I have seen this question about deploying to WebSphere using the WAS ant tasks.
Is there a simpler way to do this? In the past I have deployed to Tomcat by dropping a war file into a directory. I was hoping there would be a similar mechanism for WebSphere that doesn't involve calling the IBM libraries or rely on RAD to be installed on your workstation.
One way to do it could be using Jython or jacl scripts. See those samples at IBM site.
WAS does provide a client jar containing some custom ant tasks. However they seem to be extremely bugy and dont work with remote servers.
Netbeans also has support for was 6 and 6.1 but this again is still quite buggy, however it can be useful for generating some the bindings files etc.
Just a hint: if you activate "Log command assistance commands" in System Administration / Console preferences, you will get a logfile in the server log directory that contains the jython scripts for all actions you did on the console. So you can just deploy your stuff per console the first time, and then grab the commands for later and feed them into wsadmin.bat -lang jython "thecommandscomehere" for the next deployment.
There is the concept of WebSphere Rapid Deployment. It's supposed to be the same experience as what you describe for Tomcat.