Bug in Websphere Application Server v7.0 Migration

This is a heads-up to all worshipers of our Lord Ib'm who also use the Java liturgy known as "Websphere Application Server" (WAS) -and- who are intending to migrate their applications to WAS v7.0.

Our parish was using WAS v6.0 and we intended to upgrade the most holy O/S to v7.1. The "Memo to Users" encyclical warned us that WAS v6.0 wasn't supported under O/S v7.1. It does support WAS v6.1 and v7.0, so we decided to load the latest WAS version since it had been out for quite a while now.

The migration process steps themselves are actually very easy. All you have to do is execute a pre-migration script for all of the instances (or profiles) with applications you'll be moving over. Then create matching profile names (with different blocks of port numbers) in the new version of WAS. Then you do a post-migration and -viola- it's done and it works. (Amazing!)

Except in our case there was one problem with one of the application not "deploying" to the new version of WAS. I opened a PMR with the support minions of our Lord Ib'm and they requested all manner of logs. Then they had me zip up the pre-migration directory and send that in too.

It turned that the offending application had single-quote(') characters in its description and the pre-migration script had unwittingly embedded a syntax error in the Jython code it had written. When the post-migration ran, it encountered the syntax problem and stopped the deployment for that application.

The pre-migration should have "escaped" those single-quote(') characters in the description. The Ib'm minions manually corrected the Jython code and sent it back to me with instructions on how to run it. Thank the Lord Ib'm that my prayers to the support minions were heard because the corrected Jython code ran fine and deployed the problematic application.

This problem with the Jython code generation is corrected in v7.0.0.13 of WAS which is scheduled to be released for general availability on Oct 25th, 2010. If you have single-quote(') character(s) in the description(s) of your application(s) you should either remove them, or wait until you've had a chance to install that update to WAS, before attempting the migration.