Archive for the ‘WebSphere’ Category

WebSphere MQ JMS message selection

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Of my various publications, the one which seems to bring in the most questions at the moment is that relating to message groups in WebSphere MQ and how these are exposed through the JMS API. I should therefore confess that there are a couple of issues with the approach that the article describes.

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developerWorks articles

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Another bumper crop of developerWorks articles this week, particularly in the WebSphere ESB space. Charlie Redlin kicks off an essential new series for anyone looking to take WebSphere Process Server or WebSphere ESB in to production. Charlie heads up the bring-up team that have been providing invaluable intellectual capital around deployment topologies. It is great to see that some of this is now going to make it out in to the public domain. For those at the other end of the scale, just getting started with WebSphere ESB, there is a new introductory tutorial as part of the Hello World series. This looks at creating a simple flow providing protocol conversion from SOAP/HTTP to JMS.

One of the ongoing web service battles is SOAP versus REST (Representational State Transfer). Greg Flurry provides an interesting article showing how to create an “adapter” Java component to invoke a RESTful service from WebSphere ESB or Process Server and how to expose a RESTful interface to an SCA module.

Lastly, Tim Baldwin from the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository development team has an introductory article looking at the EJB APIs to the product. This includes some samples which should provide a good starting point for anyone working in this area.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Eclipse plug-in

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

The Eclipse plug-in for WebSphere Service Registry and Repository slipped out last Friday as SupportPac SA02. The plug-in requires an Eclipse Version 3.0.2 or later shell so will work fine with WebSphere Integration Developer and Rational Application Developer. It enables the Registry to be queried, artefacts extracted from the Repository and then these, or other artefacts, published back to the Repository. Properties can be modified on artefacts and relationships added between them. Importantly, unlike the web GUI, the plug-in enables collections of artefacts to be published together without having to worry about the order in which they need to be published.

Authentication aliases

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

I had a couple of questions last week relating to authentication aliases. When using WebSphere Application Server resources built on the JCA support, including JDBC data sources and JMS connection factories, there are a number of different mechanisms for specifying security credentials.

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J2EE newbies

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Whilst the majority of the customers I deal with are well versed in the ways of WebSphere, just occasionally I come across one that is not only new to WebSphere but also to the world of J2EE. In the past I have struggled to suggest suitable reading material, often resorting to the Sun J2EE tutorial as a starting point. Now Charlie Brown (who, as he hastens to point out, does have a beagle but not called Snoopy) has written an excellent introduction to J2EE the WebSphere way entitled “Experience J2EE! Using WebSphere Application Server V6.1“. It’s currently only a draft but, having taken a look at the messaging section, it’s well written and informative. There is even a chapter covering the, to my mind, advanced topic of importing a subject on to a message-driven bean’s thread using the credentials passed in a message. Be sure to rate the book so that we can ensure that Charlie’s good work can continue.

developerWorks roundup

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

This is my usual weekly roundup of what’s new and interesting on developerWorks. This week we start with something for the WebSphere Application Server developer. When abstracting configuration properties out of code they often end up in a simple properties file. This is fine if the values are static but, if they need updating, you either need to redeploy the application containing the file or else put the file somewhere separate from the application. (If taking the latter approach then the config directory is a good place for the file as then you call leave the application server to replicate it across the nodes.) Perhaps a better approach is to configure a resource environment provider as described in this article, enabling properties to be defined administratively.

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High availability of WebSphere MQ link

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Today sees the release of WebSphere MQ SupportPac MR01. This provides the source for a WebSphere MQ channel exit which can be configured with a list of host names and port numbers to which the channel will attempt to connect. The intention is that this exit can be used when using a WebSphere MQ link to connect a clustered Service Integration Bus messaging engine to a queue manager. The messaging engine can now failover to another cluster member and the queue manager will still be able to connect.

WebSphere Application Server command framework

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Admin commands and task commands have done much to reduce the complexity of scripting WebSphere Application Server in recent releases, effectively bringing the simplicity of administrative console panels and wizards to the command line. If you find yourself repeating the same administrative actions, this developerWorks article covers in depth how to go about writing your own commands.