We’re ramping up a new project at work and we are required to deploy to WebSphere Application Server. Luckily WebSphere 8.5 seems to be much more lightweight and much easier to use than its predecessors. Everything here will be done on a machine running Windows 7.
We are going to set up a basic development environment with Eclipse to give us Maven integration and WebSphere integration.
Installation
First make sure you have Java JDK 7 or higher installed. You can check this by running this command
java -version
Next download IBM WebSphere 8.5.5 Liberty Profile. As described on the download page we just need to run the following command and pick a directory to install in.
java -jar wlp-developers-runtime-8.5.5.0.jar
Next download Eclipse 4.2 for JavaEE Developers and extract it into a folder. We are only using 4.2 here instead of the newest 4.3 due to the fact that the IBM WebSphere plugin for Eclipse is only supported up to 4.2. Start up Eclipse and select a workspace and then we’ll need to add a few plugins.
First we’ll need the IBM WebSphere 8.5.5 Developer Tools for Eclipse. You can install this by either searching the Help -> Eclipse Market Place or dragging the install button into the Eclipse from the IBM WebSphere 8.5.5 Liberty Profile download page. Install the plugins, accept any notifications and then Eclipse will restart.
In the Eclipse Server tab (ctrl+3 and search for server if you cannot find it) click the No Servers Available. Define a new server from the new server wizard.. link. This will open the New Server dialog where you can select the the WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Liberty Profile server under the IBM folder. If you don’t see the IBM folder or the server than you need to make sure you installed the necessary Eclipse plugin in the previous step.
Hit next and you’ll see the Liberty Profile Runtime Environment dialog. Browser to the folder where you installed WebSphere above and leave the default jre (which should be jre7 if you have the newest java correctly installed). Click next and rename the server if you want. Note the info for the default HTTP End point and hit finish.
The server window should now have your new server, right click it and select start. The server should now start up, you can see the debug information in the Console window. Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:9080 (or whatever you changed the end point too) and you should see the some information and link to other WebSphere resources.
Next we’ll want to installed the m2e-wtp plugin which will add Maven support the to Eclipse WTP Plugin. Go to the Eclipse Market Place and search for m2e-wtp and select Maven Integration for Eclipse WTP (Juno) and let Eclipse restart after installing.
Create a Maven Project and Deploy to WebSphere
m2e-wtp installs the m2eclipse plugin which gives us a simple way to create new maven projects. Right click your project tab and select New -> Other and under Maven select New Maven Project. Pick where you want the project created, select maven-archtype-webapp on the next screen and finally enter the groupId and artifactId for the project.
m2e will now create a very basic webapp project for you. In the server tab right click the WebSphere server and click Add and Remove… and then you should see the newly create project in the Available side, highlight your project and click the Add button to configure the project for the server.
Right click your server again and hit start. Navigate to http://localhost:9080/appname where appname is what you see under the WebSphere server in Eclipse. If you were successful with everything you should see a simple page that says “Hello World!”
Naming Stuff is Hard 