With Rational Application Developer V6, creating a reusable and consistent Websphere (WAS) configuration was simple. It was a single server file that could be checked in and checked out of your code repository. That made distributed development easy. The downside was there was a special version of Websphere embedded in to your IDE. IBM did not like that, so once again they sacrificed usability for consistency. With RAD 7, your IDE (Eclipse) is no longer embedded with a developer version of WAS. You now have a full version of WAS installed at a separate location on your machine. The good news is it is an exact version of WAS you will ultimately deploy to. The bad news is the RAD/WAS development environment took a huge step backwards. You still have all the nice features they have bundled together, like auto-publishing and hot-deploys, etc.. but now if you want a consistently configured developer version of WAS on your local machine, you are going to have to learn Jython. Shortly I will be publishing some posts and examples from what we learned creating server scripts for our development team of 20 people spanning multiple projects.