HOWTO: create WebSphere AS 8.5.5 development workspace in Eclipse

This post is a follow-up to HOWTO: script WebSphere AS 8.5.5 internet install and describes the post-install steps to create a development workspace.

The clean install described in the previous post requires further configuration before you can start the server and deploy applications.

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HOWTO: script WebSphere AS 8.5.5 internet install

This post describes how to perform a scripted install of a WebSphere Application Server (WAS) development environment from the internet. This is adequate if you want automated installation that will be repeated infrequently. Prior knowledge of WAS, Eclipse and Linux is assumed.

IBM has at least three offerings for basic Java EE development:

• WAS for Developers - the full-fat commercial WAS server
• Liberty Profile - a lightweight, developer-friendly server
• Community Edition - a blue-washed Apache Geronimo

The scripts described here install the first two options with IDE tooling and Java 7. Eclipse Juno is the latest release with this level of WDT support.

Formally, the following are installed:

• IBM WebSphere Application Server for Developers 8.5.5.0
• IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition 7.0.4.1
• IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty for Developers 8.5.5.0
• IBM WebSphere SDK Java Technology Edition Version 7.0 for Liberty 7.0.4.1
• Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (Juno Sr2; Eclipse 4.2)
• WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Liberty Profile Tools
• WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Tools

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WebSphere Portal: users versus spiders - form reset issue

Some users can run afoul of Portal's user-agent rules. Symptoms include the inability to log in and form submissions just causing page refreshes where all the form data is lost.

The problem is an intersection of two things:

• Pestware installed in the browser that changes the user-agent.
• WebSphere Portal misinterpreting the user-agent type and altering application behaviour.

See Technote 1441915 for IBM's support analysis.

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HOWTO: install WebSphere Portal 7 on CentOS 6.2

A short post about setting up a trial WebSphere Portal Express server on the (unsupported) CentOS operating system.

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WebSphere AS: RAD vs WSDL2Java for JAX-RPC client SOAP bindings

I've been doing a bit of work recently with JAX-RPC on WebSphere Application Server 6.1. This is hardly cutting edge software (WAS 8 is out; JAX-RPC has been superceded by JAX-WS) but platforms can have a long shelf-life in the enterprise.

This post describes how to migrate from client bindings developed using RAD to automated generation via Ant. JAX-RPC isn't restricted to consuming SOAP in WARs, but this post confines itself to that topic.

For convencience, the sample code reuses the MaintainAddress.wsdl from a previous post.

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Ant: automated deployment to WebSphere Application Server

It can be useful to automate deployment of enterprise applications to servers during development, either to automatically set up test builds or perform build verification during the kitting process. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) comes with a number of Ant tasks that can be used for this.

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