This one’s doing the rounds of various IBM related blogs but I think it’s sufficiently momentous for me to give it a mention in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere. WebSphere Application Server for Developers provides a free development runtime environment using the full WebSphere Application Server V7 product. What you don’t get is support but feel free to ask questions on the developerWorks forum.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Free WebSphere Application Server
Saturday, June 20th, 2009WebSphere ESB Forum
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009There has been a WebSphere ESB newsgroup for a long while but it doesn’t see a lot of traffic compared to its sibling Integration Developer and Process Server groups. At least part of that has been due to the fact that they have been mirrored on the developerWorks forums which tend to be the preferred interface for many developers this days (although not myself!) whilst the WebSphere ESB one has not. My colleague Dave Screen has now got this rectified so post your WebSphere ESB questions here!
WebSphere Integration Developer for ESB
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009A top tip just in from the WebSphere Integration Developer team… If you only use WebSphere Integration Developer to develop for WebSphere ESB (and not Process Server) then go to Window > Preferences and select General > Capabilities. Then click the Advanced button and expand Integration Developer. If you uncheck Process Development then the Process Server specific options (e.g. SCA module creation) will be filterered out of the menu structures. It’s not perfect (the new business integration module wizard for example doesn’t take account of the enabled capabilities) but it goes a fair way to removing some of the clutter that is not relevant to you as a WebSphere ESB developer. Thankfully there are plans to make the option easier to find in future releases!
Setting promoted properties on install
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009There have been a couple of questions recently on an internal forum asking how best to parameterise a module. For mediation modules the seemingly obvious answer is via promoted properties. However, in these scenarios the parameterisation was required to handle the deployment of a module in to different environments and the originators felt that promoted properties were more about making administrative changes to properties post-deployment. I pointed out that, in the admin console, if you use the J2EE application installation process (rather than the install button on the SCA modules panel) and select the “Show me all installation options and parameters” radio button then you will find a panel entitled “Edit module properties” that allows you to modify promoted properties on installation.
Amateur IT support
Sunday, May 10th, 2009Christine’s laptop has been slowly grinding to a halt over the past few weeks and, as the university support services were proposing to take it away, I thought I’d take a look. I was initially sidetracked by an issue with a SQL Server 2005 Express update which Windows Update was repeatedly trying to install. In the end, it turned out she had the same issue with the IDE Channel transfer mode that I’ve experienced before. The Windows Update was just one of the many disk intensive operations where things got really bad. Just for good measure I uninstalled some apps I’d put on her machine and ran CCleaner and JKDefrag. Hopefully Christine will come home from work in a better mood tomorrow!
Service Integration Bus Destination Handler
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009I’ve previously plugged the Service Integration Bus Explorer and IBM Client Application for JMS as useful tools to have in your WebSphere messaging kitbag. Thanks go once again to Dave Screen, this time for bringing the Service Integration Bus Destination Handler to my attention. This provides a very configurable mechansim for carrying out actions on a set of messages either on a one-off basis (via client or web application) or on a scheduled basis. Particularly useful operations include dumping messages, moving messages from one destination to another, and resurrecting messages from the exception destination. The readme file available in the download provides lots of detailed instructions and examples.
Sharing libraries at runtime
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Thanks to my colleague Dave Screen for highlighting a useful technote relating to sharing library modules in WebSphere ESB and Process Server. The WebSphere Integration Developer concept of a library is typically only used for development time sharing of artifacts i.e. when you deploy a module that depends on that library, a copy of the JAR file is included in the enterprise application that is deployed. The technote describes how to deploy the library as a WebSphere shared library and have multiple modules depend on the same instance at runtime. This has the potential to reduce memory usage (the library is on a shared classloader) and ease managability. It does, however, mean that you need to be more careful about versioning of the library and breaking other dependent modules. If you’re not on 6.2 then note the list of APARs at the bottom of the document.
Dynamic JMS endpoints revisited
Saturday, April 18th, 2009This is a long overdue update to a previous post on achieving dynamic JMS endpoints in WebSphere ESB. As several people have commented, WebSphere ESB 6.2 added support for dynamic endpoints for all of the bindings types as documented in the InfoCenter. A couple of points to note:
- The syntax of the endpoint URI used for the JMS bindings uses JNDI names to refer to the resources and is therefore not truly dynamic in the sense that JMS destinations need to have been pre-configured for all of the messaging provider destinations to which you might want to send.
- For a native MQ binding, you can currently only modify the queue dynamically and not the queue manager to which you can connect.
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