Busy day today. Sweated off the remainder of the last night’s alcohol with a morning run. After grabbing a bite to eat (and having another interesting breakfast-time conversation with a colleague) I went to Luc Maquil’s presentation on WebSphere Process Server performance. Luc is one of the authors of the WebSphere Business Integration V6 Performance Tuning Redpaper and consequently knows a thing or two about the subject.
After lunch went to a presentation by Sherri Wayne on the WebSphere Adapters. Picked up a couple of useful snippets there. Firstly, WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 will actually ship with all of the technology adapters for production use i.e. the new FTP and e-mail adapters will be included as well as the existing JDBC and flat-file adapters. Secondly, the adapters are being enhanced with pluggable data bindings providing similar functionality to the data handlers in the WBI Adapters. This will mean, for example, that the flat-file adapter can map to a more sophisticated business object than just an array of bytes.
I was then running repeats of my two presentations from earlier in the week. I was astounded to have a capacity audience of around 45 for my second introduction to JMS pitch. This stuff is hardly cutting edge (the latest version of the specification is now nearly five years old) but obviously there are people out there still coming to it for a first time. Alternatively, perhaps there was nothing better on!
Somehow ended up having dinner with 20 Spaniards, two French and a Dutch man! The deer stew was very good although the cranberry sauce was probably overkill given it was already swimming in a thick sauce. Fortunately there was a nice large white bread dumpling to soak up the juices. We shared a good selection of desserts including the Austrian specialities Apfelstrudel and Sachertorte.