Modern Web Development with IBM WebSphere: WebSphere and Worklight

[Claude Moore]

First, an heartly welcome to the authors !
I have a couple of questions.

I've read the table of contents of "Modern Web Development with IBM WebSphere" books, and it seems that there's quite a lot of stuff related to Worklight - which, as far as I know, it's IBM 's "official" suite for developing, testing, and deploying smart devices based apps. I'd like to know if their book covers in detail (and, if it's so, how much in detail) integration between WebSphere and Worklight.

My second question: WebSphere is usually quite "conservative" with respect to new Java technologies - I mean you have to wait for a feature pack or even for a next release to get WebSphere support for new stuff; for example Was 8.5 doesn't support - as far as I know - websockets, and I'm not aware of an official feature pack which allows you to write websocket based applications. For me, that's a perfectly reasonable approach, but neverthless it would be nice to be able to "play" with new standards, just to practice (not only to develop applications to be deployed in real production enviroments).

I'd like to know if in this book third-part libraries to work with such new Java EE technologies in WebSphere, in the case of they're not officially supported.

Thanks in advance.

[Roland Barcia]

Question 1.)

Depends what you mean by integration. The Server component of Worklight runs on top of WebSphere Application Server, and there are a few integration patterns. Worklight Adapters (Serverside code written in JavaScript) can call local Java Code because we use Rhino on the server, which is a serverside JavaScript engine written in Java. In addition, WL adapters can call any REST service. The client side piece of WL (runs on the device) can call anything via adapters or direct REST calls.



Question 2.)

The WebSphere Liberty Profile is much more aggressive in adoption of standards. For example, we have a Beta that supports WebSockets: (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/was_beta_liberty/com.ibm.websphere.wlp.nd.multiplatform.doc/ae/cwlp_websockets.html).

We do cover third party libraries on the client side (Browser and device), so we have an example using backbone.js, require.js, and others. We do not cover as much on the server.

[Claude Moore]

Thanks so much for your kindly answers.

On question 1) I thought that WorkLight Server may not require WebSphere, and times ago I was told during an IBM's presentation of WorkLight that Worklight may be installed in WAS as if it were a Java EE application, but I've no experience in that
(and I may have misunderstood something in that presentation), so I asked you about it.

On question 2) Liberty profile as far as I know - and please correct me if I'm wrong - is "limited" to support web related Technologies (no EJB for example, which I'm a fan of); it would be nice to have a preview of a full Java EE stack.
Anyway, we're discussing about web development so that Liberty would be perfect to experiment techniques you describe in your book.

Thank you again

[Kyle Brown]

Claude Moore wrote:Thanks so much for your kindly answers.

On question 1) I thought that WorkLight Server may not require WebSphere, and times ago I was told during an IBM's presentation of WorkLight that Worklight may be installed in WAS as if it were a Java EE application, but I've no experience in that
(and I may have misunderstood something in that presentation), so I asked you about it.

On question 2) Liberty profile as far as I know - and please correct me if I'm wrong - is "limited" to support web related Technologies (no EJB for example, which I'm a fan of); it would be nice to have a preview of a full Java EE stack.
Anyway, we're discussing about web development so that Liberty would be perfect to experiment techniques you describe in your book.

Thank you again

So I'll let Roland address (1) in detail, but in fact, we don't even cover the installation of Worklight server in the book, which is focused on development - instead we focus on using the Worklight Studio.

On (2) in fact, the new Liberty (which we're based on) does allow the EJB-Lite profile, and we use local EJB's in our examples!

Kyle

[Claude Moore]

Thanks again for your reply.

[Roland Barcia]

Worklight can run on a server like Tomcat, however, by default, it comes with a Liberty Profile and can install on top of Traditional WAS ND. When running on WebSphere, we have additional integration for example, using WebSphere Security like LTPA and such. In addition, we can invoke Java Code running in WAS from JS. if Worklight is sitting on different servers from your WebSphere Business Logic, than it can make Web Service or REST calls to get data.

[Mikalai Zaikin]

Roland Barcia wrote:Worklight can run on a server like Tomcat, however, by default, it comes with a Liberty Profile and can install on top of Traditional WAS ND. When running on WebSphere, we have additional integration for example, using WebSphere Security like LTPA and such. In addition, we can invoke Java Code running in WAS from JS. if Worklight is sitting on different servers from your WebSphere Business Logic, than it can make Web Service or REST calls to get data.

Adding a bit to Roland's statement from own experience with WAS ND full profile: consider adding new separate server for Worklight application deployment (you could add just to the same WAS node, no need to create separate profile / node). The Worklight product uses lots of third-party libs (JPA, Spring, etc, etc.) so there is very high risk to get classes conflicts, and we were unable to resolve it with WAS classloader settings (parent last).

HTH,
MZ

[Claude Moore]

The Worklight product uses lots of third-party libs (JPA, Spring, etc, etc.) so there is very high risk to get classes conflicts, and we were unable to resolve it with WAS classloader settings (parent last).

Fully agree. I never used ND myself - where I work we used to use Base version of WebSphere, but same classloaders caveats apply as well. Personally I think that's a better choice to have always a dedicated WAS profile to run
other specific products like Worklight on top of them.

By the way, Mikalai: did / do you use worklight yourself ? Would you like to share with us any experiences with it ?

[Mikalai Zaikin]

Claude Moore wrote:

By the way, Mikalai: did / do you use worklight yourself ? Would you like to share with us any experiences with it ?

Hi Claude,

Yes, I am working on one project which based on Worklight. I mostly do Adapters development for WL application and do some administering Worklight. No HTML/JS coding.

In general I have experience <6 months with WL, so hard to tell how good it is.

New versions/fixpacks/interim fixes released pretty often, and bugs are fixed quickly (and new bugs added as well ;-) ) The best place to get issue resolved - post at StackOverflow - IBM WL developers answer questions over there.

We use WL 6.1.0.1 (note: new version 6.2 is coming which has many improvements, including WL console protection out of box), development is performed on WAS Liberty Profile 8.5 (as it's allowed by Eclipse WL studio) and production deployment is done on WAS 7.0 ND.

Regards,
MZ

[Claude Moore]

Thanks for sharing your experience with it.