JEE is an ever-changing world, and as soon as a new application server is released by IBM, new standards and approaches become available, or they become the preferred method of choice by the JEE community. Organizations who have invested in JEE technology require an application server platform that allows them to extend their existing legacy systems, and provide services-based frameworks on which their enterprise applications and systems can be based. So there is a continuing need for IBM to facilitate all the facets of the new JEE enterprise features, namely JMS, Web Services, Web Applications, and Enterprise JavaBeans, ensuring their product continues to innovate and provide the ability for their customers to extend their own core systems.

IBM is committed to ensuring WAS negates the need for complex architectures, while at the same time providing a platform for servicing business applications, process automation/workflow, and complex bus topologies as required. The WAS product is continually being updated and improved to bring in new technologies as they are released or accepted by the community as a whole.

WAS can be considered the base of your enterprise JEE application service provisioning toolbox, and can be extended with custom business solutions as required. Developers and architects want to ensure that their application designs use the latest JEE standards and programming models. Reading through the WAS product specification sheet, which can be downloaded from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ws/was/, you can see that there are many new features in WebSphere Application Server version 8 supporting many industry JEE API's (Application Programming Interfaces) and standards.

Let's now turn to a quick, but not so brief, overview of the new capabilities under WebSphere 8.