Introduction: Work area

Explore the key concepts pertaining to work areas, a WebSphere extension for improving developer productivity. Work areas provide a capability much like that of global variables. They enable efficient sharing of information across a distributed application.

Overview of work area service

One of the foundations of distributed computing is the ability to pass information, typically in the form of arguments to remote methods, from one process to another. When application-level software is written over middleware services, many of the services rely on information beyond that passed in the application's remote calls. Such services often make use of the implicit propagation of private information in addition to the arguments passed in remote requests; two typical users of such a feature are security and transaction services. Security certificates or transaction contexts are passed without the knowledge or intervention of the user or application developer. The implicit propagation of such information means that application developers do not have to manually pass the information in method invocations, which makes development less error-prone, and the services requiring the information do not have to expose it to application developers. Information such as security credentials can remain secret.

Work area partition service

The work area partition service is an extension of the work area service that allows the creation of multiple custom work areas. The work area partition service is an optional service to users. Any user that currently uses the work area service and the UserWorkArea partition can continue using it in the same manner. The UserWorkArea partition is created automatically (if it has not been disabled) by the work area partition service. By allowing a user the option to create their own work area partition through the work area partition service, they can have more control over configuration and access to their partition.