Developer Introduction to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition

Deploying application servers is usually not a developer's favorite job. Developers prefer to concentrate on making their applications as good as possible. WebSphere Community Edition helps them do just that.

WebSphere Application Server Community Edition makes the job of producing and deploying customized applications easier. WebSphere Community Edition is IBM's distribution of the popular Apache Geronimo JEE5 Application server with a powerful console and many other added features. "Anything that applies to Geronimo applies to WebSphere Community Edition," says Ron Staerker, IBM Technical Consultant for WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. Apache Geronimo was ranked second in the latest Evans Data Application Server report.

The guiding philosophy behind WebSphere Community Edition was to start with Geronimo and add the packages and features developers need to deploy applications and develop custom application servers. "WebSphere Community Edition has a number of advantages in modularity, ease of development and ease of administration over other open source application servers such as Apache Tomcat," says Staerker.

The result is a lightweight application server built using open source components, combined with sophisticated tools to make it easy for developers to build and deploy right-sized application servers for their applications. The first version of WebSphere Community Edition was released over three years ago. The most recent version, 2.1, was released in July 2008. WebSphere Community Edition is freely available from IBM. As an option, IBM provides three tiers of customer support for WebSphere Community Edition for developer assistance and production support. There is also an Eclipse WTP Server Adapter for deploying and testing applications to WebSphere Community Edition

Small, Quick and Easy to Use
"WebSphere Community Edition is easy to install, quick to start up and quick to develop applications on," says Staerker. "WebSphere Community Edition is excellent for turnkey environments."

Because it is small, WebSphere Community Edition is fast. "Developers are very cognizant of the amount of time the server takes to start up, the memory footprint and the requirements to support the server," Staerker says. "The download is approximately 75 megabytes and it expands out to approximately 100 megabytes."

"With WebSphere Community Edition, developers can build a platform that will easily reduce the size of the server, decrease startup time and decrease memory and disk footprint," Staerker says. "And it's all done through the console."

WebSphere Community Edition also has the Apache Derby database already embedded and supported. Derby is especially useful for applications that just need a simple database. "Many applications and web sites just need basic data storage in a database" he points out.

Modularity
WebSphere Community Edition is highly modular, allowing developers to use only those components they actually need. "The basic impetus behind WebSphere Community Edition is to make things as easy as possible for developers to design, develop and deploy applications on a light-weight, highly customized application server.”

For example, if you're deploying a server for the web tier only, you probably don't need Enterprise JavaBeans and the ActiveMQ message broker. WebSphere Community Edition makes it easy to omit unnecessary features, reducing the footprint and cutting load time. "With WebSphere Community Edition you just choose the modules you want for a customized server. If you only want Tomcat and Axis components, or if you don't need EJBs, you can build a server that removes components from the disk footprint as well as the runtime," says Staerker.

Using the console, developers can build new servers mostly with mouse clicks by selecting the modules desired from the "Assemble a Server" wizard on the console "Plugins" menu. You can start to build a new server from the ground up or you can modify an existing server by removing plug-ins. When you are done with your custom server environment, you can add standard security and database pools, define standard ports (i.e. listener port 80 instead of the default 8080) and even add a test Derby database. Then copy the WebSphere Community Edition install directory and give the "canned" server to other developers, pre-configured! Other developers just need to check the value of “set WASCE_JAVA_HOME=” in the <WASCE_HOME>\bin\setenv.bat(sh) file to insure it points to their installed JVM. Check out the webcast on Creating WebSphere Community Edition Custom Assemblies.