WebSphere v6.1 is out for a while now. I recently got an opportunity to use it in the development environment and wanted to list my quick thoughts here:

• First off, there is no production release of Rational Application Developer (RAD) for WebSphere v6.1 yet. WAS 6.1 ships with a so called Application Server Toolkit (AST). In my personal opinion, toolkit is a misleading word as it makes customers think it's some sort of beta tool and not suitable for serious development. This perceived lack of development tools may even cause a delay in WAS 6.1 adoption. While I believe IBM should have released RAD 6.1 with WAS 6.1 (more on this in some other post), I also believe the toolkit has all the coding features an average development project needs. Some RAD features e.g. UML modeling are missing. If you are still not clear what AST offers, think of AST as WSAD for WAS 6.1
• Second, you cannot install the toolkit with WAS 6.1 test environment. You must install WAS 6.1 and toolkit separately and then point the toolkit to WAS 6.1 installation directory to use the server. I am not sure whether this is how RAD 7.0 (which is supposed to be the IDE for WAS 6.1) will work or RAD 7.0 will continue to have WAS install within its runtimes directory. Personally, I like the ability to use separate installation of WAS. This gives the flexibility to run the server outside the IDE and deploy and run applications on it.
• Third, the toolkit appears to support export and import of server profiles. Thank you IBM! In WSAD, an experienced developer could configure all the server parameters and distribute the server profile to the rest of the team. In RAD, this feature disappeared forcing every developer to go through the painful steps of configuring the server. But, looks like now this feature is back. At least it's back in the toolkit. I haven't personally used it yet (may be I will use it next week)
• Forth, Since I am using a separate server installation, I have to rely on the log files created within the server. In other words, not everything is printed on the old friend console within the IDE. This may not be true for RAD 7.0 but it's true for the toolkit. Also, if you are using WAS 5.x, the log files are at <app_server_home>/logs/<server_name>/<log_file_name>.log but WAS 6.x uses the concept of cell, node and profile. The new location for the log files is, <app_server_home>/profiles/<profile_name>/logs/<server_name>/<log_file_name>.log

Listed above are all the WAS 6.1/toolkit features related observations. Here are some miscellaneous observations. It's possible that some of these were implemented in WAS 6.0; consequently, the list below is more useful to some one migrating from WAS 5.x:

• By default WAS 6.1 installs as a windows service. I wish I could choose against it
• Security on WAS installation is turned on by default
• Default urls have changed as follows:
• Admin console is available on http://<hostname>:9061/ibm/console
• Applications are deployed on http://<hostname>:9081/<web_app>
• Universal Test Client is available on http://<hostname>:9081/UTC
• Server startup takes longer. It appears that the server initializes some out of the box applications. I have yet to dig into this