Introduction

Welcome to the first edition of Maximizing Performance and Scalability with IBM WebSphere from Apress.

Over the past three years , IBM has proven WebSphere's power by molding it into a powerful, scalable, and robust Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server platform. Each major release since 3.5 has included impressive redundancy, scalability, and performance features that continue to put IBM WebSphere at the forefront of high-end J2EE computing.

IBM's persistence in the areas of scalability and performance has paid off. This book is all about that ”the science and art of tuning, sizing, and configuring your IBM WebSphere server platform to be optimized to maximize your organization's J2EE application cost-effectiveness .

More and more Internet sites, as well as internal corporate applications, are being built upon the IBM WebSphere platform, and therefore more than ever, it's critical to an organization's Information Technology (IT) excellence to look for ways to optimize and tune its platforms. With the help of this book, you'll see how to approach, plan, and ultimately optimize and tune your WebSphere platforms using structured and battle-proven techniques.

This book covers both WebSphere 4 and 5. As with most enterprise software suites, at any given time, IT organizations may be operating multiple versions of key software products. In WebSphere's case, having a reference guide such as this book, which covers both WebSphere 4 and the newer advanced performance features of WebSphere 5, ensures that organizations not looking to migrate off WebSphere 4. x immediately can still reap the benefits of optimization and tuning.

Just as you tune your car to ensure that it runs efficiently and economically, IT managers and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) should use this book to obtain the same positive results for their IBM WebSphere platform.

In summary, with the two versions of WebSphere covered in this book, the optimization and performance characteristics are subtle; however, given that a particular setting in WebSphere 4 may produce a completely different result under WebSphere 5, you'll benefit from this dual-version book.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written for system managers, platform and J2EE architects , and IT managers. If your job involves designing and or managing WebSphere servers, then this book will be beneficial to you.

Lead and senior Java/J2EE developers can also benefit from this book. Quite often, developers don't get exposed to the important platform-specific considerations and issues when developing applications. HTTP sessions, database accesses , and the combination of failover capability and scalability are several common areas of high-end J2EE application design that often get little focus during design and development.

Therefore, senior developers can gain valuable insight into designing and developing WebSphere-deployed J2EE applications with the strategies and recommendations within this book.