WSTC Day 1

My creative juices aren’t flowing today hence the unimaginative title for this posting (and if I couldn’t come up with a good title today, there was no chance I would be able to be inventive by day 5). Sadly, as an internal conference with significant IBM confidential content I can’t cover everything here but I’ll cover what I can. As Andy has already blogged, someone had the good sense to realise that we are a technical audience and the keynote speech was given by Jerry Cuomo, CTO for WebSphere. I particularly liked his demo around Real Time Java which showed garbage collection leading to breaks in a piece of music played with with a Sun JVM compared to the flawless playback when using Metronome GC in an IBM J9 JVM.

I’ve always meant to spend some time learning a little more about the capabilities of ITCAM for WebSphere (particularly since Version 6.1 added support for the default messaging provider and SCA components) and my first session of the day gave me a chance to do so. There is a lot of good stuff in there to assist with both problem determination and tuning but I was left with the impression that configuration is not trivial. This is definitely a product that you want to have installed up-front, not something you can just slip in when issues start to arise.

Next up was a session on what’s coming in the next version of WebSphere Process Server and ESB. Obviously I can’t go in to details here but there was general consensus amongst my colleagues that development really seem to have been listening to what we’ve been telling them and there is going to be a lot of good stuff coming along in this release.

I think it’s safe to say that there is a significant amount of Web 2.0 content on the application development agenda and I took the opportunity to learn a bit about Web 2.0 protocols from my colleagues Matt Perrins and Roland Barcia. Between them they covered an impressive list of topics: XML, REST, Comet, Bayeux, JSON, JSON-RPC, RSS and Atom. For an IBM take on some of these protocols, take a look at the Ajax for IBM WebSphere® Platform Early Program.

One Response to “WSTC Day 1”

  1. […] come out to a WebSphere conference I’m always looking to do something a little different. As Dave mentioned in his post yesterday, there’s a lot of talk and coverage about Web 2.0, AJAX, JSON and so forth. So, for the most […]