Thanks to my colleague Dave Screen for highlighting a useful technote relating to sharing library modules in WebSphere ESB and Process Server. The WebSphere Integration Developer concept of a library is typically only used for development time sharing of artifacts i.e. when you deploy a module that depends on that library, a copy of the JAR file is included in the enterprise application that is deployed. The technote describes how to deploy the library as a WebSphere shared library and have multiple modules depend on the same instance at runtime. This has the potential to reduce memory usage (the library is on a shared classloader) and ease managability. It does, however, mean that you need to be more careful about versioning of the library and breaking other dependent modules. If you’re not on 6.2 then note the list of APARs at the bottom of the document.
Archive for the ‘WebSphere’ Category
Sharing libraries at runtime
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Dynamic JMS endpoints revisited
Saturday, April 18th, 2009This is a long overdue update to a previous post on achieving dynamic JMS endpoints in WebSphere ESB. As several people have commented, WebSphere ESB 6.2 added support for dynamic endpoints for all of the bindings types as documented in the InfoCenter. A couple of points to note:
- The syntax of the endpoint URI used for the JMS bindings uses JNDI names to refer to the resources and is therefore not truly dynamic in the sense that JMS destinations need to have been pre-configured for all of the messaging provider destinations to which you might want to send.
- For a native MQ binding, you can currently only modify the queue dynamically and not the queue manager to which you can connect.
User Group Presentation
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009Yesterday I headed down to Bedfont with a car load of IBMers to present at the WebSphere User Group meeting. I was presenting an update covering new function in WebSphere ESB and Process Server 6.2. After days of pulling together slides from all the various product architects I ditched my pitch in favour of a few minor modifications to an excellent presentation from one of the worldwide tech sales team. Obviously I know the WebSphere ESB material well enough but this was a good opportunity to brush up my knowledge of the new function in Process Server. I also went to a couple of interesting presentations on OSGI, JAX-RS and JPA as well as my colleague Brian Hulse’s detailed presentation on the Service Gateway and Policy support in 6.2. With attendance down on usual, I felt the large number of parallel tracks led to smaller than desirable audiences for many of the presentations. It was also a horrendous drive back home along the M3 through torrential rain.
Security Bulletin for WebSphere Application Server
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009I now try to avoid just re-posting material from developerWorks and other IBM sources but this one is worth highlighting. IBM is now publishing a list of risk assessed security vunerabilities for WebSphere Application Server.
WebSphere MQ non-ASF in WAS
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Application Server Facilities (ASF) are the part of the JMS specification originally designed, amongst other things, to allow application server’s to retrieve messages for delivery to message-driven beans. Now WebSphere MQ’s ASF implementation had one significant flaw when it comes to multiple consumers pulling messages from the same queue. Each consumer was effectively browsing the queue looking for suitable messages and, when they found one, they then attempted to take a lock in order to consume the message. Unfortunately, inbetween the browse and the lock there’s a good chance that another consumer would have nipped in and stolen the message. This inefficient behaviour meant that you were unlikely to see linear scalability when adding multiple MDB consumers to a deep queue. As a result, some customers have switched their WebSphere Application Server listener port service to use non-ASF mode (the custom properties required for this can be found in the InfoCenter). This use a standard message consumer to poll the queue for messages – the downside being that you need a separate thread for each consumer.
WebSphere ESB 6.2
Friday, December 12th, 2008One of the disadvantages of being back in development is that much of my work is confidential. As the quantity of technical posts on here recently demonstrates – this is not conducive to blogging. Thankfully Version 6.2 of the entire BPM stack became generally available today so the flood gates have opened. developerWorks already has articles covering the new functionality in WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server so, rather than just relisting the features, I’m going to provide a slightly more personal view, focussing on the new content in WebSphere ESB.
10 years on
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Being presented with my “10 year pen” at a departmental meeting on Monday seems like a good excuse for a bit of a retrospective on my career with IBM…
New WebSphere blogs
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008There has been a recent push to get more of the WebSphere development team out in to the blogosphere in the run up to the release of V7 of the Application Server. The standard form seems to be to advertise new blogs on the WebSphere Community Blog. So far there is one covering WebSphere and Java Persistence, and likely to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, one on WebSphere and Messaging. Note that the latter doesn’t cover WebSphere MQ (see this blog if that’s your area of interest) but rather the default messaging provider in WebSphere Application Server. Expect to see lots of good material on some of the new features and make the most of the chance to interact with the development team. Whilst on the subject of new blogs, if DataPower is your bag then you can read all about a forthcoming book from some of my ex-ISSW colleagues here.
