What is new for WebSphere Application Server ToolKit?

The WebSphere® Application Server Toolkit offers new features and functions that will help you assemble and deploy applications faster than ever.

Rapid assembly and deployment

WebSphere Rapid Deployment provides an extensible mechanism for generating deployment artifacts (such as java source files, Java™ class files, or XML), packaging the application and preparing the application for running on WebSphere Application Server v6.0. The three key functions of WebSphere Rapid Deployment are annotation-based programming, support for the new WebSphere Enhanced EAR capability and simplifying the deployment of applications onto WebSphere Application Servers v6.

Annotation-based programming lets you quickly generate deployment artifacts. You can do this by adding additional metadata into the source code of your application as Javadoc comments and this metadata is used to derive the additional artifacts necessary to execute the application in a J2EE environment. The goal of annotation-based programming is to minimize the number of artifacts that you have to create and understand, thereby simplifying your development experience. As an example, consider a stateless session EJB. With annotation-based programming you would simply create a single Java source file containing the bean implementation logic and a few tags that indicate the class is to be deployed as an EJB with some methods made public. Using this single artifact, WebSphere Rapid Deployment can create the home and remote interface classes, a stateless session implementation wrapper class, the EJB deployment descriptor (ejb-jar.xml), the WebSphere-specific binding data, and all the remaining artifacts necessary to produce a compliant J2EE application. All you have to create is the single Java artifact.

The WebSphere Enhanced EAR capability improves packaging and preparing the application for publishing to WebSphere Application Server v6.0. A new page has been added to the Enterprise Application Deployment Descriptor editor for the enhanced EAR support. It lets you specify the server configuration and that data will be embedded within the application itself. This improves the administration process of publishing to WebSphere Application Server v6.0 when installing a new application to an existing local or remote WebSphere Server by preserving the server’s existing configuration.

The simplified deployment mechanism improves the process of running applications on the WebSphere Application Server v6.0. It monitors your changes and automatically ensures that those changes are reflected in a running copy of the application on WebSphere Application Server v6.0.

The real power of WebSphere Rapid Deployment comes from the combination of the three key functions. WebSphere Rapid Deployment enables a model where you can actively edit a small number of simple artifacts with annotations and as you save changes to those artifacts, a running, spec-compliant copy of the application is constantly updated and available in the background, thus reducing the time of the edit-compile-debug cycle.

Improved testing and deployment support

The Application Server Toolkit can now be used to simply deploy and test applications on any running WebSphere Application Server v6, whether it is running locally or on a remote platform supported by WebSphere Application Server v6.

Support for connecting to a remote WebSphere Application Server v6.0 is done using JMX. The IBM® Agent Controller is no longer required for connecting to a remote WebSphere Application Server v6.0.

Microsoft® SQL Server has been added as the fourth supported vendor for the automatic creation of tables and data sources to test EJB CMP beans. Now the database backend support for creating tables and data sources includes the following: Cloudscape™ (v5.0 and v5.1), DB2® (v8.1 and v8.2), Oracle (v9i and v10g) and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

Improvements have also been made in the TCP/IP monitoring function, for forwarding requests and responses, and monitoring test activities are also available.

Changes in EJB deployment tools

The EJB deployment code generation support has been simplified, eliminating the need for you to manually invoke the deployment step.

For EJB 2.x CMP entity beans, support has been added for an optimistic concurrency control scheme. This lets you add a column in your relational database table for collision detection. The collision detection column is an additional database column reserved to determine if a record has been updated. For more information about collision detection column, refer to the product's help content on the task of adding a column for collision detection.

New functionality for message processing

A new page has been added to the EJB Deployment Descriptor editor for Mediation Handlers, allowing creation, modification, and deletion of mediation handlers. Mediation handlers execute some specific message processing at runtime, such as transforming a message format, or routing a message to a particular destination. You can deploy a mediation handler using the new Assembly Toolkit Deploy wizard to install it into WebSphere Application Server as an EAR file. A mediation handler is deployed as a stateless session EJB, and you can change its behavior by modifying its properties using the wizard.

Support for J2EE 1.4

The Application Server Toolkit supports new features that are defined in the Enterprise JavaBeans™ 2.1 specification and the J2EE 1.4 specification. The new features include stateless session beans can now implement a Web service end point (a Web service client interface). EJB and client application modules can now include Web service references. EJB and client application modules can now include message destination references for message-driven beans, in order to support the use of messaging types other than JMS.

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