Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer both come with a piece of functionality known as the Web Services Explorer. Part of the unit test client, this provides a user interface for invoking WSDL defined Web services. Until now, I’ve always used the Explorer by right-clicking on a piece of WSDL and selecting Web Services > Test with Web Services Explorer. This is all very well if the WSDL happens to be in your workspace. What I hadn’t realised until this week is that you can also use the Explorer with any arbitrary URL addressable WSDL.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Exploring Web services
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006Customizing the Service Registry and Repository UI
Friday, December 1st, 2006One of the beauties of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository product is it’s flexibility. The development team have begun a new developerWorks series looking at customizing the web based administrative console. The first article covers the basic architecture and concepts but the series promises to go on to cover the ultimate in customization: a new perspective.
Laptop sanity restored
Thursday, November 30th, 2006Over the past month or so my laptop has been driving me slowly insane. It’s performance has been absolutely dire, particularly when trying to work under VMWare. I’ve spent many hours staring at the task manager looking for rogue processes that might explain the constant disk thrashing but to no avail. Process Explorer (one of the Sysinternals tools now owned by Microsoft) came to the rescue indicating that, for example, when running VMWare, 50% of the CPU was being used to handle hardware interrupts.
A quick Google suggested an issue whereby Windows steadily reduces the transfer mode on an IDE channel after six cumulative time-outs or CRC check failures until eventually it hits rock bottom speeds with PIO mode. Checking the device settings confirmed that this had happened or, alternatively, my primary hard disk has always been running in this mode. One suggested mechanism to reset the mode is to uninstall the driver and let Windows reinstall it on reboot. I’m now back in Ultra DMA Mode 5 and everything is zipping along nicely – even the reduction in noise level is noticeable!
JMS Application Server Facilities
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006On the basis of a thread of notes I was involved in this week, I was considering a post on the WebSphere Application Server support for JMS providers that don’t implement the Application Server Facilities (ASF) part of the JMS specification. As the name suggests, these facilities cover aspects of integration between a JMS provider and a J2EE application server such as transactionality and message-driven bean support. Paul Titheridge (who works in the service team covering the WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Application Server JMS providers) has done the hard work for me and written a developerWorks article on the subject.
Feature Pack for Web services podcast
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006In a previous posting I covered the Feature Pack for Web services. This week’s developerWorks Making SOA real with WebSphere podcast includes an interesting interview with Nathan Goike on this subject. Points of particular interest to me was the inclusion of Apache Axis2 and the use of policy sets to ease Web service configuration.
Security presentations
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006Keys Botzum has provided updates to his security hardening and programming presentations, written in combination with my UK colleagues Cameron Martin and Peter Kovari, to cover Version 6.0 and 6.1 of WebSphere Application Server.
Upgrade to WordPress 2.0.5
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006Finally found the time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.5. The process of copying across all the modified files, plugins, themes etc. is always far more manual than I’d like so if you spot anything that looks broken please let me know!
WS-Notification
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006Ben Bakowski, Chris Whyley and Matt Roberts have written a nice developerWorks article introducing WS-Notification in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1. For once I’ve actually sat down myself and worked my way through it so I know it’s good! It illustrates the use of a publisher, asynchronous consumer and pull point for lightweight consumers, along with mixing WS-Notification and JMS. One thing to watch out for though: the authors have chosen to use scripting for the setup and pre-written applications which, although providing useful examples, means it’s easy to get to the end of the article without knowing what you’ve done if you don’t take the time to look at the content of the scripts and code.
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