I’m not quite sure where this is written officially, but many of the customers I work with are unaware that there’s an important difference in the package names used by various WebSphere Java classes, so to clear up the confusion:
com.ibm.ws.* classes are not supported. This means that they are for WebSphere’s use only. In general, you shouldn’t use them directly from your code, as they might disappear or change without warning in a future version.
com.ibm.websphere.* classes are supported. You can use them and if you have problems, you can get support from IBM (obviously, I’m not a lawyer – I’m sure there’s some fine print!).
So the take-home message is: only use classes in the second category.
