The new features and capabilities found in the WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ 6.0 lets organizations combine new and existing heterogeneous IT assets as part of composite applications that reside on an underlying service-oriented architecture (SOA) across distributed and mainframe environments. As you deploy your composite applications, having a complete strategy in place to manage and secure them properly becomes the next goal. This article explains the key changes in version 6.0 from a management perspective and offers pointers on how to meet the management and security challenges specific to the WebSphere 6.0 platform.

What's New in WebSphere 6.0?
The IBM product line known as the WebSphere platform contains more than 350 different products, but in this article we'll focus on the two major elements of the 6.0 release: WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ.

IBM hasn't had a new release of WebSphere MQ for more than two years (although the company has supplied nine support packs during that time), so 6.0 is a major product release, designed to provide a foundation for companies building out composite applications and Services Oriented Architectures. In case you don't know, a composite application consists of functionality drawn from various sources like individual Web Services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire legacy systems whose output has been packaged as Web Services. IBM released WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 6.0 earlier this year, continuing their trend of releasing a new release every year. The WAS 6.0 release isn't as big as the 5.0 release, but it's still a solid release with many new features geared towards improving administration and application deployment, support for new J2EE specifications and APIs, better security, and support for Web Services and SOA.

Let's begin with what's new in WebSphere MQ. The 6.0 release leverages WebSphere MQ's reliable transport layer to send and receive Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages out-of-the-box that are frequently used in establishing Web Services links between applications. So WebSphere MQ 6.0 can easily provide reliable messaging and connectivity to enterprises looking into converting their existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or legacy applications into Web Services. At the same time, WebSphere MQ 6.0 ships with an interface to the Eclipse Open Source programmer's Workbench, so many Eclipse-based development and testing tools can be used to develop composite apps that make use of WebSphere MQ capabilities to communicate and pass messages across a company's IT infrastructure.

In addition, WebSphere MQ 6.0 includes a large library of connectors to application infrastructure elements - like DB2 or WebSphere or WebLogic application servers - and Oracle, SAP, or Siebel applications and support is provided for both Java and .NET environments. In fact, this release is tightly integrated with IBM's CICS Transaction Server and WebSphere Application Server 6.0 on both distributed and z/OS environments. IBM has also increased the amount and length of the messages that WebSphere MQ 6.0 supports, which again is geared towards giving users more flexibility and scalability, to allow using WebSphere MQ in the enterprise.

Similarly, WAS 6.0 introduces a lot of new standards and programming models to support Web services and SOA. Every EJB that's deployed on the application server automatically becomes a Web Service, thus integration of business logic with other application components can be done directly without any intermediate steps. Likewise, this release is also leveraging new Java standards, which automatically add a layer of authentication and authorization to secure Web services. As a part of the SOA initiative, WebSphere has included a new Service Data Object (SDO) API. That means that developers can now access data from various sources like databases, custom connectors, and XML, using this single SDO API.

New Management Features in WebSphere 6.0
Now that we've described some of the highlights of the WebSphere MQ and WAS 6.0 releases, let's go over some of the new features that can help you manage more effectively in more detail.

WAS 6.0 introduces fine-grained control over the various application components, which means you can now update only one part of the code without bringing down the entire application. This release also lets you create multiple profiles of the application server in a single installation. One big advantage is that administrators can now install multiple cloned instances of the application server on the same box, and changes to the application or the server configuration can be tested on the duplicate profile first without bringing down the production server. Once changes have been verified, settings can be migrated to the production server with minimal downtime. Likewise, WebSphere MQ 6.0 for z/OS can now be tuned much more dynamically to respond to changes in application workloads, so system resources such as buffers and pagesets can be added and removed without having to restart the queue manager or channel initiator.

Additionally, WebSphere 6.0 also implements all the new administrative APIs and standards from J2EE such as JMX 1.2 - the industry standard used to expose management functionality - Java Management Specification or JSR-77 - the industry standard schema for describing J2EE managed objects - and J2EE Deployment or JSR-88 -an open standard to deploy applications. Therefore, these new standards will make it easy for third-party management tools to interoperate with the application server in a non-vendor-specific manner. IBM's Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) now uses the standard JMX APIs to expose performance data. PMI has also been enhanced to let administrators enable or disable individual statistics. The old PMI API, though available in this release, is now deprecated and shouldn't be used. In addition, WebSphere 6.0 has been significantly improved by incorporating the new JSR 47 standard for centralized logging to facilitate troubleshooting deployed applications. Because of this, both application developers and troubleshooters can now hook into the centralized logging framework and look for message patterns. Another nice feature is the log file analyzer that can be used to analyze data from multiple servers. Similarly, there are some helpful new management functions in WebSphere MQ 6.0 to enable actions such as checking which applications are using the queue manager and tracking the objects they've opened, or showing the applications with long-running transactions. These new functions can really facilitate root cause analysis and troubleshooting tasks. Additionally, new attributed have been added to existing MQ commands like DISPLAY QSTATUS and DISPLAY CHSTATUS to provide more visibility into MQ resources. And there's a interesting new report option that can be put in the Message Descriptor so applications that process a message can generate reports on what they have done with that message. Generically, IBM calls them Activity Reports and they include information such as which transmission queues are used, and which channels are transporting the message.

How To Manage WebSphere 6.0 Environments
When thinking about your strategy to manage WebSphere MQ and WAS infrastructures there are three different approaches: product consoles, scripts, and management vendors.