Starting or stopping enterprise applications

You can start an application that is not running (has a status of Stopped) or stop an application that is running (has a status of Started).

Before you begin

Install your Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application on a server. By default, the application starts automatically when the server starts.

About this task

You can start and stop applications manually using the following:

  • Administrative console
  • startApplication and stopApplication attributes of the AdminControl object with the wsadmin tool
  • startApplication and stopApplication administrative jobs of the AdminTask.submitJob -jobType object with the wsadmin tool
  • Java programs that use ApplicationManager or AppManagement MBeans

The steps describe how to use the administrative console to start or stop an application.

Avoid trouble: The steps apply to applications that do not contain Java Application Programming Interface (API) for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) or Service Component Architecture (SCA) service providers. To stop or start applications that contain JAX-WS or SCA service providers, use the Service providers page accessed by clicking Services > Service providers. To start a service provider application, select a service and click Start Application. To stop a service provider application, select a service and click Stop Application. Then, on the Stop application page, click OK to stop all modules in the application, including other services such as enterprise beans and servlets.

Procedure

  1. Go to the Enterprise applications page. Click Applications > Application Types > WebSphere enterprise applications in the console navigation tree.
  2. Select the check box for the application you want started or stopped.
  3. Click a button:
    Option Description
    Start Runs the application and changes the state of the application to Started. The status is changed to partially started if not all servers on which the application is deployed are running.
    Stop Stops the processing of the application and changes the state of the application to Stopped.
    To restart a running application, select the application you want to restart, click Stop and then click Start.

Results

The status of the application changes and a message stating that the application started or stopped is displayed.

[z/OS]If an application server on which the application is deployed synchronizes configuration with the deployment manager during server startup, then the application might not start and a DeploymentDescriptorLoadException might be written to the server SystemErr.log file. Stop and restart the server, and then try starting the application again.

Note: This topic references one or more of the application server log files. As a recommended alternative, you can configure the server to use the High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) log and trace infrastructure instead of using SystemOut.log , SystemErr.log, trace.log, and activity.log files on distributed and IBM® i systems. You can also use HPEL in conjunction with your native z/OS® logging facilities. If you are using HPEL, you can access all of your log and trace information using the LogViewer command-line tool from your server profile bin directory. See the information about using HPEL to troubleshoot applications for more information on using HPEL.

What to do next

You can configure an application so it does not start automatically when the server on which it resides starts. You then start the application manually using options described in this topic.

If you want your application to start automatically when its server starts, you can adjust values that control how quickly the application or its server starts:

  1. Click Applications > Application Types > WebSphere enterprise applications > application_name > Startup behavior.
  2. Specify a different value for Startup order.

    This setting specifies the order in which applications are started when the server starts. The default value is 1 in a range from 0 to 2147483647. The application with the lowest starting weight is started first.

  3. Specify a different value for Launch application before server completes startup.

    This setting specifies whether the application must initialize fully before its server starts. The default value of false prevents the server from starting completely until the application starts. To reduce the amount of time it takes to start the server, you can set the value to true and have the application start on a background thread, thus allowing server startup to continue without waiting for the application.

  4. If the application or module is deployed on a cluster and you have no more configuration changes to make, click Rollout Update on the Enterprise applications page to propagate the changed configuration on all cluster members of the cluster on which the application or module is deployed. Rollout Update sequentially updates the configuration on the nodes that contain cluster members.
  5. Save the changes to the application configuration.