My Tasks

June 12th, 2007

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.

Performance Tuning Guide

June 12th, 2007

The WebSphere Business Integration Performance Tuning Redpaper has now been updated to cover Version 6.0.2 of WebSphere ESB and Process Server. The information in this paper comes from the product development performance teams and, if anyone knows how to squeeze the last ounce out of these products, it’s those guys.

Service Life Cycle

June 11th, 2007

Arnauld Desprets and Laurent Rieu are two of IBM’s European leaders in the SOA governance space so it’s worth reading their developerWorks article on implementing and enforcing a service lifecycle with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. A reminder though that WebSphere Integration Developer isn’t the only mechanism to create SACL and OWL files.

Micheldever O

June 11th, 2007

Yesterday saw my first orienteering since the JK – a local event at Micheldever Forest between Winchester and Basingstoke. Christine decided to stay home as she didn’t reckon pushing the pram up and down the car park track would be all that much fun so I hitched a lift with Sam Massey.
Read the rest of this entry »

REST and Web services in WSDL 2.0

June 9th, 2007

REST versus SOAP is one of those holy wars it doesn’t pay to get too passionate about. Each has its own merits, for example the simplicity of REST versus the transport neutrality of SOAP. It was therefore interesting to read a developerWorks article that describes how the HTTP binding in WSDL 2.0 enables REST-style interactions for Web services. As the author indicates, this support doesn’t let you do everything you could with a truly REST based service but it’s good to see the WS-* spec writers taking the move for simplicity on board.

JAX-RPC Web Services

June 9th, 2007

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.

Creating your own mediation primitive

June 9th, 2007

The WebSphere Integration Developer InfoCenter contains a section on creating your own mediation primitive to sit on the palette alongside the standard set of primitives. If you prefer learning by example, then Russ Butek has a developerWorks article out that leads you through the steps to create and deploy a simple primitive that writes all or part of a Service Message Object out to the console. (A handy primitive to have in your toolkit in its own right.)

Itchen Valley Country Park RR10

June 7th, 2007

360It was the fifth RR10 last night, taking place at a sunny Itchen Valley Country Park. I had an audience this time as Christine and Emma both came along. My legs felt a bit stiff from Tuesday night’s run in the forest – perhaps not surprising given it has been my only run in the past week. I started fairly fast, partly because I had forgotten just how far you have to go on the third lap of the course. Annoyingly though, my current lack of training seemed to pay dividends as, although I started too slowly, I still managed to move up the results again, finishing in 12th place. This just pushes me in to the top ten for the series so far. It was also great to see IBM Hursley Runners men’s team take an impressive 7th place.