AlbeesOnline: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

April 28th, 2009 dan Posted in WebSphere Community, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

AlbeesOnline has posted a great article showing how difficult integration projects can be when you need to work with teams spread across an organization. A relatively straightforward project turns into a Frankenstein of text files and workarounds. It also shows the reason why projects have meetings that involve 20-30 people five times a week, you miss a department and they’ll pop up out of nowhere and tell you what you are doing is impossible.

I have to admit that I die a little inside when I hear of projects that have to switch from clean-elegant solutions to crazily complicated ones to work around corporate policies. The customer gets the final solution and wonders why the heck they bothered with an integration platform in the first place. It’s depressing.

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Fifteen common Websphere Partner Gateway problems and how to solve them

March 30th, 2009 syndication Posted in Uncategorized, WebSphere News No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, Fifteen common Websphere Partner Gateway problems and how to solve them
Websphere Partner Gateway enables companies to connect large groups of trading partners to their businesses and extend internal integration outside the enterprise. This article discusses 15 common problems that can occur during Partner Gateway operations and their solutions.
While I don't use WebSphere Partner Gateway, I really like this article for the way that it presents a single location to solve a bunch of common problems.

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WebSphere Process Server operational architecture: Part 1: Base architecture and infrastructure components

February 4th, 2009 syndication Posted in DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Process Server operational architecture: Part 1: Base architecture and infrastructure components
Part 1 of this two-part article series dives deeply into the operational architecture of IBM WebSphere Process Server. This article introduces you to concepts, such as Service Component Architecture (SCA), Business Process Choreographer (BPC) and Service Integration Bus (SIB) in the context of WebSphere Process Server, and shows you how they work together to build a secure transactional runtime environment for your SOA. In this respect, you will be able to better articulate the technical architecture of WebSphere Process Server, which will improve your ability to operate WebSphere Process Server in your organization..
Theres always a desire to understand the architecture and implementation of complicated software that makes your life 'easier'. This is a great article that delves into the layers that compose Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer.

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The top 10 questions you always wanted to ask about WebSphere Business Modeler

December 9th, 2008 syndication Posted in DeveloperWorks, Other Business Integration Products, Syndication No Comments »

From Developerworks, The top 10 questions you always wanted to ask about WebSphere Business Modeler
WebSphere Business Modeler expert Marc Fasbinder answers the ten most commonly asked questions about Modeler.
If you are a practitioner on WebSphere Business Modeler, this is the article for you.

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Is SOA Dead? – Webinar hosted by the WebSphere User Group

December 1st, 2008 dan Posted in Service Oriented Architecture, WebSphere Community No Comments »

Well I sure hope not but the Global WebSphere Community is holding a one hour chat on the subject:
begin a

Session dates: Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Starting time: 3:00 pm, GMT -05:00, Eastern Standard Time (New York)

Many organizations have started down the path of SOA, only to find that reality is more challenging than the hype. Businesses need to see ROI, and IT professionals have a hard time staying on the theoretical course. So, how are we going forward?

In this web-event, we will focus on the current problems around SOA, suggest successful strategies towards attaining SOA benefits and discuss how you can be the catalyst for improving IT and Business-IT alignment: essentially, making SOA work in the here and now.

Our main topic will be SOA governance: coordination, ownership, right-to-decide and versioning of services are all critical factors in SOA. Other topics will include: service lifecycles, portfolio management and an SOA maturity model.

The content of this event is based in part on the book “SOA for Profit, a Manager’s Guide to Success with Service Oriented Architecture”. After the event, we will send attendees an electronic copy of this book.

I don’t think SOA is dead by any means, but I do think that it can expose communication gaps that exist in companies which lead to the delays and corner cutting that hurt SOA implementation. If your company doesn’t really work together well between Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Developers and Administrators, you are going to have serious issues with any methodology you choose anyway. I think to be successful you have to breed a corporate attitude of the first impulse being “How can I help?” as opposed to “I’d like to help, but talk to my management chain first. Then we can schedule a pre-planning meeting about how we’re going to plan to……yadda…..”.

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WebSphere Process Server invocation styles

November 7th, 2008 dan Posted in DeveloperWorks, Reviews, Syndication, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Process Server invocation styles

As you author applications in WebSphere Integration Developer, you may find it necessary to set or verify the invocation style that one component will use to call another. Users are often surprised to find that this is not as easy a task as it may seem. This article explains how to determine which invocation style will be used at runtime, based on characteristics of your application.

Another article from my former colleagues (they’re been busy!). This one explains what interaction style an invocation will use between two component. This is important to understand for error handling and transaction boundary issues. Another must read.

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Error Handling in WebSphere Process Server: Developing an Error Handling Strategy

November 6th, 2008 dan Posted in DeveloperWorks, Reviews, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, Error handling in WebSphere Process Server, Part 1: Developing an error handling strategy

With the emergence of service oriented solutions, we’ve seen a sharp rise in developer productivity. Developers are empowered with a new found freedom of service construction and reuse. However, with this freedom comes an increased exposure to inconsistent service definitions. These inconsistencies expose weaknesses in error handling and system recovery across the solution. Along with the proper governance controls, IT organizations need to define and enforce the proper error handling strategies tailored for solution recovery. Part 1 of this article series introduces the topic of error handling strategies and highlights key concepts and objectives for developing a strategy

This is an article written by my former colleagues at IBM. It goes into depth about the part of your process that you likely left until the last moment: What to do when something goes wrong. I recommend it as required reading for any WebSphere Integration Developer user.

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Establish a policy-driven SOA using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and WebSphere ESB

October 9th, 2008 syndication Posted in DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, Establish a policy-driven SOA using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and WebSphere ESB
The WS-Policy specification provides a simple language for expressing policies supported by Web services. IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository supports loading, changing, and retrieving policy documents, and also supports using policy attachments to link a given policy with a service. This can then be used by a run time component, like an Enterprise Service Bus, to retrieve defined policies for a particular service or operation and act accordingly. This article shows how you can utilize standard WS-Policy documents stored in a registry to impact run time behavior in an ESB -- and then change that behavior on the fly with no code changes or redeployment. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)
An example of invoking WSRR API from a WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus medation module to use WS-Policy.

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Feature Request: Product Exceptions should include a Hyperlink to a Wiki

October 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Business Integration, WebSphere Community 2 Comments »

One of the biggest pain points in any IBM product are the non-sensical error messages that are generated by the products when something goes wrong. The exception itself usually doesn’t provide much of a clue as to the root cause of the issue. To proceed you either need to be an expert in reading stack traces, you open a PMR with IBM (a lengthy process) or you pop the exception message into google and hope that you hit something (like say the awesome danzrobok.com ;-) ).

What I’d like to see is IBM take control of this information about explaining in greater detail how an exception can occur and likely resolutions. I’d also take this one step farther and take this information from the infocenter (where it starts out as a shell) and populate it in a wiki format. The wiki would allow people who experienced the exception to describe how it occured, attach project interchange files and create discussions based around specific errors.

When resolutions are discovered, they can be updated directly into this central location for information about this exception, aiding future users. This solution would decrease the number of support calls that IBM recieves and it empowers the users of the product to resolve their own issues. Win – Win.

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Asynchronous replication of WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus for disaster recovery environments

October 2nd, 2008 syndication Posted in DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, Asynchronous replication of WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus for disaster recovery environments
This article describes an environment that is based on using a disk replication system in asynchronous mode. You can include this environment in a disaster recovery plan that includes a secondary data center using IBM WebSphere Process Server or WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.
A serious concern if you are using WebSphere Process Server for mission critical-must-continue-to-run applications. It deals with the question of how to implement a disaster recovery solution that spans physical remote sites.

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Managing tasks and business processes using WebSphere Business Space

October 1st, 2008 syndication Posted in Syndication, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, Managing tasks and business processes using WebSphere Business Space
Learn how to create WebSphere BPM V6.1.2 Business Space dashboards using the run-time artifacts from the WebSphere BPM V6.1.1 Clips and Tacks tutorial. You'll create a business space to manage the tasks and business forms input, run some processes that use forms, and finally create a business space you can use to monitor the process and tasks.
An example of what a 'Business Space' is.

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What’s new in WebSphere Application Server V7

October 1st, 2008 syndication Posted in DeveloperWorks, WebSphere Application Server No Comments »

From DeveloperWorks, What's new in WebSphere Application Server V7
IBM WebSphere Application Server V7 has powerful new features and dramatic enhancements to help you achieve heightened productivity, stronger security, tighter integration, and simplified administration. Find out about some of the new key features that enable this new release to provide a flexible and reliable foundation for your service-oriented architecture.

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ICTY Toronto 2008: Lower Operational Costs and Improving Quality of Service Using Application Virtualization

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008 1 Comment »

This presentation was subtitled: Accelerate Business agility and cost savings with websphere virtual enterprise.

THis address the question, “How can you minimize the amount of ‘whitespace’ (deadspace) on machines when typical infastructure relys on being able to process peak performance”. Can we instead somehow provision for average performance and leverage more machines when the peak occurs?”

Top Trends for next 3 years “Green IT” (use less resources) and” Virtualization 2.0″( dynamic infastructure based on demand).

Application infastructure virtualization: Create ‘one big appserver’ that can handle demand.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise is the IBM solution for this issue – Lower TCA, Increase flexibility, Better manage health & performance.

The product does this via service policies, it appears this is configuration done in the websphere administration console-likeuser interface.

Can introduce a concept of Chargeback – Bill each department for application utilization of the application server pool.

Not just for WebSphere, also works for WebSphere CE and Tomcat.

Virtualize the application server AND the hardware on top of each other.

End Notes, Begin Opinion. 

I found it weird that this product was discussed in a one-day Impact Comes To You event. The session with Martin discussed how people need to stop selling SOA as an IT initiative but rather a business value one. The next session we get is how to micromanage your servers, an extremely IT focused presentation.  I did find this session interesting in the quest to get a java JVM to be five 9’s in the real world but it’s not exactly the best topic for a one hour session during a tight one day conference.

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Developerworks SOA Best Practices and Top 10 SOA and Web services tutorials and articles

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in DeveloperWorks No Comments »

IBM Developerworks has a nice clean looking site for SOA best practices, pulling in various content from all over the place. It’s worth checking out.

It led me to an interesting link, Top 10 SOA and Web services tutorials and articles. Its interesting to see what the most popular tutorials and articles are on developerworks. They’re pretty basic but #1 does include my favorite link to ‘Which Style of WSDL should I use?.

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ICTY Toronto 2008: A Smart SOA Approach in Any Economic Climate

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Project Zero No Comments »

This session was delivered by Martin Wildberger, IBM VP and Director of the Toronto Software Lab.

This session was attended by around 70 people, a pretty large turnout for one of these all-day events.

Martin asked the crowd if they were from the line of business side or the IT side. I didn’t see a single hand raised for the LOB, so as expected most people in the crowd are interested in SOA from an IT perspective.

There was a slide about comments from Gartner regarding “Don’t postpone SOA…. Reprioritize your road map”

  1. “… [prioritize] projects that will turn an ROI faster”
  2. “…address lower-cost projects sooner”
  3. “Choose SOA projects were reuse of established systems is prevalent”

This is a great heuristic to determine SOA project candidacy and prioritization.

Martin went through a set of slides about the success of SOA at various companies and the capabilities that can be leveraged to increase ROI.

WebSphere sMash was also brought up as an integral product to the story.

Also, this is a slide that I’ve seen so many times, I wish someone would redesign it in a new color:

Avoid the notion of explaining SOA in terms of IT. Explain it in terms of business value, agility.

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