For 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.
Archive for the ‘WebSphere’ Category
IBM Client Application Tool for JMS
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006Beware 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.
Supported J2SE JMS client
Thursday, August 31st, 2006I’ve previously mentioned the “Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server” on alphaWorks which enables Java clients running in a non-J2EE environment to access destinations on a service integration bus defined in a WebSphere Application Server (or Process Server, ESB or XD) cell. This client has now graduated to a fully supported version. There is now a small install process to take you through the license agreement but you still end up with a JAR file that weighs in at only 2MB. If you also need to suport retrieval of JMS resources from JNDI then that adds around another 0.5MB.
Vegas birthday conference
Saturday, May 6th, 2006Spent the past week in Las Vegas for the IBM WebSphere Services Technical Conference. Had a direct flight from Gatwick with Virgin Atlantic which was infinitely preferable to having to spend an extra couple of hours in some random US airport. We were based in the Rio for the week both for accommodation and the conference itself. Much more pleasant being off the Strip (in fact, I only made it to the Strip once and that was for an early morning run) although it did mean it was possible to spend the entire day inside a dry air-conditioned box. Sadly, by the time the presentations were over for each day the sun had dropped behind the buildings meaning that the hotel’s pool and beach weren’t as enticing as they might have been.
Service Integration Bus Explorer
Thursday, April 20th, 2006The browser based WebSphere Application Server (WAS) administration console is not an ideal interface for displaying runtime status. In addition, when working with the Service Integration Bus in WAS V6, the resources associated with a bus are spread over numerous panels. For a while now, those of use in IBM have had the pleasure of using an SWT application written by a colleague in development (Gareth Matthews) that provides a single viewpoint of the bus resources defined across multiple cells and their current runtime state. The legal niceties having being resolved, this fantastic tool is now available for all on alphaWorks.
J2SE JMS client
Thursday, April 20th, 2006I’m often asked by customers, both during engagements and more informally, about the support for connecting to the default messaging provider in WebSphere Application Server V6 from a client environment. Until now, the official line has been that either the client container or thin client from the WebSphere Application Client installation should be used. However, installing a 100Mb from a CD isn’t usually what most folks have in mind when talking about a thin client (at which point they start copying files from a server installation). Fortunately, a much more palatable option is now available from alphaWorks in the shape of the “Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server”.
WebSphere User Group
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006Attended the WebSphere User Group meeting at IBM’s Bedfont Lakes location today. I was presenting an overview of the High Availability Manager that was introduced in WebSphere Application Server V6. I have to confess that I was quite surprised by the size of the audience I had for this subject given that there were six other tracks running in parallel. Perhaps customer take-up of this version has reached the point where the availability of solutions going in to production has become of interest. After lunch wasn’t perhaps the best time to launch in to the intricacies of topics such as the core group bridge service and there were a few heavy eyelids in the audience! Hopefully the examples around the transaction service, WebSphere XD and the Service Integration Bus proved a bit lighter going.
Grouping messages using WebSphere MQ
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006Rather surprised to discover that developerWorks had published my article on Grouping messages using the WebSphere MQ Java and JMS APIs given that the last time I had seen it was when I submitted a first draft! Managed to persuade them to correct some of the more glaring errors that were introduced during the editorial process. I guess I’ll just have to put up with the revised writing style.
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