What are the main diference between WAS Liberty Profile and WAS downloaded by Installation Manager

Question

From developer viewpoint, what is diference between WebSphere Application Server(1.5GB) installed by Installation Manager and WebSphere Application Server V8.5 Liberty Profile (65 MB)? I will develop an application based on EJB, JSF and JPA. According to my search, Liberty Profile is an easy way to start develop with Websphere. I would appreciate any comment because I am in charge of preparing the workstations for a team and it is my first time to heard about Liberty Profile. I guess that Liberty Profile must be a smaller Web Server similiar to Tomcat plus EJB support and without Console Administration.

Answer 1

The key difference between WAS Liberty and WAS Classic boil down to the following: Java EE 7 support and Legacy app support

• WebSphere Liberty supports Java EE 7 as of 8.5.5.6, WAS classic does not. WAS 9.0 supports Java EE 7

• WAS Liberty does not support some of the older apps that have now been deprecated in the Java EE API such as JAX-RPC.

• If you inherited an old application that takes advantage of WebSphere specific extensions you're generally bound to WAS Classic
• Existing administrative and deployment scripts would not likely work on WAS Liberty
• Network Deployment support is not as robust in WAS Liberty

However, if you are doing a new app it isn't too bad and you can pay for support for it without having to redeploy to something new unlike Glassfish or WildFly. There's a 2GB limit for production on the organization level, but you can have unlimited development instances. From what I can tell this is based on the honor system.

The following article documents at a high level the differences https://developer.ibm.com/wasdev/docs/was-classic-or-was-liberty-how-to-choose/

The white paper also referenced by the article details each difference http://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/websphere/wasdev/documentation/ChoosingWASClassicorWASLiberty.pdf