SAS 9.4 – Alas poor Jboss, Websphere and Weblogic I knew them well

The papers for SAS Forum 2013 are published over at http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/

We have had heads up on some of the major changes in SAS 9.4 for a while, but as none of it was official (and I don’t seem to have the time to gossip as much as I used to) we haven’t blogged about most of it.

One of the major changes in SAS 9.4 is the replacement of the Mid Tier options.  Jboss, Websphere and Weblogic are no longer supported and the only option is a new SAS developed Mid Tier server.

Reading the paper here says it all http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/476-2013.pdf

The following extract says it all:

“Beginning with the release of SAS 9.4, SAS will include an embedded middle-tier server called SAS Web Application Server and will no longer require nor support external third-party application servers. SAS has licensed and included a commercial software suite of middle-tier technologies beginning with SAS 9.4. The SAS 9.4 middle-tier components have been integrated and optimized for SAS middle-tier deployment, configuration, and execution. These  components are being branded and delivered in the SAS offerings and referred to as the SAS Web Application  Server, SAS Web Server, and SAS® Environment Manager.  

The SAS Web Application Server is an enterprise-class web application server optimized to deliver the robust level of capabilities required to optimally support the SAS 9.4 web applications deployed through traditional on-premises physical hardware, virtualized environments, or in the cloud. By focusing on a single embedded middle tier, SAS has been able to perform extensive integration to deliver a more highly available, resilient, and manageable deployment. Additionally, SAS provides first- and second-line support for the complete set of integrated components.

The container within the SAS Web Application Server providing the serving of the web applications is Tomcat”

So if you are a new customer then not really a problem (apart from it being release 0.1) in fact you have probably saved yourself a fortune in third party mid tier software licenses.

If you are a current SAS 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 customer well then I hope you have had your Weblogic or Webssphere licenses for a while and that they are fully depreciated.

Mind you remembering the saga with Tabs in WRS in SAS 9.2/9.3, we could aways see the return of Elvis (Websphere / Weblogic) in a future maintenance release.

Ps. Tomcat?  Reminds me of my SAS 9.1 days.

Pps. As #weareSASVAexperts I do believe SAS Visual Analytics 6.2 wil be released in June 2013 and based on SAS 9.4