Customizing application servers | WebSphere Tutorial pdf

Customizing application servers

When you create a new application server, it inherits most of its configuration settings from the specified template server.
To view or modify these settings, select Servers -> Application Servers . A list of application servers defined in the cell appears in the workspace. Click the name of the application server to make a modification.

General properties
The general properties consist of a few items which you can see immediately.
Run in development mode: Enable this option to streamline the startup time of an application server. Do not enable this setting on production servers.
Parallel start: Select this field to start the server components, services, and applications on multiple threads. This might shorten the startup time. The order in which the applications start depends on the weights you assigned to each of them. Applications that have the same weight are started in parallel.
Application classloader policy and class loading mode: These settings allow you to define an application server -specific classloader policy and class loading mode.
Web container settings
The Web container serv es application requests for servlets and JSPs. The Web container settings allow you to specify the default virtual host, enable servlet caching, specify session manager settings such as persistence and tuning parameters, and HTTP transport properties.

EJB container properties
These properties allow you configure the services provided by the EJB container.
Container services
The following settings are available under the container services section:
 Application profiling service: WebSphere Application Server V6 includes a new feature as part of the programming model extensions that provides an extension to access intents. This feature, Application Profiles, lets you identify tasks and access intent to use for a specific task.
Application profiles let yo u specify externally a set of tasks and specify which access intent should be used for a specific task
Transaction service: The transaction service properties allow you to specify settings for thetransaction service, as well as manage active transaction locks. The settings include the directory location for the transaction service on the application server to store log files for recovery, the total transaction lifetime timeout, and client inactivity timeout. When the application server is running, a Runtime tab is available in the Transaction Service properties workspace. From here, you can manage running transactions and modify timeout settings at runtime.
Dynamic cache service: This page allows you to specify settings for the dynamic cache service of this server.
Programming model extensions (PME): These settings are for:
– Compensation service
– Internationalization service
– Object pool service
– Startup beans service
ORB service settings: These settings allow you to specify settings for the Object Request Broker service.
Business process services
The business process settings allow you to manage the following PME features:
_ Activity session service
_ Work area partition service
_ Work area service
Server messaging:
The server messaging settings provide configuration settings and information for the messaging services.
Server infrastructure:
The server infrastructure settings include settings for Java and process management and administration services.
Class loader: You can define new class loaders.
Process definition: you can define command -line information for starting or initializing an application server process. These sett ings define run -time properties.Within the process definitions you will find the Java virtual machine definitions, such as the init ial and maximum heap sizes, debug options, the process classpath, or different runtime options such as profiler support and heap size.
Environment entries: These entries are a set of name/value pairs for use in the application server.
Process execution settings: These include settings such as the process priority, or the user and group that should be used to run the process
Monitoring policy: These properties determine how the node agent will monitor the application server. It includes ping intervals, time outs, and an initial state setting.
Administration services: This group of settings allows you to specify various settings for administration facility for this server, such as administrative communication protocol settings and timeouts.
Performance
These settings allow you to specify settings for the Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) and the Runtime Performance Advisor.
Communications
The communications settings include:
Ports
These settings contain the basic port definitions for the server. You might not ever need to manually change these ports. When you federate a node, you will need to know the SOAP connector port of the node or deployment manager. And the inbound communications ports are essential for accessing applications and the administrative console.
Message listener service
The message listener service provides support for WebSphere Application Server V5 message - driven beans applications .
Security
Security settings for the application server allow you to set specific settings at the server level.
Troubleshooting
These settings include those for logging and tracing.
Additional properties
The following settings are defined under the additional properties section:
Core group service and core group bridge service
These settings are rel ated to high availability.
Debugging service
On this page, you can specify settings for the debugging service, to be used in conjunction with a workspace debugging client application, for example, the Application Server Toolkit.
Thread pool
The thread pool specifies the possible maximum number of concurrently running threads in the Web container. As one thread is needed for every client request, this directly relates to the number of active clients that can possibly access the Web container on this applicat ion server at any given time. A timeout value can be specified for the application server to remove threads from the pool based on a timed period of inactivity
Web container transport chains
Communication to the Web container is handled through the channe l framework, which provides a common networking service for WebSphere Application Server components. The channel framework uses a set of configuration settings that describe in layers, how a component communicates to networking ports.
Port
A port is the component’s view of the transport mechanism. A port that uses the channel framework serves as a link between the component and the transport chain.
Transport chain
A transport chain consists of one or more transport channel types that support a specific I/O protocol.
Transport channel
A transport channel is specific to an I/O protocol. It contains settings that affect the communication, such as buffer size, timeout settings, TCP/IP port numbers for TCP channels, and other settings required for the communication protocol. By default you have four ports, their associated transport chains and channels defined for a Web container.