WebSphere ESB 7.5 is generally available from Passport Advantage as of today (as are WSRR 7.5, WebSphere ESB Registry Edition 7.5 and the 7.5 BPM stack) and the InfoCenter is also live. Having been the Development Lead and then Release Architect, I feel a certain sense of parental pride in this delivery but, as always, the credit goes to the wider team. It shall also be my last as I am parting company with the WebSphere ESB development team and moving on to pastures new. I can’t say more at the moment but all will be revealed sometime this month.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
WebSphere ESB 7.5 available
Friday, June 3rd, 2011WebSphere ESB 7.5 Preview
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011As announced about a month ago, WebSphere ESB 7.5 is due to be available at the end of this week. Having presented on the subject at Impact, I felt I should provide a little more background to some of the new features described in the announce letter. Time permitting, I’ll cover some of the topics in further details once the product has been released.
Back online
Sunday, March 20th, 2011Shortly after moving my blog to an EC2 instance I received an ominous email stating:
We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.
The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you launch replacement instances and start migrating to them.
After a bit of searching around it seemed that, as my instance is EBS backed, I should just need to stop it and restart it and, in all likelihood, it would move to another host. Sounded simple enough but the stop seemed to be taking forever. After downloading the command line tools I tried to force the stop but still no luck – except when I logged in again the following night it was finally showing as stopped. Unfortunately, when I tried to start it I received the following error: “Server.InternalError: Internal error on launch”.
I posted a question on the EC2 forum and, as you can see, was told that the root volume was in an “abnormal attachment state”. You’ll also see that my attempts to force a detach via the AWS Management Console appeared to fail or at least, the console thought the volume was still attached and therefore wouldn’t let me reattach it. Reverting to the command line utilities again allowed me to successfully detach and reattach the volume and then start the instance. Another delay whilst the DNS refresh took effect (perhaps I should try out an Elastic IP) and, about three days after I first hit stop, the site is finally back online. I’m putting it down as a learning experience!
Server hacked
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011When attempting to post the image for my last blog entry, it failed to be resized. When I logged in to the server to see what was up with ImageMagick, I didn’t appear to have permission to execute ls. Or ps. Or netstat… A quick Google suggested that these were the hallmarks of a rootkit attack. Unfortunately the files had been modified prior to the oldest Slicehost backup that I had. At this point I realised the server was still running Intrepid, limiting my chances of picking up packages to detect and remove rootkits. After a reboot of the server I discovered that I had lost all connectivity. Booting up a Slicehost rescue image I was able to retrieve all of the data I needed. Now to get things up and running again. Earlier in the year I had been playing around with a free micro-instance on EC2 and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to switch across. The instance is running Apache rather than nginx as on my Slicehost image. This needed a bit of tuning down to prevent segmentation faults. Everything seems to be running smoothly now. I just need to switch the DNS records away from Slicehost and then I’m done.
WebSphere Technical Conference
Sunday, October 10th, 2010A quick post to highlight that I’m in Düsseldorf this week as a last minute stand-in for my colleague Simon Holdsworth at the WebSphere Technical Conference. I’ll be giving his Introduction to WebSphere ESB and WebSphere ESB Best Practices and Performance Recommendations on Tuesday afternoon, What’s New in WebSphere ESB V7.0 on Wednesday and then running the WebSphere ESB Birds of a Feather session that follows. I’ll also be at the Connectivity Panel Q&A on Monday afternoon which is probably the best place to catch me if you’d like to meet up at some point for a chat about the product or just to say Hi!
WebSphere ESB 7.0.0.3
Monday, September 6th, 2010On Friday, we released Fix Pack 7.0.0.3 for the BPM stack including WebSphere ESB. This was what we call a “development led” fix pack which generally means that, in addition to the usual round-up of fixes, there is some additional new function. In this case, we have been working hard on the new business object lazy parsing mode that first surfaced as a technology preview at the end of last year. Previously, although we had various performance enhancements to avoid parsing the message body if it was never touched by a mediation flow, as soon as you did touch it, we parsed the whole message in to a Service Data Object. With the new mode, we only parse as much of the message as is required to evaluate each expression. As you might imagine, this is largely done in the name of performance and the improvement is particularly significant with partial access to large messages. Sadly, were not quite done with this work and all over the update notes you’ll see a statement indicating that lazy mode is now out of tech preview but only for modules that do not contain mediation flows.
One of the other significant points about this fix pack is the move to WebSphere Application Server 7.0.0.11 and, in particular, the fact that this finally has an Installation Manger based install process. This means that you can finally install both the Application Server, ESB and fixes for both, all using the same install technology. Unfortunately you will have to use the old Update Installer to remove any ifixes that you have already installed.
New WESB/WPS book
Friday, July 16th, 2010I’ve just been asked to review a new book entitled “Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7“. I can certainly vouch for the credentials of one of the two IBM authors having worked with Salil Ahuja. As part of the AIM Early Programs team he’s in a perfect position to have both a breadth of knowledge across the products and a good understanding of what customers need and want to know. The sample chapter online (which happens to cover mediation module development) looks promising so I look forward to receiving my review copy.
Street View Fame
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Back in October ’98 I blogged about the arrival of the Google Street View car in our road. The data for our area has finally been made available and I’m glad to report that Emma (with short hair) and I can now claim our moment of fame. I’m disappointed that we don’t get to feature twice despite crossing the road whilst the car turned at the end of the cul-de-sac. Having moved house since you’re not likely to find us in the same spot again!