Getting Started with WebSphere Application Server

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Chapter 1 – Introduction to WebSphere
Application Server Community Edition
IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition (Community Edition) is a
member of the IBM WebSphere Application Server family. Community Edition is a
lightweight Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server built on Apache
Geronimo, the open source application server project of the Apache Software Foundation.
The community using Community Edition consists of all sorts of people and companies,
who design, develop, deploy, or utilize Java EE solutions.
In this chapter you will learn about:
• The history of Community Edition
• The WebSphere application server family
• Target users and service support of Community Edition
• Components of Community Edition
• Java EE compliance matrix of Community Edition
• Related free products
1.1 A brief history of Community Edition
After the acquisition of Gluecode Software in May 2005, IBM devoted many technical
resources to contribute to Apache Geronimo, the main Gluecode application server
software, so it could attain Java EE certification.
By October 2005, this goal was reached with Geronimo Milestone 5 (M5), which was used
as the foundation of Community Edition. Community Edition was one of the first IBM
products to follow a new business model: Develop products based on open source
software, offer them for free to use for development, testing and production; and optionally
provide customers with fee-based IBM technical support. This provided users comfort
when working with open source software especially in a production environment.