WDSC 6.1 Express

Just some initial impressions on WebSphere Express 6.1 and V5R4 on a small
machine (my baby model 270). It's fast. I don't know that it's quite as
fast as WebSphere 5.1 was, but it's hard to discern a difference.

Note that I'm talking about my own code running inside of WebSphere, and NOT
the administration server. I have no idea what's going on in those pieces
of code. It takes over 10 minutes just to begin stopping an instance. That
is, once you enter the command to stop an instance in QShell, it takes
nearly ten minutes for QShell to get to the point where it actually issues
the command to the server. After that, it's another two or three minutes to
actually stop the instance.

I'm not sure what causes all of that, but I ran into that when I was trying
to set up some auto-start scripts.

The good news is that you can auto-start using a script. The bad news is
that the script language still hasn't settled down. The last note I read
was that the JACL scripting language which came into play around version 4
or 5 is now being deprecated for Jython. Oh goodie.

The other good news, though, is that the integration between the HTTP server
and WAS is a lot easier to control, at least for me. Just a couple of lines
in the WAS plug-in configuration file have allowed me to define a single
HTTP instance that serve my static data and yet passes though dynamic
requests to WAS. The idea here is that I will probably be able to do FRCA
on the static data. We shall see!

Anyway, I just thought you'd all like to know. All in all it's taken me
about three days to get my applications up and running on the new box, and
now I can start doing some serious testing.

Joe