Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Service Registry Eclipse Plugin

Friday, March 9th, 2007

There are a couple of options for accessing artifacts in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository at development time. (NB I used to call them artefacts but this seemed to confuse the Americans!) If you are using WebSphere Integration Developer (Version 6.0.2) then you can use the Enterprise Service Discovery wizard to query a registry and retrieve artifacts. This support is the subject of a new developerWorks article.

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64-bit Service Registry

Friday, March 9th, 2007

As I don’t believe this is currently documented, I thought I should mention that although WebSphere Service Registry and Repository will run on 64-bit AIX, it cannot be used with 64-bit DB2. If you’re running on a 64-bit platform then make sure that you create a 32-bit DB2 instance otherwise you will get failures during the installation process (he says having learnt this the hard way!).

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Handbook

Friday, March 9th, 2007

The WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Handbook has now made it out of draft. Having submitted a whole raft of feedback on an early draft I did appear in the acknowledgements but mysteriously my name hasn’t made the final cut! Notwithstanding this, the book provides excellent coverage from the basic concepts, through installation, to advanced customization, governance and integration with WebSphere ESB, ITCAM for SOA, WebSphere Message Broker and CICS. (Note that, as of the recent 3.6.0.8 firmware version, DataPower can also be used to perform lookups in the registry.)

One topic that the WebSphere ESB chapter covers is how to connect the endpoint lookup mediation primitive to WebSphere Service Registry and Repository via SSL. This doesn’t currently work out of the box. You will need to apply APAR IC51354 to WebSphere ESB and then follow the instructions in the book or corresponding technote.

ITCAM for SOA and WSRR

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA (or ITCAM for SOA as it is usually referred to) is, as the name suggests, an important part of IBM’s monitoring solution for the SOA, tracking web service requests not only through IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server, DataPower and WebSphere ESB but also into other environments like SAP NetWeaver and JBoss. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has a number of integration points with ITCAM for SOA, one of which is an Event Handler. This enables situations detected by ITCAM for SOA (such as an excessive response time or message size) to result in the creation, update, or removal, of properties on a WSDL port or SCA export in the registry. You can read a developerWorks article that describes how to configure ITCAM for SOA to monitor a web service running in WebSphere Application Server and update the metadata for the service entry in the registry.

One possible usage is to modify the behaviour of clients depending on the current system status. For example, by using a query to select endpoints which are not currently experiencing response time issues. This isn’t currently possible in WebSphere ESB when using the endpoint lookup primitive due to the internal caching that is performed. Unlike WebSphere Message Broker, the primitive does not currently have any mechanism to invalidate the cache when service definitions are modified.

WebSphere ESB and Messaging

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

There are two new articles on developerWorks covering connectivity between WebSphere ESB and messaging. The first, is Part 4 of Rachel and Andre’s series which takes a look at the new Websphere MQ binding in Version 6.0.2. The second article shows how to use the JMS bindings with JMS providers other than the default messaging provider or WebSphere MQ i.e. what WebSphere Application Server refers to as generic JMS providers.

WS-Addressing endpoint references

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

Ben Bakowski has written a very thorough developerWorks article covering the use of WS-Addressing endpoint references with WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 to act as references to stateful session beans. Ben uses his sample online shop application to show the possibilities including how to achieve high availability in a cluster.

WebSphere User Group meeting

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

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.

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Restricted access

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

My colleague Simon Kapadia informs that he can’t access this site from our standard issue 3G cards due to “Vodafone Content Control”. Fortunately if you’re over 18 you can remove the access control (which I’m guessing I must have done at some point in the past) but make sure the children aren’t watching!