Since I’m extremely pro-Datapower, I felt it would be an effective use of time to attend and maybe it’ll push me over the top on my certification.

I found a link about the features on the IBM Support site.

• Multistep v3 processing: Mediations.
• Configurable QoS
• SOAP 1.2
• Reliable Messaging
• WS-Policy
• WS-I Profile enhancements
• Db2 v9 and IMS Connect – interesting that the datapower line continues to add adapte-like functionality.

The DataPower box is starting to look like a competitor to BPEL with the following features:

• Conditionals and For-Each loops.
• Parallel processing – Event Sinks and Asynchronous actions.

I notice that we still don’t see any form of XA transaction support which is surprising. It seems like datapower is still treating its transactions as loggable and discardable which means you have to do all that handling elsewhere.

Quality of Service

Ability to set the priority at a basic “high, normal, low” on the operation to allow datapower to decide which operation is more discard-able than the others.

Reliable Messaging

This support has been added. I don’t know much about WS-ReliableMessaging but it sounds great to not have to stick explicit queues into solutions to leverage the reliability of JMS. Let the server do it.

WS-Policy/WS-Security Policy

Again, I’m not down with the latest WS-* specifications, but the presenter was very excited by DataPower’s support. Apparently you can retrieve wsdl’s from WebSphere Service Registry and Repository as well.

Databases

Support for DB2 v9, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server databases.

WSDM

Never heard of this ever. DataPower does it and I’m sure they’re running to update the certification test to ask questions about it.

MQ Support

Huge benchmark improvements for MQ in 3.6.1 as compared to 3.6.0. 30% faster.

Configuration Comparison

When uploading new configurations you will be able to see what has changed on the server.

IMS Proxy

Natively connect to IMS connect and can also act as a server.

Cool stuff indeed.