This post is part of a series exploring the unique aspects and capabilities of WebSphere Liberty when running on z/OS.
We'll also explore considerations when moving from WebSphere traditional on z/OS to Liberty on z/OS.
To start at the beginning, follow t
his link to the first post.
The next post in the series is
here.
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This week we’ll go through some of the history of the product names for WebSphere. As I noted last week, we began life as Component Broker, but fairly early on got renamed to WebSphere Application Server.
At some point IBM decided that WebSphere was a brand and quite a few other products (including MQ) picked up the WebSphere name. Eventually IBM changed its mind and a lot of those products are now branded “IBM” instead of “WebSphere”.
We also spun off a few products along the way. At first there was WebSphere XD which stood for eXtended Deployment. That consisted of three different things: Compute Grid, Object Grid, and Virtual Enterprise. Eventually these things spun off into their own separate products. Along the way Object Grid became eXtreme Scale and Virtual Enterprise became Intelligent Management. Compute Grid kept its name. And then eventually they all folded into the WebSphere Application Server product.
We should probably also talk about the Base and ND (for Network Deployment) products. On distributed these were two different things. The Base version allowed to you run stand-alone servers. There were no Deployment Managers or Node Agents. You could run multiple servers, of course, but all that admin stuff to help you coordinate between them was missing. The ND version included all that.
On z/OS there was just the one WAS for z/OS product (well, it was also WAS for OS/390 at one point, but we won’t go there). That was basically WAS ND but for z/OS. And then came Liberty.
In the beginning Liberty was a completely separate implementation of an application server written in Java and it supported a tiny little subset of the Java EE specification. It was included ‘free’ as part of your WebSphere Application Server license. That was true for both z/OS and distributed. Over time Liberty acquired more and more capability and now far outreaches the spec levels supported in the original application server.
The presence of two server implementations in one product created a naming problem. For a while the original server was called ‘full profile’ and the Liberty server was called ‘Liberty profile’. This was based on different ‘profiles’ that make up the Java EE specification. Liberty originally just supported the ‘web profile’, but acquired more things over time. In the beginning the original server supported everything, thus ‘full’ profile, while whatever Liberty supported was ‘Liberty’ profile. You can see residue of this name in references to ‘wlp’ which was WebSphere Liberty Profile.
Anyway, over time Liberty supported things the original server didn’t, so the ‘full profile’ name didn’t make any sense. Internally we’d been calling the original server TWAS (for Traditional WAS) and the official external name became WebSphere traditional (lower-case-t). And since we were dropping the whole ‘profile’ thing, Liberty became WebSphere Liberty. On z/OS they were both still included in the one WAS z/OS product. Distributed has gone through a bunch of different options I won’t get into.
Then we open sourced most of Liberty and called it Open Liberty. WebSphere Liberty was built around Open Liberty and contained various extras, plus you could buy a license for it. Open Liberty was, obviously, open source (and I won’t get into the various support options on distributed). On z/OS there is no Open Liberty support. There’s just WAS z/OS which includes everything.
Over time more and more things that were just in WebSphere Liberty moved to Open Liberty. From a distributed perspective there’s not much exclusively in WebSphere Liberty. But for z/OS, the z/OS extensions (what we’ll be talking about in this blog…eventually) exist only in WebSphere Liberty. Which is part of the WAS for z/OS product.
There’s also a copy of Liberty that comes embedded in z/OS for use by IBM products like z/OSMF, as well as a copy in CICS. We’ll get to those..