I’ve been catching up on some of the developerWorks articles published in the past week and here are a selection of the best. First up is an up-date to the top Java EE best practices. As the article states, it’s amazing how many customers still aren’t following these simple steps. On the WebSphere ESB front we have the third part in Rachel and Andre’s series on Building an Enterprise Service Bus using WebSphere ESB. This looks at using SOAP/HTTP bindings, property promotion and administrative modification of endpoint addresses. Greg Flurry goes one step further in his article, covering the new dynamic endpoint capability in WebSphere ESB V6.0.2 including the use of the endpoint lookup primitive in combination with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. This leads me on nicely to a new series which looks at the use of generic objects in Service Registry to group related documents.
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More from developerWorks
Friday, February 2nd, 2007Service Integration Bus Performance
Monday, January 29th, 2007Another great tool for those working with the Service Integration Bus is now available on alphaWorks. The Service Integration Bus Performance tool (written by David Granshaw who leads the Service Integration Bus Performance team in Hursley) provides an SWT front-end to all of the WebSphere Application Server PMI statistics that are relevant to messaging performance. When you start the tool and point it at a server and messaging engine, it selects a useful set of default statistics. You can then use the configuration menu to select additional statistics with an indication given of the level of performance impact of doing so. Best of all (at least for someone as forgetful as me) is that when you close the tool it turns off the PMI stats before shutting down.
My first WebSphere ESB cluster
Saturday, January 27th, 2007The second instalment of the WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB deployment patterns series is now available. This describes in considerable detail the steps required to configure a simple Process Server cluster. By removing the parts that are plainly not applicable, you are left with a set of good instructions for creating a simple WebSphere ESB cluster. You should, however, refer back to the first article to review when using this simple topology is valid. In particular, you should note that co-locating the SCA modules and messaging engines is generally only possible when you are not using asynchronous SCA i.e. the module imports are not using JMS. If you do use asynchronous SCA then the partitioning of destinations on the SCA.SYSTEM bus that occurs as a result of clustering the messaging engines can become a problem, with responses no longer guaranteed to get back to a partition that is accessible by the instance of the module waiting for it.
Direct JNDI lookup warnings
Saturday, January 27th, 2007I was browsing through the fix list for Version 6.1 of the Application Server and was interested to note that APAR PK32169 is removing the J2CA0294W warning messaging (unless you have debug trace turned on) in Fix Pack 5. This is the warning that you see when performing a direct JNDI lookup of a connection factory i.e. you go straight to the global namespace rather than using a resource-reference and the application’s local namespace (java:comp/env). This message has always been rather contentious as it asserted that direct JNDI lookups were being deprecated yet various parts of the product still continued to use them. There was even a technote describing how to suppress the warnings as, in some cases, they were causing significant performance degradation.
Another WordPress upgrade complete
Friday, January 26th, 2007I’ve now moved this blog and Christine’s up to WordPress 2.1. I’m still waiting for the WPG2 patch which resolves an issue with g2image and TinyMCE but as I rarely post via the web then this isn’t too much of a problem. More problematic was that WordPress now appears to add an extra paragraph tag in around the images which broke the style applied to the Gallery one-image class. Having moved that to the ImageFrame_none class everything appears to be functioning again.
One slightly annoying side-effect of the fact that categories are now shared between links and posts, when combined with my earlier fix, is that the empty Blogroll category now appears in my sidebar. Maybe one day I’ll implement the fix properly and hide entries that don’t have any posts in themselves or their sub-categories! In the meantime I just have to sit back and enjoy the new 2.1 features.
Update 28/01/07: Looks like wp_list_cats has now been fixed so that the hierarchical view does show empty categories with posts in sub-categories (indeed, the post count includes these) so I can remove my earlier fix.
More WebSphere ESB content on developerWorks
Saturday, January 20th, 2007I’m catching up on my developerWorks reading and there are a couple more articles on WebSphere ESB that are worth mentioning. The first is What’s new in WebSphere Enterprise Service V6. Note that the title actually refers to V6 not V6.0.2 so in fact this article provides a good overview of all of the product’s capabilities (although those new in V6.0.2 are highlighted). There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in the article which I’ve alerted the author to so hopefully those will get corrected.
One of the new features in 6.0.2 is the WebSphere MQ binding support which certainly seems to be getting a lot interest from my colleagues. Phil Norton from the WebSphere ESB development team has provided a tutorial that covers invoking a mediation module from an MQ Java client. In particular, it shows how to use a custom data binding to map from the MQ message to a data object. In the tutorial the service being invoked is represented as a Java component in the mediation module. This is by way of example and should not be considered best practice.
WordPress upgrade and widget fix
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007I’m glad I didn’t get round to moving up to WordPress 2.0.6 as, 10 days later, 2.0.7 is out. The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly. I’ve also fixed the categories widget in my sidebar. By default it doesn’t show categories without any postings but, in a hierarchical view, it doesn’t take in to account that sub-categories may have postings. Having selected Sidebar Widgets in the plugin editor, I located the widget_categories function in question. In the call to wp_list_cats I added &hide_empty=0 to the end of the parameter. You should now be able to see my People category (empty) but also its Family and Friends sub-categories (with postings).
Endpoint lookup mediation primitive
Monday, January 15th, 2007I’m finally finding some time to take a look at WebSphere ESB 6.0.2. The endpoint lookup mediation primitive for determining endpoint addresses based on information retrieved from WebSphere Service Registry and Repository was near the top of my list of things to try. Just as I was about to give up hope of getting it to work, a note arrived from Greg Flurry pointing out that you need to have Fix Pack 1 of Service Registry and Repository. Importantly, he also included a link to the install documentation in the InfoCenter. The update failed the first time as my machine was crawling along and the SOAP connection timed out. Having shutdown a few spare processes the fix pack went on fine and the primitive now works like a charm. Note that you can also install directly from the fix pack.
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