WebSphere Application Server Introduction

WebSphere Application Server Introduction

Simplify the delivery and management of business applications and services to speed response and reduce costs. The current market scenario is about cutting costs as industry is badly hit by recession. This is not just about an industry like banking, but across industries that are like retail, insurance, automobile and every industry that has an IT need is trying to cut down /postpone costs on IT Assets and investments.


This is leading to an enormous amount of job cuts/ layoffs by all the IT companies, this is because the companies are trying to remove the extra employees they have on the bench as well as remove the software programming staff. Lot of people are there on roads searching for jobs.


Isn’t there any light for getting a new job, if we look around every problem brings an opportunity to someone else. Now this problem created necessity for companies to make sure that their current applications running in production environments as websites and enterprise software are running without any problem.


This created jobs for people who make sure that these applications are taken care of. These people are the administrators of the production environments. People who are in these roles are called Application Administrators.

In all the administration that is to be done, there are very few people available on Websphere Application Server in the current job market where as requirements are ample. This opens up a lot of opportunity for people who know or are trained on Websphere Application Server.

What is Websphere Application Server (WAS)?

IBM – WAS is an Application Server from IBM to serve highly complex and mission critical applications of different enterprises irrespective of whether they are from banking or pharmacy or any other business. IBM – WAS runs on the J2EE platform of Java and is a very well designed and organized product which give lot of importance to enterprise needs like security

, high performance, failsafe techniques which are essential for the growing business of the enterprise.


Why IBM Websphere Application Server is a career option?

WebSphere Application Server is the most preferred Application Server worldwide and is used by huge number of companies where there is a lot of need for administration of the Websphere.

There are very less people available on Websphere platform in the job market.

Even if people are trained on Websphere, what the production environment demands is ability of the candidate to be able to troubleshoot a problem within minutes of identification and make sure that very minimum of such kind of things happen. For this the right kind of training is very essential.

Application Server components


WebSphere Application Server relies on following server components to provide enterprise level environment


•Web Browser: The end user uses a Web browser to interact with the deployed applications. The administrator makes use of browser to access the WebSphere Application Server Administration Console

•IP Sprayer: IP sprayer is normally a hardware unit that seats in front of your web server and distributes user requests among different HTTP server. If you dont use IP sprayer instead point the application URL to HTTP Server then that server becomes single point of failure also if you have a big user load then you might want to distribute users requests among different HTTP server which in turn would distribute user requests to different WAS server. The IP sprayer can either randomly distribute requests between different HTTP Servers or they can be sophisticated things like if the user request particular application then forward that request to high performance/ powerful server

•Load balance: The end user of WAS, normally points to the load balance, which takes care of distributing the user requests between different HTTP servers. The load balancer makes sure that no individual server is overwhelemed with the requests while other servers are idel.

•HTTP Server and Web Server Plugin: THe HTTP server is used for two things first is to server static content and in addition to that it also makes use of WebSPhere Plugin to distribute requests among different servers where the application is configured (Usually different servers in cluster). The HTTP server is normally configured to use either weighted round robin scheduling algorith, where the first request is distributed to a random application server, which servers as a starting point and then the subsequent requests are distributed according to the assigned weights of the application server. You can also configure plugin to use random system in which case the server weightage is not taken into consideration and the requests are distributed randomly. The HTTP server also takes care of session affinity, which makes sure that the request from the client goes to same server which served last request for that client

•Firewall: A firewall is a hardware and software system that manages the flow of information between the Internet and your companies network. It takes care of things like blocking user access to only few predefined ports, it can block virus and denial of service attacks.

•Database server: Most of the enterprise applications use RDBMS for data storage and retrieval functionality. The Application developers decide what database to use, there structure,.. The WebSPhere application server does not store any configuration data in db, that data is stored in .xml files on the file system

•Websphere MQ: WebSPhere MQ is messaging backbone that is used for exchanging point-to-point message and publish-and-subscribe messaegs with applications that reside a WebSphere MQ network.




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