In a software announcement posted April 5, the company via electronic delivery by June 17, with media packs to be issued by July 22. IBM released a beta of version 8 last year.

This will be the first edition of the server to the latest enterprise Java standard, Java EE 6. It will also be the first version of the software to run IBM's installation manager, which the company has started packaging with much of its software, noted Steve Robinson, a U.K. who is writing an introductory book on Websphere 8 administration.

While IBM has made a lot of changes in Websphere 8, overall, this version is more of a fine-tuning of the code base, at least compared to the overhaul the company did for version 7, released in 2008, Robinson said.

Robinson noted that the software, even in beta, seems to load much more quickly. And it does feature a number of notable new capabilities, he added. The installation framework should ease deployment, especially for organizations that need to install the software across different hardware platforms. Another new "drag-and-drop" feature allows a Java application to be placed in a "live" folder that would make the application instantly operational, which should simplify testing for developers.

Considerable work has also been expended on integrating Websphere's internal Java messaging with IBM's enterprise service bus software, called Websphere MQ.