IBM WebSphere Interview Questions And Answers

1. What is WebSphere MQ JMS Provider?
Answer: IBM WebSphere MQ classes for Java Message Service are a set of Java classes that enables the JMS applications to access WebSphere MQ systems.
Both the point-to-point and publish/subscribe models of JMS are supported.

2. What does it mean by node federation?
Answer:
Federation in WebSphere means adding a node to the Cell. This is done by addNode.sh command, and this may take a few minutes based on the node size.

3. How to change WebContainer thread pool size?
Answer:
WebContainer thread pool can be changed by going inside JVM >> Thread pools >> WebContainer

4. What is PMT?
Answer:
PMT (profile management tool) is GUI to create and manage the WebSphere profiles.

I hope above helps you to get a WebSphere administrator job. If you need help with resume and interview then check out this tutorial.
below is the list of IBM Websphere Portal basic interview questions and answers. These IBM Websphere Portal interview questions and answers are meant for freshers as well as for experienced developers. So, If you going for an interview on IBM Websphere Portal, I suggest you to just give a look at following IBM Websphere Portal interview questions. These IBM Websphere Portal interview questions are based on a basic introduction to IBM Websphere Portal, why we need IBM Websphere Portal, Dynacache, Websphere Portal Life Cycle, PortletContext, PortletSession, Websphere Portal Architecture, Trace and logging for WebSphere Portal, LDAP, ReleaseBuilder tool in WebSphere Portal, Authoring and Presentation Templates, etc. (E learning Portal)

5. How is the inter portlet communication carried out in JSR 168 portlet?
Answer:
The inter portlet communication for JSR 168 in WebSphere portal can be done using Dyna cache or shared library. We can create a hash map or any data structure, where we can store an object that needs to be transported with a unique key and retrieve it from the receiving portlet.

6. What is CSA?
Answer:
Client-side aggregation (CSA) is a new method of rendering a WebSphere Portal page that moves the rendering workload from the server to the client. It is made possible by the Representational State Transfer (REST) services introduced in WebSphere Portal 6.1.

In the traditional server-side aggregation (SSA) rendering, the page and each of the portlets is completely rendered on the server, using JSPs, and returned to the client in one big response.

In contrast, in CSA, we request only the pieces of information from the server that are required to update the page as a result of the user’s interactions with the page.

For example, if a page contains four portlets and the user clicks a link in one of the portlets, only that portlet is updated. This means the server must render only one portlet, instead of four portlets plus the theme for an interaction with a single portlet.

The REST services also take greater advantage of caching. Since each individual artifact can be independently cache-able, the client ends up retrieving a greater number of responses directly out of cache, further reducing the server workload.

7. Explain About Web Sphere?
Answer:
The word web sphere popularly refers to IBM middleware technology products. Web sphere is known for its turn-key operation in e-business applications. It has run time components and tools which can help in creating applications which run on WAS. WAS refers to web sphere application server.

8. Detail About The Architecture Of Web Sphere?
Answer:

Web Sphere is built on three main components they are

  • Database
  • J2EE application server
  • A webserver

The databases which it supports are

  • DB2
  • Oracle
  •  Cloudscape

Application server is IBM WAS and the supported web servers are

  • IBM server
  • Microsoft IIS
  • Sun web server.

9. Explain About Extended Deployment?
Answer:
Web sphere application server extended deployment increases the functionality of the server in two main areas they are manageability and performance. Dynamic virtualization between servers is possible with the help of XD. A stand-alone distributed cache was added to it under the performance header, it is known as Object Grid.

10. Explain About The Network Deployment Feature Present In Was?
Answer:
Managing singletons will be a thing of the past and it also provides hot recovery of singletons which makes you forget about your GC collected singletons. Transaction logs can be stored on a shared file system. For clustering run, time operations deployment manager`s role was eliminated. J2EE failover support and cell configuration support is also present.

11. What Is The Trace?
Answer:
A trace is an informational record that is intended for service engineers or developers to use. As such, a trace record might be considerably more complex, verbose and detailed than a message entry.

12. What About Plug-in?
Answer:
plug-in is one of the modules it interfaces between the application server and web server, the plug-in process receives the request from the client first. If the request is for dynamic content, the plug-in diverts the request to the WebSphere application server. If the request is for static content, the plug-in forwards it to the Http server. 

13. What are the common issues you have experienced?
Answer:

You should always be honest about your expertise, however, to give you an idea:

  • Virtual host not defined
  • Logs not moving
  • Internal Server Error
  • OutOfMemory exception
  • Slowness
  • JVM not starting
  • High CPU/Memory/Disk utilization

14. Where is your web server hosted?
Answer:
Again explain about your supported application architecture. However, in a typical production environment for the Internet-facing applications, Web servers would be in DMZ and application server in a core network.

This means you must have necessary ports allowed in the firewall between web servers to an application server.

15. Differences between a Portlet and servlet?
Answer:
Portlets generate the only fragment of the portal page rather than the entire page
Portlets have more refined request cycle than servlet
Portlets have predefined modes and window states
Portlets are can be only invoked using portlet URLs

16. Explain About Web Sphere Commerce?
Answer:
IBM web sphere commerce has a single platform which offers complete eCommerce solutions to developers. It can be very productive if you are planning to do business with consumers, business and indirectly through channel partners. This can be used to perform business with consumers, business and channel partners altogether.

17. State Some Of The Features Present In Web Sphere?
Answer:

Some of the features which are present in the web sphere are: 

  • Order management
  • Web sphere commerce accelerator
  • Analytical and business intelligence
  • Open standards such as Java, EJB, etc
  • Web sphere commerce payments and customer care, etc.

18. Explain About The Security Features Present In Was?
Answer:
The security model for web sphere is primarily based on JAVA EE security model. It also depends upon the operating system. User authentication and authorization mechanisms are also provided in WAS. Light weight third party authentication mechanism is the main security feature present in WAS.

19. Explain About Web Sphere Mq Real-Time Transport?
Answer:
This feature is very useful in instant messaging across different clients through intranet and internet. This supports high volume and high performance across different clients. It uses the concept of light weight transport which is again based on IP rather than the queue process.

20. Is The Naming Of Connection Factory Independent Of The Name Specified By Jms Client?
Answer:
Yes, the naming of the connection factory is independent of the name specified by the JMS client. This is made possible by WAS (Web sphere application server) with its resource references. It isolates the application from object names. This feature is important because it gives us the flexibility to change the administered object without changing the JMS client code. 

21. What About the Master Repository?
Answer:
deployment manager contains the MASTER configuration and application files. All updates to the configuration files should go through the deployment manager.

22. What Is Difference B/w Dmgr And Other Profiles?
Answer:

dmgr app custom:

  • its used for administration
  • admin console is there
  • plain node purpose of remaining profiles
  • initially one app server there
  • empty node
  • it supports the distributed
  • work independently environment.
  • Put applications
  • it is not included app server
  • the admin console is there
  • work independently
  • do not put applications.

23. What Is The Difference Between Web Server And Application Server?
Answer: Web server
 serves pages for viewing in a web browser, the application server provides exposes business logic for client applications through various protocols
Web server exclusively handles Http requests. application server serves bussiness logic to application programs through any number of protocols.
Webserver delegation model is fairly simple when the request comes into the web server,it simply passes the request to the program best able to handle it(Server-side program). It may not support transactions and database connection pooling.
Application server is more capable of dynamic behavior than the webserver. We can also configure the application server to work as a webserver. Simply applic! ation server is a superset of the webserver.

24. Why Use The Boostrap Port Number?
Answer:
client applications use the bootstrap port to access web spheres built-in object request broker (orb) to use enterprise java beans in applications installed on the application server. The java naming and directory interface service provider URL used by the client application needs to reference the bootstrap port to obtain an initial context for looking up EJB’s it wants to use. (For communicate two servers)

25. How Websphere Discovers A Change In Jsp And Compiles It?
Answer:
There is an algorithm that Websphere uses to find the timestamp of .jsp and .class files. It checks that timestamp of .class file is always later than its corresponding .jsp file.

26. What Are The Different Modes Of Archival? Explain Each Mode In Two Lines Each?
Answer:
Rotate, rotate the log file when the maximum size is reached. The appliance creates a copy of the file and starts a new file. The appliance retains the archived copies up to the specified number of rotations. After reaching the maximum number of rotations and the log file reaches its maximum size, the appliance deletes the oldest file and copies the current file.

Upload, upload the log file when the maximum size is reached. The appliance uploads the file using the specified upload method.

27. What Is The Difference Between Object Type And Object Name And What Happens When I Keep The Add Referenced Object Option To ‘off’?
Answer:
Object Type, specify the type of object. This filter restricts log messages to only those messages generated by the selected object.

Whereas, Object name specifies the name of an existing object of the selected type.

When the add referenced object option is turned ‘off’, the appliance generates no additional object filters anymore and includes events for only the specified object.

28. Who Issues A Certificate, Explain In Detail?
Answer:
Certificate authorities act as trusted third parties that verify the identity of the sender of an encrypted message and issue digital certificates as evidence of authorization. These digital certificates contain the public key of the sender, which is then passed along to the intended recipient. The Certificate authorities do extensive background checks before giving an organization or a given individual a certificate.

29. Give Three Popular Algorithms Used For Encryption?
Answer:
Triple DES-uses three individual keys with 56 bits each. The total key length adds up to 168 bits, but experts would argue that 112-bits in key strength is more like it.

RSA- is a public-key encryption algorithm and the standard for encrypting data sent over the internet.

AES-it is extremely efficient in 128-bit form, AES also uses keys of 192 and 256 bits for heavy-duty encryption purposes.

30. What are deployment descriptors? How many types of Deployment descriptors are available? What are they?
Answer:
The deployment descriptor is an XML file that describes how to deploy a module or application by specifying configuration and container options. For example, an EJB deployment descriptor passes information to an EJB container about how to manage and control an enterprise bean. There are two types of deployment descriptor in WebSphere: Web application deployment descriptor and portlet deployment descriptor

Portlets are packaged as WAR files with a web application deployment descriptor (web.xml). This defines each portlet as a servlet within the web application, including unique identifiers for each portlet, the portlet class, and initialization parameters.

31. What Is Asynchrony?
Answer:
With message queuing, the exchange of messages between the sending and receiving programs are independent of time. This means that the sending and receiving application programs are decoupled; the sender can continue processing without having to wait for the receiver to acknowledge receipt of the message. The target application does not even have to be running when the message is sent. It can retrieve the message after it is has been started.

32. Explain About Websphere Mq Real-Time Transport?
Answer:
It is a lightweight protocol. This protocol is optimized for use with messages that are non-persistent. WebSphere MQ Real-Time Transport is utilized only by JMS clients.
WebSphere MQ Real-Time Transport is right suitable for the applications to send a large number of messages. All the applications that use this protocol must rely on TCP/IP for quality considerations and which do not require persistent delivery. For example, this protocol can be used in situations where the data is updated very frequently, such as stock market share values, updating scoreboard of a sporting event.

33. What are Portlets?
Answer:
Portlets are applications managed by a portal container which generate a fragment of the portal page rather than complete page as generated by the servlet. 

34. Can you change the context root for deployed application?
Answer:
Yes, it’s doable. To do this through the administrative console, go inside the application and click “Context root for web modules” to change the context root.

35. What is garbage collection?
Answer:
Garbage collection is a memory management process which automatically frees the objects that are no longer in use by the program.

36. How Do Edit/modify The Property/configuration Files?
Answer:
It is recommended to modify all the configurations using the administration console. When you need to make any configuration changes, you need to do the apply changes and sync them. Any changes you do at local repository level are discarded upon the next restart of that server because the sync is always from DMGR to the local repository and changes are not saved to master repository. For example, if you edit a configuration file of server1 and restart it. the changes are lost. When the server starts it syncs the configuration from the master repository.

37. How Many Ways Can You Deploy Applications In Websphere?
Answer:

1. Directly copy files to deployed application folder in WebSphere- hot deployment.
2. use WebSphere specific ant tasks and building automated scripts for deploying the application.
3. through the administration console.

38. Are There Any Differences Between Weblogic And Websphere?
Answer:
Websphere tends to focus more on integration, connectivity and web services. it has rich implementation of J2EE, better performance, more extensive integration, and transaction management. In terms of the transaction, WebLogic is having the default transaction attribute as ’supports’, but WebSphere does not have any default transaction attribute.
Websphere is from IBM and Weblogic is from BEA.

39. What are different steps in creating content for WebSphere portal WCM?
Answer:

The following are different steps involved in creating the content for the WebSphere portal WCM –

  • Create Library
  • Create Workflow
  • Create Site area (Sites are removed in WebSphere Portal 7.0)
  • Create Authoring templates
  • Create Presentation templates
  • Map authoring and presentation templates

40. What is the PortletContext interface?
Answer:
The portlet view of the portlet container is defined by PortletContext. It allows the availability of resources to the portlet. Using this context, the portlet log can be accessed and URL references to resources can be obtained. There is always only one context per portlet application per JVM.

41. What is the difference between Application Server and Portal Server?
Answer:
Application servers extend the ability of a Web server to handle Web application requests, and enables a server to generate a dynamic, customized response to a client request. A portal server extends the application server by providing a portlet container that can run portlets and create portal a website that provides users with a single point of access to Web-based resources by aggregating those resources in one place.

42. What Development Environment(s) are available to develop applications for WebSphere?
Answer:
IBM provides several industrial-strength development environments based on the Eclipse development framework the current IDE is Rational Developer for Websphere. Applications can also be developed with the Websphere Application Server Toolkit and third-party tools like Jbuilder, and Eclipse/ANT, etc.

43. Is There Any Difference Between Weblogic And Websphere?
Answer:
Websphere tends to focus more on integration, connectivity and web services. it has rich implementation of J2EE, better performance, more extensive integration, and transaction management. In terms of the transaction, WebLogic is having the default transaction attribute as ’supports’, but WebSphere does not have any default transaction attribute.

44. What is the difference between personalization and customization?
Answer:

Personalization: It means to serve the user or consumer with user-specific data depending on his interests collected over time. A real-world example would be google serving ads basing on the recent search you made.

Customization: It is ability provided to the user to change the layout, styling of the page and save it.

45. What is the PortletSession interface?
Answer:
User identification across many requests and transient information storage about the user is processed by the PortletSession interface. One PortletSession is created per portlet application per client.

The PortletSession interface provides a way to identify a user across more than one request and to store transient information about that user.

The storing of information is defined in two scopes:

1)APPLICATION SCOPE

2)PORTLET SCOPE.

APPLICATION SCOPE: All the objects in the session are available to all portlets, servlets, JSPs of the same portlet application, by using APPLICATION_SCOPE.

PORTLET SCOPE: All the objects in the session are available to the portlet during the requests for the same portlet window. The attributes persisted in the PORTLET_SCOPE are not protected from other web components.

46. What Are The Telemetry Capabilities?
Answer:

  • Telemetry enables Remote sensors, smart meters, etc., to be easily connected with the existing applications and services
  • Telemetry provides messaging technique for optimizing the needs of sensor networks
  • Decision-makers can focus on significant data and events
  • It enables responses of rapid and proactive nature for current situations
  • Network traffic is reduced and responsiveness increases by only sending significant data and events
  • It encourages various device manufacturers to enable their sensors that are ready to connect into IBM connectivity solutions
  • Enables the custom implementation of messaging that is device-side for connecting unusual devices
  • Optimizes the use of the network to lower the traffic
  • The pay-per-byte costs can be reduced in satellite networks

47. What Is Sslpeer In Ibm Websphere Mq?
Answer:
if you connected MQ via SSL. SSLPEER is a String usually DN (Distinguished Name) of MQ Client which connect to Queue Manager securely using Queue Manager. This is a mechanism WMQ uses to identify the client. In case of Java or JMS client, SSLPEER is DN of client certificate stored in its keyStore and sent to the server during SSL handshake.

48. What Is the Difference Between Binding Connection And Client Connection?
Answer:
If MQ clients sit on the same physical server where QueueManager is located then it can create a binding connection which is relatively faster than client connection, which is usually created by MQ clients residing on the same network but not same host. Most of the application uses MQ client connection to connect QueueMangaer, which is easy and flexible.

49. Explain about asymmetric clustering?
Answer:
Asymmetric clustering applications are primarily used in electronic trading systems employed in banks. Some of the features are, partitions can be declared during run time and are usually run on a single cluster at a time. Work specific to a particular can be routed to that cluster.

50. What Is Websphere Commerce?
Answer:
WebSphere Commerce is a software platform framework from IBM. This framework provides the functionality for e-commerce, including sales, marketing, customer support and order processing functionality. These functions are performed using a tailorable and integrated package. WSC is a unified and single platform. This platform offers to perform the functionality between businesses to the customer, business to business through channel partners. WSC is a scalable, highly reliable and customizable solution which is built on the JEE platform. WSC uses open standards such as XML and Web services.

Note: Browse latest  IBM Websphere interview questions and Websphere tutorial. Here you can check  IBM Websphere Training details and Websphere training videos for self learning. Contact +91 988 502 2027 for more information.

Leave a Comment

Scroll to Top