new Service Federation Management across WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and the ESB family to manage service visibility and reuse across the enterprise

Maybe that doesn’t tell you a great deal but I’m not at liberty to say any more at the moment. You could, however, turn to the WSRR announcement which provides a little more detail:

Better manage visibility of service across SOA domains. By using the Service Federation Management console to simplify the process of sharing business services between service domains, you can improve the connections within an organization, and increase reuse of services and information by extending the reach of existing assets across the organization and beyond.

And this might lead you to Greg Flurry and Marc-Thomas Schmidt’s developerWorks article which provides the motivation for this new functionality.

More to come once we reach general availability…

The two biggest deliverables from the team here in Hursley are the service gateway and policy support.  The dynamic service gateway support addresses one of the major limitations of the product to date – the fact that the strong typing of SCA interfaces made it very difficult to implement a gateway pattern, particularly for web services. The dynamic gateway implementation provides a very simple interface with two operations: one for request-reply operations and one for one-way operations. The export binding will perform the mapping from the incoming request to one or other of these operations. The general pattern is then to perform some common processing before using a lookup (WSRR or otherwise) to locate the required target provider.

The policy support comes in two parts. A new policy resolution primitive enables the retrieval of policy information relating to a service from WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. The Service Message Object (SMO) has then been enhanced by the addition of a dynamic context. Properties retrieved from the policy are used to populate the dynamic context. These properties then override properties promoted from primitives in the flow. The ability to dynamically modify the behaviour of the flow at runtime, combined with the service gateway support, really opens up the possibilities for creating a meta-data driven ESB with WebSphere ESB.

When you install the runtime you will notice that the Web Services Feature Pack is also installed. The service gateway utilizes the JAX-WS support added by the feature pack and this brings with it support for SOAP 1.2 and WS-ReliableMessaging.

My personal baby is the new concept of mediation subflows. The componentization in SCA already provides for reuse but sometimes this is needed at a much lower level. In many ways, a mediation subflow is just like a regular flow – it consists of a number of mediation primitives wired together. The biggest difference is that, rather than exposing interfaces, the in and out nodes of a subflow specify a message type or may even be left untyped. To promote greater reuse, the subflow can also be defined in a library.

To use a subflow, a new mediation subflow primitive has been added. The input and output terminals of this primitive match the in and out nodes of the subflow with which it is associated and properties promoted from primitives in the subflow become properties of the subflow primitive. A subflow can also contain mediation subflow primitive so nesting is possible. I could say much more about all of this but I’ll save the detail for another day (or a developerWorks article if I get my act together).

While talking about new primitives, there are four additional primitives that allow easy manipulation of MQ, SOAP, HTTP and JMS headers. There is a new primitive that performs filtering based on the type of the message and another that allows a data handler to be used to transform a request to/from the raw wire format. Both of these become particularly useful in the gateway context where multiple different message types may be arriving in a single flow. The message logger primitive has also been enhanced so that it can now be used to perform custom logging (the default being to java.util.logging) rather than just to a database.

On the aggregation front, we now have the ability to perform some asynchronous processing between fan out and fan in nodes. This means that if, for example, the aggregation block contains an asynchronous service invoke, the next leg of the block can start processing whilst waiting for a response.

Two major changes at the module level: a mediation flow component can now be placed in both business and mediation module; and multiple mediation flow components can be placed in the same module. The former means that, if you need to perform pre- and post-processing on, for example, message headers, this can now be done in the same module as the business logic. It is also now possible to specify version numbers for modules and tie this in to service selection.

Lastly on the runtime front, the failed event manager finally comes to WebSphere ESB and has been enhanced to cover many more scenarios such as failures in the bindings.

On the tooling side, I won’t provide quite so much detail but here are some of the new features in WebSphere Integration Developer that I’ve already found useful:

• Java context assist for BO fields when using the SDO API
• Improved automatic wiring layout
• Filtering in the mapping editor
• Ability to view transaction boundaries within and across modules
• Insertion of primitives by drag-and-drop on to a wire
• Wiring unmatched terminal types results in automatic insertion of an XSLT primitive
• Formatted server logs view with filtering
• Improvements to the cross component trace including support for the bindings

Whilst this post by no means provides a comprehensive list of the new function, I hope that it provides a good flavour of the significant changes that have gone in to this release. I certainly wish I’d had even half of these features when implementing WebSphere ESB solutions out in the field!

Update: the replay for this webcast is now available.

At the latest customer, this lack of support manifested itself in the following way (in case you should come across this problem). Firstly, a warning with the following text:

CWSCA0001W: "jar:file:/<profile directory>/installedApps/<app name>/<ear name>.ear/<jar name>.jar|/<component name>.component" is not a valid Service Component Definition Language file for the following reason: "org.eclipse.emf.ecore.xmi.PackageNotFoundException: Package with uri 'http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/websphere/wbiserver/eventSequencing/6.0.0' not found.

This was then followed by an exception

CNTR0020E: EJB threw an unexpected (non-declared) exception during invocation of method "onNotification" on bean "BeanId(<app name>#<jar name>.jar#<export name>, null)". Exception data: java.lang.NullPointerException at com.ibm.wsspi.sca.j2c.inbound.J2CInboundImpl.invoke(J2CInboundImpl.java: 242)

As it’s of particular relevance to a project I’m working on at the moment, I then attended Bill Hine’s pitch on "WAS/DataPower Web Services Security Integration". A good mix of the why and how without getting bogged down in the detailed steps. Must get myself access to a DataPower box again to try some of this out.

After lunch went to a presentation by my Hursley colleague Andrew Ferrier and Andre Tost on WebSphere ESB Best Practices. Andre covered the higher level architectural best practices and Andrew the more detailed material. Nothing new for me here but it was good to see it all gathered together in one place. Hopefully they’ll make it more widely available in the not too distant future.

Unfortunately an impromptu meeting overran and I lost my slot in the Project Zero Assemble lab. It did mean that I could go along and here about the work that Pete Lambros has been doing with others on patterns for the Enterprise Service Bus.

I then took my final test of the week to qualify as IBM Certified Solution Developer — WebSphere Integration Developer V6.0.1. Once again, my generic SCA and WebSphere ESB knowledge was sufficient to compensate for my lack of knowledge about the Process Server components.

With an early start ahead of me tomorrow to catch a flight back to the UK I was grateful to Phil Coxhead for driving me out of town for a bit of last minute shopping and away from temptation (or to it depending on your point of view!). The Premium Outlet Mall didn’t yield much in the way of purchases but I came away from Frys with some new headphones, a USB hub and a Creative Zen Stone Plus (the version with speaker).

Next up I sat the IBM WebSphere Process Server V6.0, System Administration certification test. This was a bit of a gamble as, despite being a specialist with WebSphere ESB (for which there is no certification test), I haven’t knowingly opened the admin console for Process Server. With some educated guessing I scraped through – particularly pleasing as, when combined with previous tests, it means I can now claim to be both an IBM Certified Administrator for SOA Solutions – WebSphere Process Server V6.0 and IBM Certified Deployment Professional – WebSphere Process Server V6.0.

After lunch it was another lab: "EJB 3 and Open JPA with RAD 7.5". This was my first hands on experience with the EJB 3 feature pack and with the tooling it really was a pleasure to use. Whilst I’m happy to see unnecessary interfaces removed in EJB3 I’m still skeptical about the use of annotations for ORM and hope many customers will still see the importance of separating the deployment specifics from the application code. The lab was also a chance to finally meet Kevin Sutter face to face – a guy who I’ve worked with closely in the past when he owned the WebSphere JCA component and I the JMS resource adapter but never met in person.

Finishing the lab early gave me a chance to sit another test and add to IBM Certified Advanced System Administrator – WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V6.1 to my list of titles. I’m glad to say my pass mark was considerably higher than for Process Server. I did, however, have to restrain myself on several occasions from answering "none of the above – the question is badly worded".

Went to see Alasdair Nottingham present his latest updates to the Service Integration Bus Security presentation that we jointly own. Despite having reviewed the changes it was still good to hear Alasdair present it from his perspective.

Actually managed a run before dinner although at that time of day it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. I probably would have been better of spending some time by the pool! We had our team meal out at the Ellis Island Casino & Brewery which seemed to have been chosen largely for the price of the beer ($1). At least, it can’t have been for the quality of the food. Stopped off at Nine Fine Irishmen in New York-New York until the early hours.

In the slot before lunch I went to Shane Claussen’s WPS/WESB/WID Technical Futures presentation. As the name probably suggests, that was all IBM Confidential so nothing I can divulge here.

With Project Zero finally set to hit the streets at the end of June as WebSphere sMash  I thought it was high time to see how things have changed in the past year. Consequently, after lunch I headed along to a lab entitled "RESTful Services with Project Zero". I have to confess that I was slightly disappointed to discover that aspects of the programming model are still changing and that the lab wasn’t running on the latest code base but understand that the material has to be submitted well in advance of the conference. That said, when sMash (not a name that I like – in the UK at least it is a brand of instant mashed potato) hits the streets then things should stabilise.

Then it was time for my final presentation of the week – rather grandly titled "Architecting Solutions with the Default Messaging Provider". This detailed a whole host of considerations that need to be taken in to account when it comes to both functionality and performance. I’ll not say too much here as it’s slated for a developerWorks article (if I ever find some time to write it!).

The evening brought the conference networking dinner and, more importantly, the chance to watch some colleagues jamming on stage with a local band. Surprisingly un-cringeworthy – some real talent out there. Had to stay up to watch the Scotland’s very own Gaby Telerman (occasionally of the BMX Bandits).

I have mentioned previously IBM’s support statement for running it’s software products within VMWare. It was therefore interesting to go to Ruth Willenborg’s presentation on Using WebSphere with VMWare. You can see a summary of her thoughts on the subject over on developerWorks and can expect to see more in the near future.

Next up was a lab on ITCAM for SOA, in particular looking at its use with WebSphere Process Server. It didn’t teach me much I didn’t know already but I was still left wanting to know more. The day ended with a Birds of a Feather session around WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. If nothing else it was an opportunity to put faces to some of the voices I have heard on our weekly Community of Practice calls.

This evening the UK contingent headed out to Cafe Ba Ba Reeba. The tapas was good but the mains left a little to be desired. It was a slight shame that I ended up on a table most occupied by my department as there were plenty of faces elsewhere in the group that I don’t know.

The learning part of the day ended with Greg Flurry’s presentation on WebSphere ESB Advanced Topics. As well as some of the new function in 6.0.2, this covered interesting subjects such as making side-calls out to auxiliary services, retry/failover and aggregation – all possible with the use of custom mediation primitives. Watch out for forthcoming developerWorks articles on some of these topics.

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.