WebSphere Today

Clustered deployments are essential for growing enterprises because they enhance your ability to deliver reliable and scalable SOA solutions. This article provides an overview of how to deploy and configure WebSphere Business Services Fabric in a clustered environment.

The final installment of this three-part series uses WebSphere Integration Developer V6.1 to configure WebSphere Process Server V6.1 JMS imports and exports to use WebSphere Transformation Extender Data Binding to transform data from the delimited format into a Customer Business Object (inbound) and from a Customer Business Object into the delimited format (outbound).

Deploying message flows can be problematic in busy production environments, but new features in WebSphere Message Broker V6.1 reduce the need for message flow editing and redeployment when applying minor configuration changes. This article describes these features and explains how best to use them.

Deploying message flows can be problematic in busy production environments, but new features in WebSphere Message Broker V6.1 reduce the need for message flow editing and redeployment when applying minor configuration changes. This article describes these features and explains how best to use them.

Deploying message flows can be problematic in busy production environments, but new features in WebSphere Message Broker V6.1 reduce the need for message flow editing and redeployment when applying minor configuration changes. This article describes these features and explains how best to use them.

Creating a CodeIgniter application is easier than you might think. Take a guided tour through your first project: a simple Web page with a contact form.

In this series, learn about the dramatic changes in IBM WebSphere Business Monitor V6.1—a major release that extends capability and simplifies how you monitor and manage the performance of your business. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides options for basic and advanced installation environments. Prerequisite products include IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal, and IBM DB2 AlphaBlox, with options to use DB2 and other database products. While the environment is complex, the installation is relatively robust and easy to use. Without a basic understanding of all of the individual products in this suite, though, it can be challenging to diagnose problems. In this article, learn to use WebSphere Business Monitor installation logging and how to navigate through product logs to diagnose problems.

Creating a CodeIgniter application is easier than you might think. Take a guided tour through your first project: a simple Web page with a contact form.

Get acquainted with Jaxer, the first true Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) server. Jaxer makes it possible to execute JavaScript code, Document Object Model (DOM), and HTML on the server side as well as giving you the ability to access server-side functions asynchronously from the client side. This article describes the features of Jaxer and shows the great potential that Jaxer has to offer, even in its infancy.

In this series, learn about the dramatic changes in IBM WebSphere Business Monitor V6.1—a major release that extends capability and simplifies how you monitor and manage the performance of your business. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides options for basic and advanced installation environments. Prerequisite products include IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal, and IBM DB2 AlphaBlox, with options to use DB2 and other database products. While the environment is complex, the installation is relatively robust and easy to use. Without a basic understanding of all of the individual products in this suite, though, it can be challenging to diagnose problems. In this article, learn to use WebSphere Business Monitor installation logging and how to navigate through product logs to diagnose problems.

Draft Redbook, last updated: Tue, 26 Aug 2008

- Introduction to DataPower Services
- Integration Services
- Security Services

IBM® WebSphere® DataPower® SOA Appliances are purpose-built network devices that offer a wide variety of functionality such as the securing and management of SOA Applications, Enterprise Service Bus Integration, and high speed XSL execution.

Draft Redbook, last updated: Tue, 26 Aug 2008

- Introduction to DataPower Services
- Integration Services
- Security Services

IBM® WebSphere® DataPower® SOA Appliances are purpose-built network devices that offer a wide variety of functionality such as the securing and management of SOA Applications, Enterprise Service Bus Integration, and high speed XSL execution.

Draft Redbook, last updated: Tue, 26 Aug 2008

- Migration concepts, planning and best practices
- Migration tools and scripting
- Migration end to end scenarios

In this IBM Redbooks publication, we discuss the concepts, planning, differences and migration paths, that you must understand before any attempt to migrate the source artifacts created using IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition 5.1 product, to the IBM WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1.

Draft Redpaper, last updated: Tue, 26 Aug 2008

- Appliance Management Protocol (AMP) configuration examples
- SOAP Configuration Management (SOMA) configuration examples
- Debugging tips and common errors

The XML Management Interface is the third way to configure and administer the WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance.

Draft Redbook, last updated: Thu, 21 Aug 2008

- Migration concepts, planning and best practices
- Migration tools and scripting
- Migration end to end scenarios

In this IBM Redbooks publication, we discuss the concepts, planning, differences and migration paths, that you must understand before any attempt to migrate the source artifacts created using IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition 5.1 product, to the IBM WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1.

Draft Redbook, last updated: Mon, 25 Aug 2008

- Customizing Management Center for WebSphere Commerce
- Optimizes the day-to-day activities of the business users
- Examples of customization scenarios

The Management Center for WebSphere Commerce is the next generation business user tool for managing online business tasks, introduced with WebSphere Commerce version 6, Feature Pack 3, for example, catalog tasks, marketing tasks, and promotion tasks.

So what's this cloud computing thing all about? Sounds like SOA and ESBs to me.

David Chappell, frequent industry commentator and author of books like Understanding .NET (not to be confused with David Chappell, Sonic MQ and Oracle guy and author of Enterprise Service Bus, nor with Dave Chappelle, the guy with the self-titled TV show), has a new and rather interesting paper, "A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms." There's a discussion of it, David Chappell: Introduction To Cloud Computing, on InfoQ.

I personally get cloud computing confused with grid computing. According to Wikipedia (chronicler of wikiality), grid computing is a cluster of resources that act together like one big resource, such that you don't care where in the grid your functionality gets performed. This sounds like, for example, a J2EE application deployed to a WAS ND cluster; the user doesn't know nor care which cluster member is performing his work. Cloud computing, says Wikipedia, occurs on the Internet (or some other type of network, I suppose) such that you don't even know where it's occurring. When you perform a search using Google, Amazon, Travelocity, etc., where is your search executing? Silicon Valley, New York City, or Bangalore--it doesn't matter. In fact, users in NYC are probably hitting different servers than those in Bangalore; those servers are running in a cloud. The data centers in Silicon Valley, New York City, and Bangalore should each be running a grid.

"What cloud computing really means" (InfoWorld) (part of Inside the emerging world of cloud computing) doesn't really answer its own question. Instead, it covers all the bases, saying cloud computing can mean: Software as a service (SaaS), utility computing, Web services in the cloud, platform as a service, managed service providers (MSPs), service commerce platforms, and Internet integration. Gee, clear as mud. (At least they didn't say it's Web 2.0 (which I say is MVC for the Web).)

Likewise, "Guide To Cloud Computing" (Information Week) doesn't really say what it is. But Amazon, Google, Salesforce, etc. are all doing it. An example that a lot of journalists are talking about is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which essentially lets you outsource computing jobs to them. Need some data crunched? Give it to Amazon and they'll get it done. Of course, there's a lot of constraints in how you package up your functionality to be performed, you need to have a lot of flexibility on when it gets done exactly, and you may need to worry about the security (esp. privacy) of your data.

Back to David's paper. He divides an application platform into three parts (see Fig. 2): Foundation, such as the operating system, and I'd include middleware like a J2EE application server; Infrastructure Services, other capabilities and middleware that the app uses for persistence, security, messaging, etc.; and Application Services, which perform business functionality and ideally are wrapped up as SOA business services. The upshot (see Fig. 3) is that cloud computing makes infrastructure and application services available outside the enterprise, in the cloud. Cloud computing also enables the app itself to run in the cloud, so you just deploy your app to the cloud and access it from anywhere (again, like a world-wide WAS ND cluster).

To me, this approach isn't that astonishing; I guess someone just had to give it a name. I (and many others, I think) look at SOA as being an app that works as (what I call) a service coordinator consuming services, namely service providers. The key is that the providers for any given service may be inside the enterprise (what David calls on-premises) or may be outside the enterprise (what David calls the cloud). In fact, a single service may have both internal and external providers, and it seems to me that the cloud should include both, so that the app consuming the service doesn't need to know whether the provider is inside or outside the enterprise (or both). I think an important part of solving this problem, making services available to consumers without having to know where the providers are, is the enterprise service bus. This is one of the main points of my articles "Why do developers need an Enterprise Service Bus?" and "Simplify integration architectures with an Enterprise Service Bus" (the latter with James Snell).

So cloud computing is functionality being performed wherever is convenient, where the client application doesn't know nor care where the functionality actually lives. A great approach to make this happen, and to prepare for more of it in the future than may be practical for you today, is to use SOA and ESBs.

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This article series introduces an automatic deployment toolkit (Automatic-DT), which helps infrastructure architects install and configure deployment nodes with IBM software installed and configured automatically. It also helps testers or developers refresh builds in their daily tests or integration life cycle. This first article in the series gives you an overview of Automatic-DT.

This session is a Open Mic session and is not a web conference but rather a Q&A session. Some of the different country's phone numbers are below but not all so please refer to the link listed in the "Presentation URL" to access all conference call information for your specific country.

The WebSphere® Message Broker Toolkit contains a native Mapping node "drap and drop" interface for specifying message transformations. This talk covers SupportPac IA9Y, which provides a plugin wizard for the Toolkit to convert Mapping node message map files into ESQL code.

The WebSphere® MQ product Add-on provided a series of data collectors that guides the user to collect information regarding the MQ instance, based on the Must gather technote. It guides the user through a series of steps to collect logs and queue manager information and uploads collection to Ecurep.

Data Conversion issues for WebSphere MQ on various platforms, iSeries, z/OS, VSE, Unix and Windows

Topics covered will include garbage collector(gc) concepts, various gc policies and analysis of verbose gc output. Review some of the IBM tools that are available for debugging. This presentation will be limited to IBM® Java™ on AIX, Linux and Windows®.

Service Integration Bus Messagine Engine Startup Problems and Solutions: How to identify a proper Messaging Engine startup and common Messaging Engine startup failures. Solutions to common startup failures will also be presented.

Topics include garbage collection(gc) analysis and tuning with respect to SUN java. Review differences that exist between SUN and HP. Provide an overview of the memory management of the Java™ heap. Discuss various gc parameters and appropriate tuning recommendations.