Today one of my customers had the need to add new MIME types to a virtual host because some file types were not recognized correctly by IE8. I looked around and there was nothing in wsadminlib for doing this, so I came up with my own setVirtualHostMimeTypes.py.

I’ve thought about a more open sharing of sample scripts for some time, given that our release process for wsadminlib isn’t very agile, but it never really materialized. Maybe the creation of this mercurial repository will motivate me to share a few more. It’s kind of a waste to have various customers reinvent the wheel over and over again and those sample scripts are not exactly intellectual capital; they just accumulate on my hard drive instead of helping others to use our products more efficiently. Enjoy!

Our WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Beta is now available. It includes the liberty profile and we also made a beta of Rational Application Developer V8.5 available so you can test our new development environment together with the runtime. You can find all of these on our WebSphere Early Programs Download Site. If you download and test those new beta versions, please don’t forget to send us your feedback!

Arquillian Happy IkeAfter having container support for WAS 7.0 for several months we’ve now also added WAS 8.0 embedded & remote container support into Arquillian. Get the arquillian-container-was code and please provide feedback – or patches :-)

Today we make WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Alpha available to our developer community. I’ll be at the WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin next week, so I won’t get too much time to play with it. Want to check it out? Head over to our WASdev community site and give it a try, and don’t forget to give us feedback!

WAS Tools Editions

October 4th, 2011

Today we announced three new WebSphere Application Server bundled offerings.

The two enterprise offerings, IBM WebSphere Application Server – Tools Edition and IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment – Tools Edition, will improve availability and ease of licensing for our enterprise developers as those WAS bundles include Rational Application Developer.

More interestingly we’re now offering what we call IBM WebSphere Application Server for Developers – Tools Edition for Eclipse. This combines the previously available no-charge WebSphere Application Server for Developers, but also provides you with Eclipse plugins that can easily be installed on top of your existing Eclipse environment. These plugins are a subset of what we ship with Rational Application Developer and provide the adapters you need to quickly deploy to WebSphere Application Server. While you can download and use these plugins at no charge we certainly also offer you the option to purchase support for these plugins.

Thinking about deploying WAS V8.0? Our developerWorks article on Garbage Collection in WebSphere Application Server V8.0 introduces you to IBM’s generational gc, which is now the default; and stay tuned for part 2, which will introduce you to the new balanced region-based collector.

Arquillian Happy IkeThe last few weeks I’ve worked on the WAS 7.0 Container Support (JIRA Issue ARQ-264) for Arquillian, a Java EE testing framework. My arquillian-container-was code has now been pushed upstream. No matter what container you use, if you want to improve your Java EE integration testing, make sure to check out what Arquillian can do!

The story of WebSphere

May 7th, 2011

Great video about a great story. Want to learn more? Check out our WebSphere Icon of Progress on the IBM100 site.

With WebSphere Application Server V8.0 and EJB 3.1 we’re introducing an embeddable EJB container that allows testing of EJB and JPA components inside a test JVM without starting a separate application server process. One interesting extension is that we also support a properties file or annotations to configure JDBC connections for those components. Get more info about this new embeddable EJB container and direct links to the InfoCenter articles in Jeremy Bauer’s post on Lightweight JPA testing.

Last week we announced that IBM Business Process Manager V7.5 will eGA on June 3, 2011, and GA on June 17, 2011.

WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Lombardi Edition support will be discontinued between 2013 and 2016, depending on the version.