One of the most interesting things that you come upon with WebSphere is that it runs Java in ASCII mode, reading and writing out files in ASCII. z/OS stores its files in EBCDIC. So this basically means that if you are telnetting into USS, you can't really view or edit files. If you try to view an ASCII file through USS using vi, you get something like this:
^T^Z^78_%^20^76^65^72^73^69?>^U^22^31^F^30^22^20
^69?>^U^22^V^F^30^22^20^78_%>^73^3A^78_^69^U^22
?>^U^22^V^F^30^22^20^78_%>^72^3A^78_^69^U^22^68
Not too useful. So, a fellow developer who has since left the company found out how to use iconv pretty well and added to a bunch of our ant scripts. I made some shell scripts that basically run:
iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t IBM-1047 file.name | more
so I can actually view the file and it shows up properly. Of course this sucks because I haven't figured out how to tail a file live, but it's better than ftping the files down to windows in binary mode.
Other than that, WebSphere is pretty normal. The different I've seen between z/OS and Unix/Windows is that the z/OS WAS has a control jvm process that launches and controls 1 or more servant jvm processes. Unix/Windows just has a single jvm process that does all the work.
Also, I just upgraded my IntelliJ 3 to version 5 and now it spends a few minutes a day indexing my project files. This is a little annoying. I guess with version 3, it would index while it was minimized/backgrounded. But now, with version 5, it waits until I switch to it to start indexing. Oh well, I guess those smart Russians will fix this soon.