Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Creating your own mediation primitive

Saturday, June 9th, 2007

The WebSphere Integration Developer InfoCenter contains a section on creating your own mediation primitive to sit on the palette alongside the standard set of primitives. If you prefer learning by example, then Russ Butek has a developerWorks article out that leads you through the steps to create and deploy a simple primitive that writes all or part of a Service Message Object out to the console. (A handy primitive to have in your toolkit in its own right.)

Registry and Repository Access Control

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

If you’re going to put all of your services in to a single registry along with the artefacts that describe them then security is going to be important to you. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has a comprehensive fine-grained access control mechanism based on the industry standard XACML. There is a developerWorks series starting which describes the details. (And no, I’m not just plugging it because Gary was once my mountain marathon partner!)

Web Service Transactions

Monday, June 4th, 2007

As I’ve mentioned previously, shortly after I first joined IBM I was a member of the development team for the transactions component, initially of Component Broker and then WebSphere Application Server. My team leader back then was one Ian Robinson. Ian has since risen to the heady heights of Senior Technical Staff Member and I’m glad to say that he now acts as my mentor. Ian is co-chair of the OASIS WS-Tx committee and, as announced on his blog (of which I had no idea of the existence), Version 1.1 of the standard has just been announced. Ian has also added his name to the list of contributors on the WebSphere Community Blog (note the new location) having authored a lengthy article on the support for Web Service Transactions in WebSphere Application Server.

Rails Overview: Intro and Getting Started

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

So, here goes… there’s plenty to say so my overview of Ruby on Rails is going to be a multi-parter. Note, this isn’t going to be a tutorial – there are plenty of those about. This is my view on what makes Rails hot and where it’s not based on my experiences as a Rails newbie. My background, for reference, is with J2EE professionally, and PHP on the side.
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Hosting by the slice

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

A couple of months back I was looking for somewhere to host a Ruby on Rails app (of which more in another post shortly). In the end I settled for a Virtual Private Server from US firm Slicehost (who are themselves Rails developers). For just over £10 a month I get 10GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and 256MB. Bargain! I’d love to use a host in the UK but I’d easily be paying twice that and getting half the spec (unless someone out there can point me at a good deal I’ve missed).
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Process Server and ESB exception handling

Monday, May 21st, 2007

Another useful fact I picked up at WSTC was around retry behaviour for JMS exports. Pamela Fong and Jeff Brent have put together a very detailed developerWorks article covering all aspects of exception handling in WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB. Definitely worth trying to get your head round this stuff.

Virtualized WebSphere Application Server

Monday, May 21st, 2007

I mentioned that Ruth Willenborg gave a presentation at WSTC on virtualization and WebSphere Application Server. She now has an article on developerWorks that covers one technique she was talking about: creating and then deploying customized WebSphere Application Server images. Now where this gets really interesting is when you apply it to something like WebSphere Process Server…

WordPress 2.2

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Having missed the previous security update I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.2. I’m glad to say everything seems to have gone smoothly (although PlusNet managed to take the site down again at one point which had me a little worried). Nothing really different for you, the reader, to see. Widget support is now there out of the box but then I had the plugin installed previously anyway.