WAS 8.5 and Liberty Profile

What is WAS 8.5?

• It is a proven, high-performance transaction engine that can help to build, run, integrate, and manage dynamic business applications. 
• It introduces the concept of dynamically adding applications  
• It does not requires server re-start after adding any applications on Liberty profile

What is new in WAS 8.5?

• New Liberty profile: a lightweight application foundation
• Fast, flexible, and simplified application development
• Intelligent Management and enhanced resiliency 
• Integrated tools 
• Improved operations, security, control, and integration 

Why Liberty on z/OS? 

• Improved performance  
• It is included with all the commercial editions of WAS 8.5 server 
• It provides a lightweight profile of the server for web, mobile and OSGi applications
• It is a functional subset of the full profile of WebSphere Application Server, for both development and production use
• Install size of under 50 MB, a start up time of around 03 seconds and a new XML-based server configuration

Liberty Profile Installation
   There 02 ways to install Liberty profile-
     1) Unzip jar file ‘wlp-developers-8.5.0.0.jar’
     It creates following directories-
     bin, clients, dev, lafiles, lib, templates, usr   

    2) Install Eclipse Java EE IDE for Web Developers (Indigo Service Release 2).
    Select the install icon for WAS V8.5 Liberty Profile. 
   https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/wasdev/entry/download_wlp?lang=en
   Drag it onto the menu bar in Eclipse IDE(Integrated Development Environment). 
   And then follow the prompts.

Install directory created for Liberty  Profile

 'Usr' directory contains server instances with their configuration and applications

Liberty Profile Architecture 

Deploy Applications on Liberty

• Drop new application into dropins directory, the application is automatically deployed on the server 
• Location of dropins directory: wlp/usr/servers/server1/dropins

Liberty Profile Commands

    1) To create new Liberty server
    bin> server.bat create <serverName> (windows)
    bin> server create <serverName> (other Platform) 
   
    2) To start Liberty server  
    bin> server.bat start <serverName> (windows)
    bin> server start <serverName> (other Platform)
 
   3) To stop Liberty server
   bin> server.bat stop <serverName> (windows)
   bin> server stop <serverName> (other Platform)  
NOTE: Commands may slightly differ for different Operating Systems.
The user needs to set JAVA_HOME & PATH pointing to JDK install path.

Features of Liberty Profile 

1. Unlike traditional WAS on z/OS, the Liberty Profile server instance is a single JVM rather than the multiple JVM model used by traditional WAS on z/OS. 
2. Configuration of Liberty Profile server instances is done by editing the 'server.xml' file and a small set of other optional files.
3. There is no "Administrative Console" for Liberty Profile.
4. The Liberty Profile is designed to be composable, lightweight, dynamic and fast.
5. Liberty Profile does not support EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) applications at this point of time. 
6. It only supports JEE Web modules and Enterprise applications.
7. To install an application on Liberty profile, just place your application file into the dropins directory. 
   
8. Liberty profile kernel will identify application files placed in the dropins directory to install them.

IBM Cognos Audit Reporting

The large software systems and applications have logs for various things which can be useful for debugging, data mining and analysis. When an application or a system crashes then the error details found in such logs are useful for the investigation purpose.

By default there is only one IBM Cognos logging target “File.” This set up has the various Cognos components logging to 'cogserver.log' file. The log files are useful for administrator since it can be used to watch the log as events occur.
If a customer have requirement for Cognos audit reporting then he can follow the below steps-

1) Route IBM Cognos log messages to a different database. It should be different from the Content Store database.
a) Open IBM Cognos Configuration window
Under Environment -> right click Logging -> click New Resource ->Destination

 

Type the name and select the db type of destination & click OK.

b) Now right-click on the newly created 'Audit_db' and select New Resource -> Database
Type the name of the db, select the db type and click OK.

 

Give following details for the new db-
-Database server with port number or instance name
-User ID and password
-Database name

c) On IBM Cognos Configuration window.
From File menu -> click Save and then click Re-start button.
It will create all the necessary tables in the db you have created.
And all newly created tables have a prefix "COGIPF_" as shown below-

2) Edit the logging level for audit reports. Choose the options Minimal, Basic, Request, Trace and Full from given drop down.

3) Enable the "Audit the native query for batch report service" logging. Click OK.