IBM WebSphere Application Server Pros and Cons

Starting with version 8, WAS provides a special folder called monitor deployment. Once you put the .war or .ear file in there, it is deployed automatically without human intervention. This greatly helps us in our continuous integration server. Once the deployment binary is ready, we write a script to copy it to that folder and then, voila! The application is up and running and accessible from its context root.

Ease of administration: It has an Integrated Solutions Console, what we call the administrative console, with very detailed configurations and Help pages for each configurable item.

Security: It is compatible with the latest Java 8 security features, supports FIPS 140-2 and NIST SP 800-53 with strong ciphers and cryptography keys, and supports TLS 1.2 completely. Also, configuring client and server certificates is relatively easy.

IBM WAS is the backbone for our enterprise content management suite which delivers the primary processes for our customers. Without a good application server, it would be hard to provide a secure layer of midddleware upon which the other applications run. IBM WAS improves the stability of the entire solution and provides a high quality platform for running web-based solutions.

Without the Admin Console it would be very hard to configure JVM settings, JDBC datasources, mail session settings, and security providers.

IBM WAS is extremely scalable. It is easy to add additional servers and to divide the load over servers in all kinds of ways.

High availability, alert management, and deployments are the most valuable features for us. We have the ND version so we can do deployments.

IBM needs to pay attention to market changes more quickly. We now have Java 9 and very soon Java EE8. We do not want to wait for two or three years after their release until they are supported by the new version.

Installing or configuring a WAS server instance as a Windows Service causes a lot of problems, especially when the server needs credentials to stop.

Initial setup is very simple. Just use the IBM Installation Manager and add the packages. The install wizard takes care of the rest. The only thing that can be difficult is to find the right packages on the IBM website, because of all the changes that IBM does on its website(s).

The footprint could be reduced so that we can use a smaller virtual machine to run the application. We could also use more scripts. I would like this solution to be more script oriented, rather than GUI oriented.