IBM WebSphere Application Server version to version comparison

IBM WebSphere Application Server version to version comparison

1. WebSphere Application Server Version to version comparison

2. WAS Support Lifecycle http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/support/lifecycle/

3. List of supported various industry standards Source: Wikipedia, validity of this information has been checked

4. WAS V7.0 New Features It is a  Java EE  5 compliant application server. Following are the flagship features introduced by WebSphere Application Server Version 7: Flexible Management Flexible Management facilitates administration of a large number of WebSphere Application Server base edition and Network Deployment topologies that might be geographically distributed. Business-Level Application Business-Level Application is used for managing application artifacts independent of packaging or programming models. Property Based Configuration The Property Based Configuration feature simplifies the experience of automating administration: an administrator can update the WebSphere Application Server Version 7 configuration using a simple property file. Anumber of additional capabilities were made available for V7 in the form of  feature packs  which are optionally added to a V7 install. Feature Pack content has the same quality and support as main release content - the purpose of a feature pack is to deliver new innovation before the next major release. The following feature packs were provided for WebSphere Application Server V7: Feature Pack for Modern Batch Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and JPA 2.0 Feature Pack for SCA Feature Pack for Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack for XML Feature Pack for Communication Enabled Applications

5. WAS V7.0 Performance Improvement V7 Web Services performance improvements of up to 100% over the WAS V6.1 Web Services FEP V7 EJB3 performance improvements of over 30% V7 64-bit memory footprint reduced by 33% and overall performance improved by 10%. 64-bit memory and performance now equivalent to 32-bit! Dominates the overall benchmark category by 33% Commanding lead in the throughput per core and single 4-core system categories Leading Oracle/HP and Oracle/Sun by more than 16% in performance per CPU core IBM Oracle Oracle Sun BEA BEA

6. WAS V8, V8.5 and V8.5.5 New Features Version 8.0 It is a  Java EE  6 compliant application server and incorporates the capabilities originally delivered as feature packs with WAS V7 . This version of WAS is installed using the IBM Installation Manager. Version 8.5 It offers the same  Java EE  6 and  Java SE  6 (by default) as V8.0 and also provides - and can be configured to run on -  Java SE  7. The primary new capabilities in V8.5 are the  Liberty profile  of WebSphere Application Server and the  intelligent management   features. The   Liberty profile  of WebSphere Application Server is included with all the commercial editions of the server, providing a lightweight profile of the server for web, mobile and OSGi applications. It is a functional subset of the full profile of WebSphere Application Server, for both development and production use, with an install size of under 50 MB, a startup time of around 3 seconds and a new XML-based server configuration which can be treated as a development artefact to aid developer productivity. Intelligent management  capability is added in the  Network Deployment and z/OS editions. This integrates operational features that were previously available in the separate  WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (WVE)  offering: application editioning , server health management, dynamic clustering and intelligent routing . Version 8.5.5 It includes significant enhancements to the Liberty profile compared to v8.5. The WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core edition leverages the lightweight and dynamic aspects of the Liberty profile.

7. 7 WAS V8, V8.5, V8.5.5 Performance Improvement Java 6 JVM runtime enhancements JIT optimizations Application Performance Improvements vs. WAS v7 DayTrader : Up to 20% OSGi Applications: Up to 26% End-to-end performance improvements vs. WAS v7 including Up to 15% faster product installations Up to 20% faster server startup time for developers Up to 69% faster application server creation in a large topology Up to 31% faster application server cluster creation in a large topology Up to 22% faster application deployments in a large topology Up to 11% better vertical scaling on larger multi-core systems JPA 2.0 optimizations with DynaCache and JPA Level 2 cache Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput or performance that any user will experience will vary depending upon many factors, including considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user's job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve results similar to those stated here. Performance data is based on WebSphere Application Server in a distributed environment

8. WAS 8 Performance Improvement We focused on performance for v8 because of the TCO advantages that high performance drives WAS V8 is up to 85% higher throughput than WAS V6.x WAS V8 is up to 20-26% higher throughput than WAS V7 From a raw throughput for EJB apps (i.e. # of transaction) standpoint, v8 is upto 20% faster than the latest update of v7. WAS v8 also provides 26% better throughput when running OSGi Apps vs. running Spring 3.0 apps on WASv7 ( OSGi Apps contains the standardized Spring component model) Beyond throughput, we also deliver end-to-end performance enhancements like 20% faster startup for developers, 15% faster installs and 69% faster app server creation in a large topology. Automation of problem determination task via HPEL (High Performance Extensible Logging) – Up to 6x faster than V7

9. Liberty Profile The Liberty profile supports a subset of the Java EE 6 stack. Supported technologies that are supported by all versions of the Liberty profile: Java Servlet 3.0 JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.2 Java Expression Language 2.2 Standard Tag Library for JavaServer Pages (JSTL) 1.2 Bean Validation 1.0 Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0 Java Transaction API (JTA) 1.1 Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 4.0 Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS ) 1.1 WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core (support full Java EE 6 Web Profile specifications) Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java (Web Beans 1.0) Dependency Injection for Java 1.0 Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 (includes Interceptors 1.1) - EJB Lite subset

10. Additional supported technologies: Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.2 Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.2 SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) 1.3 Java Message Service API (JMS) 1.1 Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 - Message-Driven beans OSGi Technology: Web Application Bundles ( OSGi R4.2 Enterprise, Chapter 128) Blueprint Container ( OSGi R4.2 Enterprise, Chapter 121) – Blueprint Transactions – Blueprint Managed JPA JNDI ( OSGi R4.2 Enterprise, Chapter 126) OSGi application of Java EE technologies that are supported by the profile