Archive for the ‘WebSphere’ Category

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WebSphere Appliance Management Center

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

I haven’t posted anything product related since the release of WebSphere ESB 7.5 in June last year where I hinted at pastures new. Those of you that I’m connected to on LinkedIn will know that I subsequently became Technical Lead for a product called WebSphere Appliance Management Center. WebSphere Appliance Management Center provides off-box management and monitoring of multiple WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances. The development for the management component of the product moved to Hursley shortly after the initial release (named 4.0 after the coincident firmware release). The new team put together a fix pack later in the year which delivered support for the new Service Gateway XG45 appliance.

Today saw the announcement of the next chapter in the WebSphere Appliance Management Center story. Significantly, you will find this in the WebSphere DataPower Appliances firmware V5.0 announcement letter as the next version will no longer be a chargeable product in its own right. Instead, it will be freely downloadable and supported free of charge for all customers with a current support entitlement for a WebSphere DataPower SOA appliance.

Not only will it cost you less – but we’ll also be giving you less! The team has been working flat out to create a much lighterweight offering which is faster to install and less resource intensive. The management user interface has also been extensively reworked to be more responsive and better support user interaction patterns. In particular, the current restrictions around managed set membership will be lifted allowing much great flexibility for firmware and configuration deployment. In addition to the existing domain management capabilities, you will also be able to manage configuration at the service level. All of this will be available for download on June 26.

For those attending IBM Impact next week who’d like to find out more about this exciting new release, I’ll be co-presenting on WebSphere Appliance Management Center (Monday, 5:15-6:30pm, Lando 4305). We will also be hosting a series of round table sessions in Toscana 3701 (Monday, 10:45-12:00; Tuesday, 1:20-2:45pm; Thursday 3:15-4:30pm) which will be your chance to shape the future direction of the product. Alternatively, please feel free to contact me directly or post questions in the DataPower developerWorks forum.

Posted in Appliance Management, DataPower, Work | No Comments »

WebSphere ESB 7.5 available

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

WebSphere ESB 7.5 is generally available from Passport Advantage as of today (as are WSRR 7.5, WebSphere ESB Registry Edition 7.5 and the 7.5 BPM stack) and the InfoCenter is also live. Having been the Development Lead and then Release Architect, I feel a certain sense of parental pride in this delivery but, as always, the credit goes to the wider team. It shall also be my last as I am parting company with the WebSphere ESB development team and moving on to pastures new. I can’t say more at the moment but all will be revealed sometime this month.

Posted in WebSphere ESB, Work | No Comments »

WebSphere ESB 7.5 Preview

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

As announced about a month ago, WebSphere ESB 7.5 is due to be available at the end of this week. Having presented on the subject at Impact, I felt I should provide a little more background to some of the new features described in the announce letter. Time permitting, I’ll cover some of the topics in further details once the product has been released.

Posted in WebSphere ESB | No Comments »

WebSphere Technical Conference

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

A quick post to highlight that I’m in Düsseldorf this week as a last minute stand-in for my colleague Simon Holdsworth at the WebSphere Technical Conference. I’ll be giving his Introduction to WebSphere ESB and WebSphere ESB Best Practices and Performance Recommendations on Tuesday afternoon, What’s New in WebSphere ESB V7.0 on Wednesday and then running the WebSphere ESB Birds of a Feather session that follows. I’ll also be at the Connectivity Panel Q&A on Monday afternoon which is probably the best place to catch me if you’d like to meet up at some point for a chat about the product or just to say Hi!

Posted in Travel, WebSphere, WebSphere ESB, Work | 2 Comments »

WebSphere ESB 7.0.0.3

Monday, September 6th, 2010

On Friday, we released Fix Pack 7.0.0.3 for the BPM stack including WebSphere ESB. This was what we call a “development led” fix pack which generally means that, in addition to the usual round-up of fixes, there is some additional new function. In this case, we have been working hard on the new business object lazy parsing mode that first surfaced as a technology preview at the end of last year. Previously, although we had various performance enhancements to avoid parsing the message body if it was never touched by a mediation flow, as soon as you did touch it, we parsed the whole message in to a Service Data Object. With the new mode, we only parse as much of the message as is required to evaluate each expression. As you might imagine, this is largely done in the name of performance and the improvement is particularly significant with partial access to large messages. Sadly, were not quite done with this work and all over the update notes you’ll see a statement indicating that lazy mode is now out of tech preview but only for modules that do not contain mediation flows.

One of the other significant points about this fix pack is the move to WebSphere Application Server 7.0.0.11 and, in particular, the fact that this finally has an Installation Manger based install process. This means that you can finally install both the Application Server, ESB and fixes for both, all using the same install technology. Unfortunately you will have to use the old Update Installer to remove any ifixes that you have already installed.

Posted in WebSphere ESB | 3 Comments »

New WESB/WPS book

Friday, July 16th, 2010

I’ve just been asked to review a new book entitled “Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7“. I can certainly vouch for the credentials of one of the two IBM authors having worked with Salil Ahuja. As part of the AIM Early Programs team he’s in a perfect position to have both a breadth of knowledge across the products and a good understanding of what customers need and want to know. The sample chapter online (which happens to cover mediation module development) looks promising so I look forward to receiving my review copy.

Posted in WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Process Server | No Comments »

WebSphere ESB V7 available

Friday, December 11th, 2009

WebSphere ESB (and Process Server) Version 7.0 is generally available as of today which, amongst other things, means that I’m free to blog at will about the product content. As is traditional, I’ll start with an overview of what’s new in this release of the product (and the associated WebSphere Integration Developer tooling). Over the coming weeks I hope to cover each of these areas in more detail.

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Posted in WebSphere ESB | 3 Comments »

DynaCache and WebSphere ESB/Process Server

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Building WebSphere ESB and Process Server on WebSphere Application Server means that they benefit from the scalability, reliability, transactionality and security of the underlying platform. Another advantage is that you, as a developer, have access to all of the underlying capabilities of the application server. In a recent article, Alan Hopkins (Dr Alan to you apparently!) demonstrated the use of the object cache to provide a shared variable between two modules. On a similar vein, another UK ISSW consultant Gabriel Telerman has just published a detailed tutorial describing how to use DynaCache from an SCA Java component to improve performance in a WebSphere ESB or Process Server environment. Now Gaby, can I have that pint now for the plug?

Posted in WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Process Server | No Comments »

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