IBM Corp.’s campaign to promote the open-source version of its flagship WebSphere application server is getting a boost with a new release Monday of the software that supports the Java Enterprise Edition 8 specification.

That makes Open Liberty, which is the open-source version of WebSphere, the first production application server to support Java EE 8, ahead of even Java overlord Oracle Corp.

The new release also supports Spring Boot, a Java development environment that’s favored by developers for its ease of use and rapid deployment features. Spring Boot applications can now run natively on Open Liberty as well as in Docker containers, the portable lightweight runtime environment. That gives Spring applications the ability to take advantage of the inherent layering that containers provide and eliminates the cumbersome repackaging into Web Application Resource files that was previously required.

“You can now only update the application layer and not the rest of the Docker container, which makes a continuous deployment model more viable,” said Melissa Modjeski, director of WebSphere Application Server at IBM. “It can reduce the size of the code you’re pushing by 90 percent, which results in a considerable savings in time.”

Released in 1998, WebSphere is one of the most popular platforms for integrating multiple server-based applications as well as building cloud-native applications in Java. Renamed WebSphere Liberty last year, it’s intended to be a fast, reliable Java application server that accelerates developer productivity by providing a full runtime stack and integration with a variety of popular open-source automation tools. IBM released WebSphere under the Eclipse Public License late last summer, dubbing the project Open Liberty. The company continues to sell a commercial version under the name WebSphere Liberty.

“The code developed in Open Liberty is picked up and consumed in commercial Liberty,” Modjeski said. “We add some enterprise features [to WebSphere Liberty], but the code base is the same.” The decision to open-source the venerable platform “gives us a much better, more open way to collaborate with our customers,” she said. “We also saw it as a way to increase commercial sales of Websphere Liberty.”

The Docker image for Open Liberty can be downloaded from the Docker hub. The source code is hosted on GitHub.

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