I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage – when I was young, I had to walk to school – uphill both ways! Back in the seemingly ancient days when I first started working with IBM’s WebSphere Application server – version 3.5, in 2000, it really was uphill both ways! One didn’t simply deploy applications, one had to add servlets by hand. It was a long, laborious process. How far it seems we’ve come in many ways, yet perhaps not so far in others. By the end of my tenure with IBM’s Common Development and Test group, some 10 years later, we still did most of our work by hand, except we had a nice little ANT script developed by some folks in the Raleigh labs that almost completely automated the installation of WAS 6.1. But moving applications through our environments, or from say, version 6 to 6.1, was still a manual task done almost entirely by hand.
Author: John Grasett
John is a senior technical consultant at Avnet with over 25 years experience in the IT profession, the last 15 years focused on the WebSphere product family and more recently DevOps and Cloud. John wrote the Talos WebSphere Commerce toolkit.