Okay, the WSAD is the development tool, also known as WebSphere Studio Application Developer. WSAD, which sorta replaced VisualAge for
Java, was replaced by IBM's Rational Application Developer 6. Nobody knows what happened to versions one through five of IRAD. Versions one through three of WSAD are also a mystery.
Now, WSAD, and for that matter, IRAD, come with embedded WebSphere Application Servers, which are essentially scaled down versions of the real thing. The idea is, any problems you get in development, are the same one's you would then get in production, since the two environments are essentially the same.
However, the (non-certified)
J2EE application server embedded in WSAD/IRAD does lack some major features. First of all, it is just one JVM, so workload management of the JVM, called server1, is not possible. You can't do any clustering or anything like that. Furthermore, I don't believe embedded messaging comes with the out of the box
test environment either.
Nevertheless, it does run on an open port, and clients can indeed access applications hosted on the embedded WebSphere Test Environment of WSAD and IRAD. It's certainly not designed for production, but how something is designed, and how something is used, are two totally different things.
But for a full scale, clusterable, certified J2EE environment for deploying
Servlets, JSPs, EJBs and Web Services, you'll want the full blown WebSphere Application Server v6.1.
Cheers!
-Cameron McKenzie
