Not to be outdone by Andy and Richard, today is the eigth anniversary of my joining IBM. Eight whole years… that’s longer than I was at secondary school for! Here goes with a little jaunt down memory lane…
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Eight whole years
Friday, October 6th, 2006Messaging engine file store
Friday, October 6th, 2006Here’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.
WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1
Thursday, October 5th, 2006Having 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.
IBM supports products in VMware
Thursday, October 5th, 2006I use VMware Workstation extensively as I typically need access to numerous different incompatible versions of our products (some of which I don’t want to pollute my host with) and across multiple operating systems. I have, however, come across a couple of customers this year looking to deploy to VMware ESX, generally to reduce hardware and administration overheads. It’s therefore good to see that IBM will now support any of the software group products in this environment.
Introducing WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006I have spent the past few weeks educating myself on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository which became generally available last Friday. This is one of the new products forming part of the today’s SOA launch. The launch has focused on how the product can be used to enforce the governance of services (through the use of a state machine to define the service lifecycle) but, given my focus on all things ESB, my main interest is in the use of the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to support dynamic allocation of service endpoints.
IBM Client Application Tool for JMS
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006For a while now, Martin Smithson’s JMS client application has been an essential part of my WebSphere ESB and service integration bus toolbox. I’m therefore glad to see that it’s now available to all on alphaWorks. It runs inside a J2EE client container and provides a Swing or SWT interface to browse JNDI, locate JMS resources, and then send, receive or browse messages. Simple but effective. Best of all, in the past Martin has been very responsive to making enhancements.
More space
Sunday, October 1st, 2006Christine’s laptop has been creaking under the weight of our photos so some more storage was long overdue. I was tempted by a cheapo LaCie USB hard drive but the reviews reported a few too many disk failures for my liking. Instead went for a Western Digital My Book 250GB Essential. Plugged it in and it worked. Reformatted it as NTFS and it still works. Only time will tell how reliable it is.
Beware transaction completion order
Thursday, September 28th, 2006I should know better having once worked in the WebSphere Application Server transactions development team but it is easy to assume that JTA maintains consistency throughout the lifetime of a transaction. In reality though, for a distributed transaction it is impossible to ensure that all resource managers commit at precisely the same moment. The result is that, between the first and last commit, the state of the different resources is inconsistent. This can be a particular problem if one of the changes taking place under the transaction is used to trigger further processing.
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