David Currie

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA (or ITCAM for SOA as it is usually referred to) is, as the name suggests, an important part of IBM’s monitoring solution for the SOA, tracking web service requests not only through IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server, DataPower and WebSphere ESB but also into other environments like SAP NetWeaver and JBoss. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has a number of integration points with ITCAM for SOA, one of which is an Event Handler. This enables situations detected by ITCAM for SOA (such as an excessive response time or message size) to result in the creation, update, or removal, of properties on a WSDL port or SCA export in the registry. You can read a developerWorks article that describes how to configure ITCAM for SOA to monitor a web service running in WebSphere Application Server and update the metadata for the service entry in the registry.

One possible usage is to modify the behaviour of clients depending on the current system status. For example, by using a query to select endpoints which are not currently experiencing response time issues. This isn’t currently possible in WebSphere ESB when using the endpoint lookup primitive due to the internal caching that is performed. Unlike WebSphere Message Broker, the primitive does not currently have any mechanism to invalidate the cache when service definitions are modified.

I’ve been catching up on some of the developerWorks articles published in the past week and here are a selection of the best. First up is an up-date to the top Java EE best practices. As the article states, it’s amazing how many customers still aren’t following these simple steps. On the WebSphere ESB front we have the third part in Rachel and Andre’s series on Building an Enterprise Service Bus using WebSphere ESB. This looks at using SOAP/HTTP bindings, property promotion and administrative modification of endpoint addresses. Greg Flurry goes one step further in his article, covering the new dynamic endpoint capability in WebSphere ESB V6.0.2 including the use of the endpoint lookup primitive in combination with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. This leads me on nicely to a new series which looks at the use of generic objects in Service Registry to group related documents.