Santa arrived early with the latest release of IBM’s business integration products. WebSphere Process Server 6.0.2 and WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 were both released just before Christmas. There is a developerWorks article providing an overview of the new features. WebSphere Integration Developer 6.0.2 is also available as an update via the Rational Product Updater (as is the first ifix). Note that this will also bring the Process Server installation that forms part of the Integration Test Environment up to the 6.0.2 level. For the runtimes, make sure you also get the critical fixes.
Archive for the ‘WebSphere ESB’ Category
All the twos
Thursday, December 28th, 2006WebSphere ESB JMS bindings
Monday, December 11th, 2006The second part of Rachel and Andre’s series on Building an Enterprise Service Bus using WebSphere ESB looks at placing a WebSphere ESB mediation between an MDB and JMS client. In this case the requester and provider both deal in the serialized business object XML but don’t forget that you can use the JMS data bindings to provide custom mappings from other external message formats to that expected by the SCA runtime.
Exploring Web services
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer both come with a piece of functionality known as the Web Services Explorer. Part of the unit test client, this provides a user interface for invoking WSDL defined Web services. Until now, I’ve always used the Explorer by right-clicking on a piece of WSDL and selecting Web Services > Test with Web Services Explorer. This is all very well if the WSDL happens to be in your workspace. What I hadn’t realised until this week is that you can also use the Explorer with any arbitrary URL addressable WSDL.
Performance, adapters and food
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Busy day today. Sweated off the remainder of the last night’s alcohol with a morning run. After grabbing a bite to eat (and having another interesting breakfast-time conversation with a colleague) I went to Luc Maquil’s presentation on WebSphere Process Server performance. Luc is one of the authors of the WebSphere Business Integration V6 Performance Tuning Redpaper and consequently knows a thing or two about the subject.
Sightseeing and SOAP
Wednesday, November 15th, 2006Presentation and dinner
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006Many of the presentations at the conference are repeats from our internal services conference earlier this year which means I have some spare time to catch up on other work. One session I did go to today was Eric Herness (Chief Architect for WebSphere Business Integration) presenting the new content in Version 6.0.2 of WebSphere Process Service and ESB. I think it’s safe to say this is a refresh pack with more than a few functional enhancements!
developerWorks articles
Thursday, November 9th, 2006Another 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.
developerWorks roundup
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006This 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.