Creating Shared Library in WebSphere Application Server

Creating a Shared library:

One of the most common way of sharing the files among the multiple applications on a websphere server is Shared Library. The following are the steps involved in creating shared library and registering to a server. In portal world, all the common files pertaining to theme, portlets and third party application are stored in shared library. Before the eventing in JSR 286, the typical implementation of eventing was using shared library or dynacache, where a hashmap is created to save the values that are need to shared across portlets.

 Creating shared library:

 1. Login to Websphere Application server console

 2. Navigate to Environment -> Shared Libraries

3. Provide a specific name to you shared libraries in name text box.

4. Provide the path of the libraries where you have stored all your jars in Classpath like: /tmp/myApplicationjars

 5. Click apply and save it

Assigning to a server:

 1. Go to servers -> Applicaiton servers -> websphere portal -> Java and Process management  -> classloader

 2. Click Shared library references

 3. Add the library you created in above stepts.

 4. Save and restart the portal

 The reason we want to restart the server is the class loader can then load all the newly added class files. Now, you can add the shared jars to build path for proper compilation and deployment.