What is Websphere? [closed]

Question

Googling this question returns lots of results with marketing jargon.

What I am looking for is a summary of what it does, more along these lines What is Maven?

This is the closest I could get.

Answer 1

"WebSphere" in the most abstract sense is a brand encompassing various products, so "a brand" is about as good an answer as you can get.

What one usually refers to when saying "WebSphere", though, is the WebSphere Application Server, which (as the name implies) is an application server - something that runs EJBs and other server-side Java technologies like servlets, JMS, etc. An example of another important player in this space is JBoss AS.

Finally, another possible definition of "WebSphere" is "its creator's biggest technology mistake" ;)

Answer 2

Unlike a regular web server which simply provides clients acces to html-documents, which their browser then displays as websites, an application server allows for programms/scripts to be invoked by requesting websites, which dynamically generate the websites.

In this case the scripts are written in Java. This allows for a lot of the apis provieded in Java to be utilised by your web-application (the website itself is simply the frontend of your webapplication)

So web sphere is an application server from IBM. Simple as that. This tells you what it can do.

Hope that helps.