What are the main diference between WAS Liberty Profile and WAS downloaded by Installation Manager

websphere-liberty
DemeCarv picture DemeCarv · Apr 17, 2014 · Viewed 28.9k times · Source

From developer viewpoint, what is diference between WebSphere Application Server(1.5GB) installed by Installation Manager and WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Liberty Profile (65 MB)? I will develop an application based on EJB, JSF and JPA. According to my search, Liberty Profile is an easy way to start develop with Websphere. I would appreciate any comment because I am in charge of preparing the workstations for a team and it is my first time to heard about Liberty Profile. I guess that Liberty Profile must be a smaller Web Server similiar to Tomcat plus EJB support and without Console Administration.

Answer

Archimedes Trajano picture Archimedes Trajano · Aug 4, 2015

The key difference between WAS Liberty and WAS Classic boil down to the following: Java EE 7 support and Legacy app support

  • WebSphere Liberty supports Java EE 7 as of 8.5.5.6, WAS classic does not. WAS 9.0 supports Java EE 7

  • WAS Liberty does not support some of the older apps that have now been deprecated in the Java EE API such as JAX-RPC.

  • If you inherited an old application that takes advantage of WebSphere specific extensions you're generally bound to WAS Classic
  • Existing administrative and deployment scripts would not likely work on WAS Liberty
  • Network Deployment support is not as robust in WAS Liberty

However, if you are doing a new app it isn't too bad and you can pay for support for it without having to redeploy to something new unlike Glassfish or WildFly. There's a 2GB limit for production on the organization level, but you can have unlimited development instances. From what I can tell this is based on the honor system.

The following article documents at a high level the differences https://developer.ibm.com/wasdev/docs/was-classic-or-was-liberty-how-to-choose/

The white paper also referenced by the article details each difference http://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/websphere/wasdev/documentation/ChoosingWASClassicorWASLiberty.pdf

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