Ibm Websphere Application Server Placement Papers - Ibm Websphere Application Server Interview Questions and Answers updated on 19.Mar.2024

DMGR is the single point of failure in WebSphere network deployment model. Even if DMGR is down, rest of the server will contine to run and serve the applications. However, anychanges you make in this situation are not saved to master configuration repository.

WebSphere refers to a brand for IBM software products. It is designed for setting up, operation and integration of electronic business applications. These applications could perform well on cross platform environment. These set of software are java based web technologies.

When you install WebSphere application server, executable files and configurations files are seperated. This allows you install the product once and create multiple sets of configurations which uses the same underlying core executables of the websphere application server installation. These are the profiles in websphere application server. As you know, there are many types of profiles and you can create multiple profiles.

a connection pool is a cache of database connections maintained so that the connections can be reused when future requests to the database are required. Connection pools are used to enhance the performance of executing commands on a database. In connection pooling, after a connection is created, it is placed in the pool and it is used over again so that a new connection does not have to be established. If all the connections are being used, a new connection is made and is added to the pool. Connection pooling also cuts down on the amount of time a user must wait to establish a connection to the database.

When you install a new application or update an application, your web server need to be aware of the changes. Which me you need to update the web server plug-in configuration file. So after a successful installation of an application with mapping to web server, you need to regenerate the plug-in configuration file and propagate it to web server.

Web Server and WebSphere application server provide two different functionalities. WebSphere application server do has an inbuilt web server functionality but it is recommended to use a separate web server for many reasons.

Some of them are:

  1. By seperating web and application server activities, your application serving environment is more secure.
  2. Using the webserver you can loadbalance the requests between multiple application servers.

IBM provides several industrial strength development environments based on Eclipse development framework the current IDE is Rational Developer for Websphere. Applications can also be developed with the Websphere Application Server Toolkit and third party tools like Jbuilder, and Eclipse/ANT etc. 

To achieve this , you need to create a JDBC provider and datasource. The JDBC provider object encapsulates the specific JDBC driver implementation class for access to the specific vendor database of your environment. The data source object supplies your application with connections for accessing the database. The best way to learn more about this task is, login to administration console –>guided activities –> connecting to a database.

  • JBoss Is an Application Server that supports J2EE
  • IBM Websphere and BEA WebLogic servers are a combination of Application Server, Web Server & container
  • Jakarta Tomcat is a Servlet container and a Web server.
  • Apache Sever is a Web server 

WebSphere application server stores all the configuration data in one central location knows as ‘Master repository’. And every node/server will have the local configuration repository. The sycn process make sure that the configuration in both local and master repositories are same and in-sync. The sync is a one dimentional process me, it will sync the configurations only from Master repository ==> local repository.

We will have one node agnet per one node. The node agent acts as an mediator between the Deployment manager and the node.

  • ApplicationServer: takes care of Security, Traction, Multithreading, Resource pooling, load balancing, clustering, performence, highly availability, scalability, etc. Exposes business logic to client applications through various protocols, possibly including HTTP. Supports deployment of .war and .ear filesApplication server = webserver + EJB container.
  • Webserver: handles HTTP protocol. Receives HTTP request, it responds with an HTTP response. 

A channel is a connection that is to establish a link between sending channel and receiving channel. A channel has a sender channel at the local queue manager and receiver channel at the remote queue manager. These two channels consist of same name, and together make one channel.
The CHANNEL attribute is used with WebSphere MQ applications to specify the channels for receiving and sending messages in a file that defines sender and receiver channels.

WebSphere Extended Deployment is a new product for IBM WebSphere software. WED extends the WebSphere software platform. The new features / notions include dynamic operations, high performance computing and extended management.

It is recommended to modify all the configurations using the administration console. When you need to make any configuration changes, you need do the apply changes and sync them. Any changes you do at local repository level are discarded upon the next restart of that server because the sync is always from DMGR to local repository and changes are not saved to master repository. For example, if you edit a configuration file of server1 and restart it. the changes are lost. When the server starts it syncs the configuration from master repository.

@Directly copy files to deployedapplication folder in websphere- hot deployment.
@use websphere specific ant tasks and building automated scripts for deploying application.
@through administration console. 

Virtual host is a configuration not a physical one. A configuration that lets a single machine resemble multiple host machines. Each virtual host has a logical name and a list of one or more DNS host aliases by which it is known. By deafult, we wull have a default_house and admin_host virtual hosts defined in websphere application server.

@open WSAD
@go to project
@click properties
@select javaBuildPath
@add any jar file like jaxp select add external jars. 

If you use JDBC type (I) driver you dont need to add any driver in websphere. you simply created DSN and use it locally, same we use java class, if you use Type(2) and Type(4) so first go to admin console then go to connection, then add driver there fill other info like conn. size, uname pass, max conn. and connect it to you applications. 

WebSphere architecture consists of one or more computer systems which are called nodes. Nodes are available within WebSphere cell. A WebSphere cell can have one node. On this node all the needed softwares installed. If a WebSphere cell contains more than one node, then all the software components are distributed among the nodes. The software components that are installed in one node can share in the distributed environment. This distribution enables for scalability, reliability.
The following are the components:

  • A web server which provides the services of HTTP
  • A database server for data persistence
  • WebSphere Application Server (WAS)

It is common practise to have web and app servers on different machines. WebSphere provides a plug-in which enables web server to talk to application server, this is known as web server plug-in. Web server plug-in will have a configuration file named plugin-config.xml which will have referenes to all the servers, clusters, applications, virtual hosts of the websphere application server. You can generate this configuration file from administration console, servers –>web servers. Select a web server and click generate plugin configuration file and then propagate the plugin. This plug-in needs to be installed on the web server machine

Change the WebSphere server's server variables using the Administrative Console or use scripts. 

A Web Sphere MQ server is a queue manager that provides queuing services to one or more clients. All the Web Sphere MQ objects, for example queues, exist only on the queue manager machine (the Web Sphere MQ server machine), and not on the client. A Web Sphere MQ server can also support local Web Sphere MQ Applications

Deployment descriptor is an XML file that describes how to deploy a module or application by specifying configuration and container options. For example, an EJB deployment descriptor passes information to an EJB container about how to manage and control an enterprise bean. There are two types of deployment descriptor in websphere: Web application deployment descriptor and portlet deployemnt descriptor Portlets are packaged as WAR files with a web application deployment descriptor (web.xml). This defines each portlet as a servlet within the web application, including unique identifiers for each portlet, the portlet class, and initialization parameters.

Websphere tends to focus more on integration, connectivity and web services. it has rich implementation of J2EE, better performance, more extensive integration and traction management. In terms of trnsaction weblogic is having default traction attribute as ’supports’, but websphere does not have any default traction attribute.
Websphere is from IBM and Weblogic is from BEA. 

It is a lightweight protocol. This protocol is optimized for use with messages that are non-persistent. WebSphere MQ Real Time Trport is utilized only by JMS clients.
WebSphere MQ Real Time Trport is right suitable for the applications to send large number of messages. All the applications that use this protocol must rely on TCP/IP for quality considerations and which do not require persistent delivery. For example, this protocol can be used in situations where the data is updated very frequently, such as stock market share values, updating scoreboard of a sporting event.

The following are the features of WebSphere:

  • Supports the Servlet/JSP container functionality which runs on top of HTTP.
  • Supports HTTP servers such as IBM HTTP server, MS IIS and Netscape iPlanet server.
  • Supports HTML pages, Setvlets, Java Server Pages and XML.
  • Supports EJB component model, Workload Management. WLM supports multiple servers within a single administrative domain.

WebSphere Edge Server allows deploying parts of an application that contains servlets or JSP components to a proxy cache and executes at the cache. The cache, called edge server, in this context works with the original WebSphere Application Server. This feature is called offloading.

You can do this from the administration console. Go to enterprise applications –>select your application and click update. on the next panel, you’ll have option to update the entire application, a single module or even a single file or multiple files.

Select the single file option and specify the file’s path you like to update . Specify a relative path to the file that starts from the root of the war/ear file. So it looks something like this : app1.war/WEB-INF/web.xml

Selecting application server is part of architectural process when infrastructure is defined. It depends on several factors:

  1. External systems your application will be interacting.
  2. Type of application you have.
  3. Target availability of system.
  4. Corporate standards
  5. Budget.

Webpshere tends to focus more on integration, connectivity and web services. it has rich implementation of J2EE, better performance, more extensive integration and traction management. In terms of trnsaction weblogic is having default traction attribute as ’supports’, but websphere does not have any default traction attribute. 

WebSphere Commerce is a software platform framework from IBM. This framework provides the functionality for e-commerce, including sales, marketing, customer support and order processing functionality. These functions are performed using a tailorable and integrated package. WSC is a unified and single platform. This platform offers to perform the functionality between businesses to customer, business to business through channel partners. WSC is a scalable, highly reliable and customizable solution which is built on JEE platform. WSC uses the open standards such as XML and Web services.

  • WAR or EAR files. 
  • Can be installed using Administration Console or scripts.

The usage of WebSphere MQ is employed to use as Java Message Service provider for JEE applications which are deployed in WebSphere Application Server.
The WebSphere MQ JMS is message service provider for WebSphere MQ systems. It is a set of Java classes. These classes allow the usage of JMS applications to access WebSphere MQ systems. The models point-to-point and publish/subscribe of JMS are supported by MQ JMS provider.