Persistence in the WebSphere Enterprise - The Future of WebSphere 7

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

I know that the authors of this book include widely respected WebSphere specialists. As WebSphere 7 hits the market, I was wondering if there were any persistence mechanisms that Big Blue was tending to get behind a little more than the others.

WebSphere 7 Beta - Early Adopters Program

I understand that as a JEE5 compliant application server, WebSphere 7 will support all of the major persistence mechanisms, but IBM does have a tendency to train up their technical support in a few key areas.

For example, with Portal Server, IBM initially pushed the Struts Portlet, which they still support, but as Portal matured, IBM provided more and more support for the JSF portlet within their portal. Of course, you can do anything inside a WebSphere Portlet, be it Struts, JSF, Spring or whatever, but IBM clearly liked JSF as time went on.

So, is there any leaning that you can see? Or is there simply an IBM implementation of JPA that the WebSphere 7 Application Server will use?

Just curious.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Roland Barcia]

Originally posted by Cameron Wallace McKenzie:
I know that the authors of this book include widely respected WebSphere specialists. As WebSphere 7 hits the market, I was wondering if there were any persistence mechanisms that Big Blue was tending to get behind a little more than the others.

WebSphere 7 Beta - Early Adopters Program

I understand that as a JEE5 compliant application server, WebSphere 7 will support all of the major persistence mechanisms, but IBM does have a tendency to train up their technical support in a few key areas.

For example, with Portal Server, IBM initially pushed the Struts Portlet, which they still support, but as Portal matured, IBM provided more and more support for the JSF portlet within their portal. Of course, you can do anything inside a WebSphere Portlet, be it Struts, JSF, Spring or whatever, but IBM clearly liked JSF as time went on.

So, is there any leaning that you can see? Or is there simply an IBM implementation of JPA that the WebSphere 7 Application Server will use?

Just curious.

-Cameron McKenzie

IBM's JPA implementation is based on Apache OpenJPA. This is the JPA implementation we ship with (Both the WebSphere EJB 3 Feature Pack for WAS 6.1 and WAS 7.0 App Server have this).

WAS 7 should allow you to work with other JPA implementations (tolerate), but we will support what we ship because we have developers on as committers on open source projects we ship to help fix bugs. Not all open source projects allow others to be committers.

So we will tend to favor our JPA implementation. We will also have support for pureQuery as an SQL based framework. I have gone to a few customers who just do not want to do ORM and love to control their own SQL. pureQuery will work well for those customers.

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

Awesome! Thanks for the insights.

I know my customer base is very excited about WebSphere 7, and they will be equally excited about OpenJPA. I'll have to did into that a bit more.

OpenJPA at Apache.org

-Cameron McKenzie
[ July 25, 2008: Message edited by: Cameron Wallace McKenzie ]

[Billy Tsai]

what about WebSphere Process Server and Portal Server? are they still going to be using EJB 2? do they provide any new persistence layer mechanisms?
[ July 29, 2008: Message edited by: Billy Tsai ]