Deploying and administering business-level applications

A business-level application is an administration model that provides the entire definition of an application as it makes sense to the business. It is a WebSphere® configuration artifact, similar to a server or cluster, that is stored in the product configuration repository. A business-level application can contain artifacts such as Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications or modules, shared libraries, data files, and other business-level applications. You might use a business-level application to group related artifacts or to add capability to an existing application. For example, suppose you want to add capability provided in a Java archive (JAR) to a Java EE application already deployed on a product server. You can add that capability by creating a new business-level application and adding the JAR file and the deployed Java EE application to the business-level application. In some cases, you do not even need to change the deployed Java EE application configuration to add the capability.

Before creating a business-level application, you must develop the artifacts to go in the application and configure the target server or cluster. Before choosing a deployment target for the application, ensure that the target version is 7.0 or later.