David Currie

I’ve mentioned the IBM Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server on a couple of occasions. As the name suggests, this provides you with a couple of JAR files that allow a standalone J2SE application to act as a JMS client to the WebSphere Application Server default messaging provider. What it isn’t good for, is acting as a client from another, third-party, application server. Yes it may work but you don’t get all those good things that an application server provides, like XA transaction coordination and parallel message consumption using MDBs. Enter the IBM Resource Adapter for Java Message Service with WebSphere Application Server which allows you to do just these things. Note that it’s currently only tested on Apache Geronimo V1.2 and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V1.1 but it’s a JCA 1.5 compliant resource adapter so should work with any J2EE 1.4 application server. Also note that, as with the original client, this download is initially only available with an early access license. If you are interested in using it in production though, drop a note to the e-mail address in the technical support section.

As reported over on the WebSphere Community Blog, Interface21 has announced certification of the Spring framework with WebSphere Application Server. The article on developerWorks describing using Spring and Hibernate with WebSphere Application Server has also been just updated to cover Spring Framework 2.1.

I tend to consider myself more of an application architect than an infrastructure expert when it comes to WebSphere Application Server and this is exemplified by my total lack of knowledge about WebSphere’s proxy server. Although shipped as part of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment I have to confess to only having a rather fuzzy idea about its capabilities. It was therefore good to read Erik Burckart’s column reviewing the capabilities of the product and discussing where and when it may be used.

The WebSphere Application Server administrative console isn’t always the easiest beast to navigate and I often find myself having to repeat those five clicks to get back to the page I was just on a moment ago and wishing that there was some sort of bookmarking support. I’m therefore surprised I’ve failed to spot the My Tasks support in Version 6.1 before, which goes at least part of the way to solving that problem.

There is an interesting developerWorks article covering the JAX-RPC Web Services support in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1. It demonstrates how this support alone can provide some of the benefits normally associated with an enterprise service bus, namely location transparency (WSDL endpoints can be overridden in the administrative console) and protocol transparency (SOAP/HTTP, SOAP/JMS or RMI/IIOP). As the article goes on to state, the combination of WebSphere ESB and Service Registry and Repository can give you much more dynamic behaviour when trying to achieve the first of these but if all you need is the ability to modify endpoints when, for example, moving from the development environment in to production, then this may suffice.