David Currie

Continuing my series of posts on new functionality in WebSphere Application Version 6.1, today I’m looking Web Services Notification (WS-Notification). For those with a messaging background, WS-Notification basically provides publish/subscribe capabilities for Web services i.e. a one-to-many relationship between client and service.

(more…)

One subject that keeps cropping up with customers is the subject of message order. Now I’ll say up front, having a requirement to maintain the order of messages in an application is a bad thing. If messages can’t be processed in parallel due to ordering constraints then the resulting application is unlikely to scale and high availability will be difficult to achieve. This, however, doesn’t seem to stop people wanting it, so here’s a few things you should know about message order and the service integration bus.

(more…)

Another area of the service integration bus which has seen some significant changes in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 is that of security. For starters, the option for bus security has always been checked by default but it is only enforced when global security is enabled. To reduce the confusion, this option is now greyed out in the administration console if global security is not enabled.

(more…)

Here’s my first post of a series looking at some of the new functionality in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 that has come out of the Hursley Development Lab, in particular in the area of the service integration bus.

One of the most of obvious change is the addition of a new persistence mechanism: the file store. In Version 6.0, the messaging engine data store used JDBC to store persistent messages and transactional data (amongst other things) in to a database. There were a couple of issues with this. Firstly, even for non-transactional, non-persistent messaging, it meant configuring a database and, secondly, the out-of-the-box performance with the default Cloudscape database was not great.

In Version 6.1, the default is to use a proprietary flat file in much the same way as WebSphere MQ. Although almost three times faster than using Cloudscape, the best performance can still be obtained by offloading processing to a remote DB2 instance. It may also be preferable to still use a database for other reasons such as high availability and backup and recovery.

Having posted on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository yesterday, I thought it was a little unfair that, despite being out for a while now, I haven’t mentioned Version 6.1 of WebSphere Application Server. Robby Peterson has a developerWorks article providing an overview of the new features so I shan’t list them all here. I will, however, pick out a few that I think are important/interesting and then blog again on some of the new functionality brought to you by my development colleagues in Hursley.

(more…)