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  1. Stackups
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  3. Websphere vs Websphere Liberty

Websphere vs Websphere Liberty

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Websphere
Websphere
Stacks100
Followers92
Votes0
Websphere Liberty
Websphere Liberty
Stacks38
Followers93
Votes0

Websphere vs Websphere Liberty: What are the differences?

WebSphere and WebSphere Liberty are Java application server offerings from IBM. They are designed to host Java applications. Let's explore the key differences between WebSphere and WebSphere Liberty:

  1. Architecture: WebSphere is a traditional Java EE application server with a monolithic architecture, while WebSphere Liberty follows a microservices-like architecture and offers a lightweight and modular approach.

  2. Footprint and Performance: Due to its monolithic architecture and comprehensive feature set, WebSphere has a larger footprint compared to WebSphere Liberty. WebSphere Liberty, being modular, allows for a smaller and more lightweight installation. This reduced footprint contributes to faster startup times and better overall performance, making it suitable for microservices-oriented deployments and scenarios where resource efficiency is critical.

  3. Development Approach: WebSphere requires more configuration and has a formal deployment process, whereas WebSphere Liberty embraces agile development practices, supports containerization, and offers a simpler and more intuitive configuration model.

  4. Feature Set: WebSphere offers a comprehensive set of enterprise-level features and supports the full Java EE specification, while WebSphere Liberty provides a broad range of core Java EE and MicroProfile specifications for building lightweight and cloud-native applications.

  5. Licensing: WebSphere requires a paid license, whereas WebSphere Liberty offers a flexible licensing model with a core set of free features and options to add additional features or purchase commercial licenses.

  6. Target Use Cases: WebSphere is suitable for large-scale enterprise applications with complex requirements, high availability, scalability, and advanced security needs. WebSphere Liberty is preferred for cloud-native and microservices-oriented deployments, agile development practices, and scenarios where rapid deployment and resource efficiency are important.

In summary, WebSphere provides a comprehensive set of enterprise features, while WebSphere Liberty offers a lightweight and modular approach that is better suited for modern cloud-native and microservices architectures.

Detailed Comparison

Websphere
Websphere
Websphere Liberty
Websphere Liberty

It is a highly scalable, secure and reliable Java EE runtime environment designed to host applications and microservices for any size organization. It supports the Java EE, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile standards-based programming models.

It is very lightweight profile of WebSphere Application Server. It is a flexible and dynamic profile of WAS which enables the WAS server to deploy only required custom features instead of deploying a big set of available JEE components.

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lightweight profile; deploy only required custom features
Statistics
Stacks
100
Stacks
38
Followers
92
Followers
93
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
No integrations available
Docker
Docker
Chef
Chef
Jenkins
Jenkins

What are some alternatives to Websphere, Websphere Liberty?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

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