WebSphere V9 “traditional” has recently been fully Java EE 7 certified. In case you are wondering, this is indeed the much maligned “kitchen sink” monolithic version of WebSphere – as opposed to the far more nimble WebSphere Liberty.
Given the very large and loyal customer base IBM has as well as the continued substantial usage rates for WebSphere traditional, this is sure to be a further boost to Java EE 7 adoption. In particular it is important to note that WebSphere V9 also comes with support for Java SE 8.
WebSphere V9 joins the Java EE 7 compatible ranks of JBoss EAP 7, GlassFish 4, WildFly, WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5.5.6, WebLogic 12.2.1, Hitachi Cosminexus and TmaxSoft JEUS. All of the Java EE certified offerings are always listed on the official Java EE compatibility page. For some perspective few other open standards such as SQL have as many available implementations as Java EE 7 already has (and this is bound to only just keep getting better).
You’ll find the trial link for WebSphere V9 here. IBM senior staffer Tom Alcott has a nice technical write-up on the details of WebSphere V9 certainly including support on various cloud platforms including BlueMix. It should be noted that unlike WebSphere traditional, WebSphere Liberty was one of the earliest available commercial Java EE 7 certified application servers, certainly well ahead of WebLogic and JBoss EAP. You should really check out my WebSphere Liberty Java EE 7 compatibility announcement on The Aquarium, written while I was still at Oracle.
Other than existing WebSphere traditional customers it is honestly difficult to recommend it over WebSphere Liberty. Whatever you may think of the WebSphere brand, you will be doing yourself a disfavor if you do not take WebSphere Liberty seriously. You should definitely not let any open source prejudices unduly hinder your appreciation of the engineering work behind Liberty. It is definitely one of the most modular, lightweight and impressive performing (in every way) modern application platforms available today – Java EE or otherwise. Hopefully that is food for some thought…
According to our test of existing CDI and JSF 2 based applications , WAS classic EE7 always performs better than WAS Liberty EE 7 (we are deploying same war file) . WAS classic and liberty contains same versions of CDI and JSF , why WAS classic based jsf pages opens faster than liberty, we could not understand so far. Our expectation was to get similar page performance throughput for ee 7 liberty and classic. Also , page performance of WAS EE 6 classic almost same with WAS EE 7 classic.