Newbie Questions

[Michael42]

Hello, my company has made the decision to move to Websphere 4.0. I have been on IBM's site and have some basic questions.

At the moment we use iPlanet for our web server, J2EE 1.3.1, JRun 3.1 for our servlet engine and I am not sure what Websphere does as related to this set of technologies?

1. In short, what is it?
2. Does it include a web server, J2EE or a Servlet engine?
3. Though I have soured IBM's site I cannot find a site or PDF that covers installing, configuring and administration. I would like to review this BEFORE installing it. I am not sure what it's dependencies are etc.


Thanks VERY much for your time,

Michael

 

[DanSS2471]

Which platform are you intending on running it on? Here's a link to some documentation for z/OS and OS/390, which is the platform we use. If you're running on a different one, try a Yahoo search on "websphere 4.0". Good luck..

http://www3.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/zos_os390/library.html

 

[Michael42]

We will be running WebSphere on Sun and NT\2000.

Thanks for your feedbac.

 

[fearo]

Hi,

There are two main sources of information for WebSphere which you must have:

The WebSphere v4 Handbook downloadable from

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com

and the WebSphere v4 Infocenter which comes with the product. This comes as a separate jar and is obtainable from the WebSphere support site:

http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/

As regard to your question WebSphere v4 complies with J2EE standards. It consists of a Servlet Engine and Web Container within a configurable environment. For testing purposes it includes an in-built Web Server (not for use in production) but it also comes with an external Web Server IBM HTTPServer. iPlanet however is also a supported Web Server.

Any more questions then please feel free!

Regards,

Fearo

 

[Michael42]

Thanks very much for the info. Is it generally preferable to use the IBM HTTP server rather than iPlanet?


Thanks gain for your view,

Michael

 

[Einstein47]

In previous builds WebSphere was more closely tied to the WebServer (with it's proprietary OSE Remote plugin), however with 4.0, WebSphere uses the HTTP for communcation. This means that WebSphere will work better with any selection of WebServer. iPlanet I do believe is on the supported software list which you can find here

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/doc/latest/prereq.html

If your webapp is alread J2EE complient, then you will be well ahead of me when I did my WebSphere 4.0 migration.

One important thing to consider, will you be using DB2 as the administration database? WebSphere needs a full install of DB2 to hold its configuration settings. This may not be widely known so consider yourself warned. Einstein47
(Love is like PI - natural, irrational, endless, and very important.)