WebSphere Application Server 8.5 on #WasDev

Thanks to my colleague, Andy Piper, via Twitter, I found the WasDev site on IBM developerWorks.

8.5 Reasons why the WAS Liberty Profile is awesome

1) Lightning fast! The server startup time is amazingly fast. If you're still reading this, your server has already finished starting.

2) Tailored for developers. Designed by developers, for developers! The server has been built from day one to make development easier and more productive.

3) Lightweight. So small you won't even know it's there! The liberty profile has a tiny memory footprint..  

4) Simple Management. One file config that uses convention over configuration. This provides a cleaner more effective way to manage and share server configurations.

5) Modular design. Architected in a modular way, the server only enables and starts the features required by the applications and configuration. If you're not using a feature, it won't start in your server runtime  

6) Dynamic runtime. Features can be added to the server dynamically, while the server is running, with zero downtime and server restarts. Similarly server and application config can be updated without the need to restart.

7) Eclipse based tools. The eclipse tools for the Liberty Profile are small and very well integrated with the Liberty Profile environment  

8) WAS fidelity. The Liberty profile uses the reliable and trusted containers and quality of services that have existed in WAS for many years. This provides easy migration from development to production environments.

8.5) WASdev! The development community you're currently in provides you with a great opportunity  to collaborate with the Liberty Profile developers, and become part of the development team!

There's also a rather useful piece by Ian Robinson about the new "Liberty" Profile: -

At its heart, the Liberty profile is a dynamic profile of WAS that enables the WAS server to provision only the features required by the application (or set of applications) deployed to the server. If an application requires just a servlet engine, then all that starts is the WAS kernel, the HTTP transport and the web container. Which is lightening fast to bring up (a few seconds) and has an incredibly small footprint. Need a JPA provider to access relational data? No need to go hunting around to find one, just add in the JPA feature and persistence configuration and we'll switch that on. Dynamically. Even though the server only takes you a few seconds to restart, you don't have to. Which is important in a development environment, as you build up the capabilities of an application, modify classes, add resources and fix problems. Developers need code and configuration changes to be easy to make and reflected immediately in the test environment. This is as easy as it gets with the combination of the WAS Liberty Profile and the new WAS Developer Tools.