From DeveloperWorks, What’s new in WebSphere Integration Developer V6.2

New enhancements to IBM® WebSphere® Integration Developer V6.2 support the latest features and standards provided by WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB V6.2. … You’ll learn about the solution view, editor enhancements, and services gateway pattern support, and be introduced to new features like business calendars and support for the Web Services Feature Pack. You’ll also learn about improved testing and problem determination, along with enhancements for migration

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the holiday season because it means that we’re getting new versions of WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer! I’ll go through the list of features:

WebSphere Business Modeler interaction

I’m not sure what to make of this feature. One of the new parts that I’m sure IBM will be pushing is the ability in Modeler 6.2 ‘Design to Deploy’.

WebSphere Process Server V6.2 enables a new direct deploy scenario, where users of WebSphere Business Modeler can directly deploy modules into the WebSphere Process Server runtime.

I believe this feature is more for testing, but I really have to play with it more. Without more investigation, deploying an application from a business analyst perspective into a technical server like WebSphere Process Server sounds weird. As more people use Modeler to deploy, will it just become WebSphere Integration Developer, just with an even more candy UI?

Solution view

Woo hoo! It’s about time. You can finally have some kind of visualization of your entire solution and the interactions between modules! No more visio (or if you are like me, MS Paint) diagrams and manually ensuring the interactions are correct.

Process editor Improvements

There is finally an ability to use Business Object maps directly in a BPEL. No more visual snippets!

Human task editor Improvements

the option to bind a participating human task to the process lifecycle

Finally, your human tasks can terminate if your instantiating business process dies. And finally,there’s an editor for those insane BPEL/Human Task variables.

Assembly editor enhancements

Don’t you worry, it’s been made prettier 🙂 More importantly, the WebSphere Web Services Features Pack is now supported. It’s also got policy set support for all you guys that want to do your WSReliableMessaging.

You can define new policy sets through the administrative console, export into an XML file, then import into WebSphere Integration Developer.

Blech.

Mediation Flow Editor

Performance is improved by eliminating the hop between modules, improving efficiency

Hmm, I wonder what this actually means? I know that the SCA.SYSTEM bus creates an ungodly amount of queues for an application, I wonder if someone finally looked at this to minimize them?

Support for Services Gateway pattern

This is very interesting. It appears that WID v6.2 now is starting to support patterns and wizards to create these patterns.

Other editor enhancements

Versioning! You can now version all components in your assembly diagram.

I also see a ton of new features added to the Integration Test Client that sound very exciting.

Conclusion

All-in-all, it looks like a good release on paper. Of course, what really matters is how it behaves when you are using it. The progression of WebSphere Integration Developer from 6.0 -> 6.0.1 -> 6.0.2 -> 6.1 -> 6.2 has been very good so I have faith that this will be another large step in the right direction.