It’s that time of year when IBM’s WebSphere Services and Support organisation (plus a whole host of interlopers) descend on Las Vegas for our annual technical conference. As usual, I didn’t take up the opportunity of spending more time here than is absolutely necessary and flew out yesterday. Norway doesn’t have the luxury of direct flights so I flew Continental from Oslo to Newark and from there to Vegas. The first flight was probably only half full which was a nice luxury. Sadly, it arrived an hour early and the flight to Vegas departed over an hour late so I had over six hours to kill at Newark and didn’t arrive at the Rio in Vegas until about half eleven.
I can’t claim to have been particularly enthused by the kick-off session this morning but perhaps I was still half asleep. My only real choice of the day was then to attend Shane Claussen’s WPS/WESB/WID 6.1.0 Update. My main reason for doing so was because I was due to present a WebSphere ESB update presentation in the next slot and wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything that disagreed with the WebSphere Process Server lead architect! I shan’t go through the details of either of those presentations as there is already plenty of material available externally (e.g. WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB). One item that had passed me by previously was the addition of data handlers for fixed-width, delimited and JSON format in 6.1.0.1.
I was then helping out with a WebSphere ESB lab put together by Russ Newcombe from the AIM Early Programs (a man whose path I first crossed back in the Component Broker days). This looked at the new service invoke and fan-out/fan-in primitives as well as the retry capability. For more information on the fan-out/fan-in primitives, both he and I would heartily recommend the series currently running on developerWorks. I know Russ has the lab in the format used by IBM Education Assistant so hopefully it will be available for you to try in the comfort of your own home at some point soon.
Other than that, there was just time up to catch up with a few folks in the corridors and at the Worldwide Tech Practice meeting/dinner this evening. I’m presenting again first thing tomorrow though so bed is calling now…