (SIBus) configuration are provided for configuring a cluster bus member and a foreign bus connection, as well as new panels for SIBus authorizations, WebSphere MQ JCA Resource Adapter configuration, and for inspecting an application's use of SIBus resources.
•WAS V7 also includes a WebSphere MQ JMS JCA 1.5 resource adapter, as well as associated new panels and administrative commands. Having the JCA 1.5 resource adapter also means that message-driven beans that consume messages from WebSphere MQ can now use activation specifications instead of listener ports.
•Improved management of activation specifications -- stop, start, message retry limits (or "poison" message filtering) -- is also included in WebSphere Application Server V7.
•Centralized installation - Network Deployment also adds the capability to perform centralized installation from the deployment manager to remote nodes. This enables a single installation to the deployment manager to be pushed out as an installation package from the deployment manager to a series of endpoints. The endpoint can be either a node that is not part of a Network Deployment cell.
•Business level applications - Another new function in WebSphere Application Server V7 is the notion of an "application" beyond J2EE™, or a business level application (BLA). This is a new administration concept that expands upon what was previously provided by J2EE.
•Security - Security management and auditing improvements are also a significant portion of what’s new in WebSphere Application Server V7. Perhaps the most prominent change is the capability to create multiple security domains within a single WebSphere Application Server cell. Each security domain can have its own user population (and underlying repository), and, additionally, the application domain can be separated from the administrative domain. Not only can each domain have its own separate user population, but each domain can also be customized with a separate security configuration -- for example, JAAS login configuration, TAI, authorization provider, JCA authentication data, and auditing -- in addition to the current application server level security configuration options.
•Further, the fine-grained administrative security function that was introduced in WebSphere Application Server V6.1 but limited to wsadmin is now expanded in V7 to include the administrative console. Within the administrative security domain for a cell, this enables administrative roles to be restricted to specific components, such as a cluster, node, application server, or application.
•Auditing - Another security enhancement is the option to generate security-auditing records of WebSphere Application Server administrative actions. These actions can be security configuration changes, key and certificate management, access control policy changes, bus and other system resources management, and so on. This feature enables you to hold administrative users accountable for configuration and run time changes.
•Further, the review and control of audit records and audit configurations is entrusted to a new auditor role, which enables the separation of administrative user privileges, in that an administrator cannot change audit policy and cannot view audit records, nor can an auditor change WebSphere configuration and run time state.
•Kerberos - WebSphere Application Server V7 provides support for Kerberos Authentication, which can be used in a variety of single sign-on scenarios. The Kerberos support in V7 expands on the SPNEGO TAI support in V6.1 to provide better interoperability and identity propagation with other applications that support Kerberos authentication (such as IBM DB2®, .NET®, and others).
•Application development and management - WebSphere Application Server V7 includes two tooling options for application development that let you leverage the standards supported in this new release:
•IBM Rational® Application Developer Assembly and Deploy V7.5 replaces the Application Server Toolkit (AST) function provided with WebSphere Application Server V6.1. This development tool expands on the functions provided in the AST with Java EE 5 XML-form based DD editors, Java EE 5 application support, and more.
• IBM Rational Application Developer V7.5 for WebSphere adds functions to Rational Application Developer Assembly and Deploy, including EJB 3 application development productivity features, visual editing domain modeling and Web development; Web services productivity features, and relational data tools.
