I headed down to Bedfont early this morning for the WebSphere User Group meeting. Such is the traffic on the M3 that I missed the start but arrived in time for Jim Caldwell’s keynote presentation. Jim is the IBM Director of WebSphere Application Infrastructure and had some interesting things to say about many parts of the portfolio from WAS CE to WebSphere XD. Two products were mentioned that I’ve never really paid much attention to in the past. WebSphere Real Time is a Java environment for real-time applications, providing for sub-second response times free from the usual vagaries of garbage collection. Meanwhile, WebSphere Remote Server is targetted at the retail market, providing a J2EE runtime for the store with remote management capabilities.
I was presenting “Connection Enterprise Systems to WebSphere Application Server” in the next slot and had a good sized audience. The presentation itself was a bit of a random mix covering integration options from Java libraries and HTTP to JMS, Web services and JCA. The focus of the presentation was really JCA though and I continued on to look at the WebSphere Adapters.
After lunch I attended Ann Black’s presentation on what’s coming in WebSphere XD Version 6.1. Sadly it isn’t yet announced so I can’t say any more but this product continues to offer some exciting technologies.
I was back on again for the last session of the day, filling in for a colleague with a pitch on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
Actually realtime java is not so much about fast response times (though they help) but predictable response times.
It is not good having a realtime app that has to wait for a garbage collector to clean up before it can do anything.
The most important part of control software is that you know that the code will run withing a certain time period.