Configuring the HTTP session manager with WebSphere Application Server

While WebSphere® Application Server provides session management function, the performance degrades as the number of requests increases. WebSphere eXtreme Scale comes bundled with a session management implementation that provides session replication, high availability, better scalability, and more robust configuration options.

1. Splice your application so that it can use the session manager.
   To use the session manager, you must add the appropriate filter declarations to the web deployment descriptors for the application. In addition, session manager configuration parameters are passed in to the session manager in the form of servlet context initialization parameters in the deployment descriptors. There are multiple ways in which you can introduce this information into your application:
   • Auto-splice with WebSphere Application Server

     You can configure your application to use the HTTP session manager for the data grid when you install your application. You can also edit the application or server configuration to use the WebSphere eXtreme Scale HTTP session manager. For more information, see Configuring WebSphere Application Server HTTP session persistence to a data grid.

   • Splice the application with the addObjectGridFilter script

     For more information about running this script, see Splicing a session data grid application with the addObjectGridFilter script.

   • Auto-splice the application with custom properties

     You do not need to manually splice your applications when the application is running in WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.

     You can use this auto-splice option when your environment meets the following conditions:

     • You are using a deployment manager. The cell, server, and application scope are available scopes and are only available when you are running in a deployment manager. If you require a different scope, manually splice your web applications.
     • The splicer.properties file must be in at the same path on all nodes. The nodes are hosting an application server or applications that are being spliced for session replication. For mixed environments containing Windows and UNIX nodes, this option is not possible, so you must manually splice the application.

     Add the com.ibm.websphere.xs.sessionFilterProps custom property to either a cell or a server to set the splicer.properties file location for all of the web applications at that scope. The file exists on the deployment manager. If you want to indicate the splicer.properties file for a specific application with a cell-level custom property, enter the name of the custom property as: <application_name>,com.ibm.websphere.xs.sessionFilterProps, where application_name indicates the name of the application for which you want to apply the custom property. The value is the location of the splicer.properties file your applications require. An example path for the location of a file follows: /opt/splicer.properties.

   • Manually splice the application with the Ant build script
     WebSphere eXtreme Scale ships with a build.xml file that can be used by Apache Ant, which is included in the was_root/bin folder of a WebSphere Application Server installation. You can modify the build.xml file to change the session manager configuration properties. The configuration properties are identical to the property names in the splicer.properties file. You modify the build.xml file, start the Ant process by running the following command:

     • ant.sh, ws_ant.sh
     • ant.bat, ws_ant.bat

     (UNIX) or (Windows).
   • Manually update the web descriptor

     Edit the web.xml file that is packaged with the web application to incorporate the filter declaration, its servlet mapping, and servlet context initialization parameters. Do not use this method because it is prone to errors.

   For a list of the parameters that you can use, see Servlet context initialization parameters.
2. Deploy the application.
   Deploy the application with your normal set of steps for a server or cluster. After you deploy the application, you can start the application.
3. Access the application.
   You can now access the application, which interacts with the session manager and WebSphere eXtreme Scale.