Attended the WebSphere User Group meeting at IBM’s Bedfont Lakes location today. I was presenting an overview of the High Availability Manager that was introduced in WebSphere Application Server V6. I have to confess that I was quite surprised by the size of the audience I had for this subject given that there were six other tracks running in parallel. Perhaps customer take-up of this version has reached the point where the availability of solutions going in to production has become of interest. After lunch wasn’t perhaps the best time to launch in to the intricacies of topics such as the core group bridge service and there were a few heavy eyelids in the audience! Hopefully the examples around the transaction service, WebSphere XD and the Service Integration Bus proved a bit lighter going.
Started the day by attending Rob Phippen’s pitch on WebSphere ESB. Although this is an area I know well having spent the last few months generating education material for the IBM services community, it was interesting to hear Rob present from his position as runtime architect. Having asked Rob to present I also felt obliged to at least listen to what he had to say!
Also attended an interesting presentation by Jason McGee (Chief Architect) on some of the new features in WebSphere Extended Deployment 6.0.1 such as Business Grid (for J2EE batch processing and compute-intensive workloads) and Object Grid (a transactional distributed object cache). The latter is particularly interesting in that, although it builds on the WebSphere HA framework, it can run in any Java environment. You can catch up with Jason and the XD team on their blog.
Ended the day with Tim Francis’ session on the current issues with WebSphere administration and some of the work that is being to address this in the next release of the Application Server. Tim demoed the Jython editor and debugging support that will be part of the Application Server Toolkit which looks like it should be of great assistance in scripting.