Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

More WebSphere ESB content on developerWorks

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

I’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, 2007

I’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, 2007

I’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.

developerWorks WebSphere newsletter

Monday, January 8th, 2007

The weekly developerWorks WebSphere newsletter, the prompt for many of my postings on this site and previously only available to IBMers, is now open to all. Sign up here.

MDB reconnection

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

The asynchronous nature of message-driven beans means that the JMS provider must be permanently connected to the messaging system in order to know when a message is available for delivery. I received a question last week as to what WebSphere Application Server’s behaviour is when that connection is broken.

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Image recovery

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

A couple of weeks back I managed to wipe an SD camera card having failed to copy across a few images. Nothing too disastorous but I thought I’d see if I could get them back. Top marks to Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery which found 120 images on the card including the ones I’d deleted. Meanwhile, my brother, who made the rather more serious mistake of wiping a whole USB hard drive only to discover the last backup had failed, has good things to say about the freeware PC INSPECTOR File Recovery.

IBM Software Support Toolbar

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Just spotted that the IBM Software Support Toolbar is now available for Firefox. This plugin provides search capability across the support knowledge base and downloads as well as key links to support sites and documentation specific to each product family.

Registry and Repository Redbook

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

A draft of the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Handbook is now available.