I’ve largely given up posting links to interesting content on this site – see my delicious feed for that. However, many of my original posts related to messaging and WebSphere Application Server and hence I suspect a reasonable proportion of those who stumble across this site are interested in that subject. Consequently, I feel it’s appropriate to advertise the new WebSphere Application Server V7 Messaging Administration Guide. This document covers both the default messaging provider and WebSphere MQ support. Don’t be misled by the title – although it does provide detailed information on the administration of resources, the background information on concepts and topologies is equally relevant to developers and architects. The document also has a good section on securing the default messaging provider.
Archive for the ‘WebSphere Application Server’ Category
Messaging Administration Guide
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Free WebSphere Application Server
Saturday, June 20th, 2009This one’s doing the rounds of various IBM related blogs but I think it’s sufficiently momentous for me to give it a mention in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere. WebSphere Application Server for Developers provides a free development runtime environment using the full WebSphere Application Server V7 product. What you don’t get is support but feel free to ask questions on the developerWorks forum.
Service Integration Bus Destination Handler
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009I’ve previously plugged the Service Integration Bus Explorer and IBM Client Application for JMS as useful tools to have in your WebSphere messaging kitbag. Thanks go once again to Dave Screen, this time for bringing the Service Integration Bus Destination Handler to my attention. This provides a very configurable mechansim for carrying out actions on a set of messages either on a one-off basis (via client or web application) or on a scheduled basis. Particularly useful operations include dumping messages, moving messages from one destination to another, and resurrecting messages from the exception destination. The readme file available in the download provides lots of detailed instructions and examples.
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.
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.
Messaging Engine Startup Problems
Thursday, September 11th, 2008Another heads up for some Service Integration Bus education. On 17 September there is a free webcast entitled Messaging Engine Startup Problems given by Level 2 service and followed by a Q&A session. You can see a list of all the upcoming webcasts or, to receive information about events such as this, along with information about publications and support issues, sign up at My Support.
Update: the replay for this webcast is now available.
