IBM WebSphere Application Server Reviews

With the proper hardware the performance should be good, the administration is actually more easy than in the past and IBM is working to make more easy to admin, if your solution is working with more IBM solutions, WAS should be the right selection for your aplication server.

A lot of versions with minimal differences from each other but licensing could be problematic if you don't select the right one, the performance depends a lot of the experience of your sysadmins and tuning could be a issue if the application is not well designed.

If you have budget for a good hardware solution and your operations team is with the proper experience, WAS could be a good solution, but you need think and architect the complete solution with IBM middleware to avoid interoperability issues.

A lot of internal projects are working with new versions and the performance is good in most of the cases

WAS has been around for sometime and my company has been using it for some years now. It has also gone through many updates and release. The current stable release is version 8.5 with support for EJB 3.1 and many other J2EE features. This is actually what we are using. The system is stable and IBM had done alot of R&D on this product. This tool provides good integration with the IBM devloper tool (RAD), and makes development and testing a much easier.

Well the fees for this software is high so we have floating license which makes it a pain sometimes. certain feature is not available on the trial version which is a draw back. Try a few application servers in this space to see if it fits your requirements first and this will take some playing around.

I would recommend this tool to other developers as it as gotten updates and improved over the years. Try the trial version first to see if it fits you first.

We use it to develop Java based application at eGov Jamaica Ltd. where I work.

It's pretty easy to use and to install. The installation guide is very easy to understand. Support is also very helpful. Opening PMR with WAS is pretty easy and they are very responsive. The response time is also very fast. Our WAS representative is also very help and accessible.

Licensing is very expensive. WebSphere Application Server ND and family edition is pretty expensive. The first time pruchase is very expensive and the renew is pretty costly as well. The migration tool from one version to the next also requires some time to understand.

With WebSphere Liberty, it gives us the ability the refine some of our current footprint and enable to save money on licensing. We are working on migrating our traditional env to a liberty env. However, liberty is very new and requires some time for us to get used to.

IBM's support of IBM WebSphere is one of the best attributes of both the product and the company. Both tickets as well as working with our representitives is alway a quick means of getting answers to our questions.

WebSphere ND is a full featured product that can be overly complex when solving simple solutions. IBM Liberty offers a bring what you need options; however, I have not used it at this time.

We leverage IBM WebSphere to host our Enterprise Appliance Java applications. The main benefit is being able to host these applications in an environment that is designed to support uptime.

Being a paid server it has technical support. It is compatible with several IDE and easy to install and administer. You can generate profiles for each application.

Consume bastantes recursos de memoria y debes tener un ordenador potente sobretodo para el modo debug.

Being able to generate profiles for each deployment or application development with its own configuration adds a lot of value.

I like to see a lot of development effort by IBM to use Kebernetes, Docker, containers to move the apps to hybrid cloud. As the solution to the legacy systems and legacy data, this is a solution. I'd like to see in the future. -Jack Zhu

nothing. Watson may be far away from our daily life. But this is beginning of this period. We will try it when we have chance.

passing data into and from mainframe.

There are many options for the upgrade path - We chose the inplace upgrade. Though it sounds destructive but it is a straight upgrade with the pre and post upgrade migration scripts. It preserve all the configuration settings including apps. The upgrade is seemless.

I worked with WebSphere both traditioal and liberty profile on both zOS and distributed linux platforms. The upgrade on the zos is more complictad.

Hosting CA DMV online applications on WebSphere on ZOS

I liked that it connected the things I needed connected. It is built to do a specific task and is able to do that specific task. When using IBM software suite you kind of need WAS to do your job.

I disliked not being able to reuse a lot of the processes that I would follow for redundant tasks. I think this has gotten better though.

I was using the IBM software suite and needed to connected some of the pieces. WAS was able to do this for me.

It is very stable, and it also has a lot of dimcumentation on the internet, not only from IBM but also from other developers.

It also has a lightweight version that starts very quickly with a minimum set of dependencies.

The UX of the administration console is not very easy, nor very intuitive.

From time to time I find myself serching where should I click to get to the configuration parameter I want to change.

Deploying JEE application

I like the close adherence to the Java EE standards and support has been excellent.

I would like to see a more well-formed roadmap for how WebSphere ND is going to integrate with Jakarta EE or what the future holds for the WebSphere ND product.

We utilize WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment as our standard Java Enterprise Edition/Web Container solution. We run multiple policy management systems on WebSphere.

efficiency, scalability, east to be managed and setup. flexibility when moving between different evironments,

sometimes it comes down of no reason.

we face a repeated error of node is not available. or could not syncronize the config between all nodes. we have tp restart the server from command line not from the console.

Console cannot do ann admin functionaoities.

plan well for all your enterpeisea apps.

try to build one farm that contains all your apps

It is our main backbone that hosts most of our internet channels, we serve millions of users. we can deploy the apps on many nodes,monitor them, manage them easily,

It comes with a local server that you can configure to run code on your local machine.

So old technology. Constant problems with upgrading, deployments...etc. Should only be used to support legacy applications. Upgrading Java and other languages is a pain. It is also bundled with their version of eclipse which makes things annoying use together. Configuring server profiles and ports is especially annoying

Use AWS or any other cloud server provider instead. Docker or Kubernetes is the future of cloud applications

Deploying websites and technical server code to the backend. It does streamline the build process but the servers themselves are very annoying.

WebSphere Application Server allows us to run our enterprise Java applications with high availability over hundreds of production domains for the nation's healthcare companies.

APC hangs are not easy to identify or diagnose

WebSphere Application Server allows us to run our enterprise Java applications with high availability over hundreds of production domains for the nation's healthcare companies.

One server working as base server for many other servers, if developer is good at one he can easily operate many other servers provided by IBM and others as well. Easy to maintain and optimize too.

Better Troubleshooting options might help adminsitrators.

IBM Security Identity Manager, ISAM and other former products Websphere portal and Content Management

We are using WAS for a while and we are seeing good perf. We would like to upgrade to 9/9.5 to get better performance.

OpenJDK is diff from OpenJ9 and it affects not to get OpenJDK features fully & support. Hope it will be as one product in the future

Running business critical apps

I worked as WS admin for a number of years. It's a generally stable software, once it's properly installed and configured. Its also a lightweight Web services and Micro services can be deployed saving time and cost

Cost is on the higher side and Issues are sometimes very hard to trace. Working through support can be cumbersome. Also they do not have very good community support for WebSphere.

hould take training classes offered for WebSphere. It offers many useful classes

An app with a full set of functions and tools about business integrations. It also offers templates to easily build customized tools/apps.

As the WebSphere application server product has matured the need for specialized skills and understanding of the product internals has diminished.

As the product has become easier to implement there is a concomitant loss in the technical expertise of available WebSphere administrators. While this is usually not an issue, there is still value in having someone who is more deeply familiar with how the product operates.

We have consolidated a large number of applications onto a platform where they need not be aware that they are sharing resources.

WAS has an overall higher throughput and tolerance for higher user load compared to other enterprise grade app servers. Also the underlying IBM Java platform is delivering faster startup and better performance than the open source varieties or the ones from competitors.

The fact that all scripting effort from the past years is being lost by moving to WAS Liberty, which needs less complex scripts in general.

We are helping customers move to a more modernized application environment to enable the customer to move to a microservice architecture.

Been running WebSphere for 10+ years for major applications with very few problems and when needed IBM support has been great.

The long term migration of WebSphere applications will be tough as we move to a cloud based data center.

Look at LIberty

We use websphere for mass use applications that require stateful applications used in the support of the public. The great part has been one platform for all and the development of skill sets that can be used by all the customers we support

Centralized repository for updates, timely fixpacks, well supported.

Logging is not always descriptive, can be difficult to troubleshoot.

We have been able to help customers deploy applications that server as a bridge to their legacy applications. WebSphere has been a robust enviroment for them.

Agility, performance, security aspects of the application server that served our business for almost 2 decades now

nothing much to dislike. trying to get the product to cloud now and see how that work

financial products for insurance and all

Only working WebSphere for a few years, when configured properly, it is the most stable thing you want to use to run your applications or service. Looking forward to WLP having the same longevity

the setup time and the size, it has a very large foot print

do it

not sure how to rally respond to this except while there are other products that could be used to do the same thing. This is much more stable

WebSphere is very robust and has the ability to allow you to support and customize JEE applications. We have a very lareg footprint of applications running on this platform and we are happy with the result.

There are a few pieces I wish they opened up for easier control over, one of which is the SSL functionality.

Allowing a platform for both vendor written Java apps, as well as a robust framework for in house developed apps.

A lighter, more nimble client for automation developers

It would be nice if Liberty exposed the same elements as tradtional WAS

We use WAS to host web services used with HATS for QA automated testing of MF applications

with the IBM support , we are able to install on our environment sooner and its is being used on our production

nothing i could recollect now to

its an application server for our portal

The flexibility and simplicity of the product to create and maintain products in the web layer

Technically speaking, due to open nature of product, issues related to memory management

Faster solution for web products

We use WAS across several platforms, including different versions/flavours of Windows, Linux and Unix.That allows us to define the best environment for a workload without having to have different skill sets on our Dev and Middleware teams.

Sometimes pricing can be prohibitive and other options allow us to scale without having to buy additional licenses.

Many of our applications use WAS, and we can deploy them on Unix, Linux or Windows

To be honest; I don't like the product at all.

Deployment is tedious, Development is time taking, support is a nightmare.

Never consider WAS, worst product ever seen in my life.

We have hosted all our microservices in IBM WAS.

The dynamic cluster concept and managing multiple application servers using on server template is great.

The Dynamic Cluster operations when set to automatic mode can spin up 100's of JVM's and to stop them and to get everything under control is a bit painful. We have stopped using automotic operational mode for clusters because of this reason.

Our main business applications run on WAS and it makes administration easy.

Its a Good middleware Technology With best Clustering concepts.

Cost is high than compatitors. Other Company have better service and support.

To run Legacy systems for EDI and Order management.

Light weight and easy to use cross platforms

Lack of documentation. The ibm.com site is very difficult to navigate and documentation is very limitted

Micro-services for large scaled applications

WAS is used to run many of our business critical applications

Licensing could be confusing. How to convert from one type to another

Web based applications.

Ease of use, performance gains from previous versions (i.e v6 to v9)

Lack of support for WAS 8, cost of upgrades and maintenace.

n/a

n/a

Simple to handle, runs fast and is made of modules. We espacially count on the zero migration statement, so far it has proven to be right.

simply nothing - I like it as it is, simple and fast

Don't dream it - be it.

we are now able to run the applications separate and have a modern platform to build on

I like the simply kind of Working with WebSphere Liberty

the price, the price, the price, the price

over 180 Apps vor Banks

Innovation to suit the current market trends.

We are still not able to trust completely with upgrades.

Deploy modern applications at rapid growth.

its it one of the most powerful and feature rich application

ihs backward compatiblity on the as400 is not great

portal applications

The configuration in WAS to set up connection., transaction, security, certificates etc which are not part of application maintenance and make it easy to maintain.

Nothing special that I dislike about WAS server. For lower environments or toolkits, it may be a bit heavy, which I beleive is getting resolved with Liberty server.

WCS platform implemented using WAS

Seamless integration among various application components that minimize developer efforts and maximize developer productivity.

Websphere Administration can be made simple and Messaging debugging should be more riigid.

Ability to run in windows and other open platform.

We are running complex real time business monitoring solutions all in a single host running more than 35 different JVMs with ease.

Elaborate admin console to manage the cell.

its heavy footprint ,roadmap, non-cloud-native nature

its our runtime environment/middleware for JAVA applications

The stability of the platform, it's usually working when we need it.

The install process takes rtoo long and is very difficult to follow.

It'sd a great product, but it's not for the faint of herat or for someone wanting to install software quickly,

It allows us to run HCL Connections and HCL Leap

Continuous reliablility of the app server through over two decades..

Till recently, the cost was a factor we disliked. With Open Liberty we hope to see a change in the trend.

Exceptional support from IBM. It does what it needs to do.

we run entitre systems on WAS. Benefits: performance and fault tollerance.

good support from IBM. Provides good WAS console for configuration.

IBM WAS is very heavy software. Even on developer machine, it takes almost 10 GB. Also it's very costly.

IBM WAS used in our old applications. It was stable. However in new applications, i would not recommend using IBM WAS. Should use Tomcat.

Once you have WebSphere tuned the way you need it, it's very stable.

The amount of troubleshooting can be time consuming. Installation and customization can be problematic as well.

Make sure you perform thorough testing before you deploy!

We use it as an effective communications tool for our employee portal

very stable and standard and worth implementing for a enterprise environment.

Very high cost. Can help in reducing costs

just go for it.

Complete middleware along with MQ, helps in being the spinal cord for the organization, Connecting all the systems in the back in a very standard manner

We have WebSphere v8.5.5.x deployed in our environment. We have migrated from several versions back to v5.x. Migration process has improved immensely over the different versions. The product also has improved in stability as well.

The cost for Network Deployment version.

Stable product that I can count on keeping up with latest updates of standards.

Industry-standard platform and programming language, lots of EE libraries, good support, improving (finally) patching tools, adopting to changing methodologies and standards

Java less relevant than it used to be, needing to use InstallationManager since it's awful, devs prefer more modern tools

The business of state governmental agencies

Excellent security currency that is highly configurable. Ability to integrate with other products with all the possible options.

Not as quick to startup and a much lager footprint then cloud native options like Open Liberty.

Rock solid application server. We host thousands of applications!

This is the main Middleware platform for our company. It is reliable and scalable.

It is rather heavy weight and is not best for all applications. We are looking into Liberty for the right applications.

This is more core platform for our web-based applications.

It’s a great middleware tool to deploy j2ee applications in today’s world. Very user friendly.

Nothing to dislike, again great product. Loved to see in cloud.. also openshift is a great tool

It’s most on new fixpacks . It’s very stable tool.