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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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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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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From DeveloperWorks: Configuring IBM WebSphere Process Server V6.1 with an Oracle Database

Redpaper, published: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 This IBM® Redpaper publication explains how to configure IBM WebSphere® Process Server V6.1 to work with an Oracle® database.

There's always a thin amount of documentation on integrating IBM products with non-DB2 databases. Here is a redpaper on using Oracle for WebSphere Process Server.

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From DeveloperWorks, WebSphere InterChange Server migration to WebSphere Process Server

Draft Redbook, last updated: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 - Migration of WebSphere InterChange Server and WBI Adapters - Architectural usage patterns and migration planning - Migration tools, technical examples and scenarios IBM® WebSphere® Process Server is the next generation business process integration server that has evolved from proven business integration concepts, application server technologies, and the latest open standards.

WICS was the precursor product to WebSphere Process Server. I know there are still a lot of WICS users out there looking to migrate.

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From DeveloperWorks, Adding custom roles in WebSphere Business Services Fabric

Learn how you can add custom roles to the base WebSphere Business Services Fabric V6.1 Business Service Model using Rational Software Architect and the Fabric modeling tool. Once you add these roles, you can build policies and assertions around them.

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From DeveloperWorks, Make SOA real with IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances, Part 1: Use WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus for protocol switching of encrypted data And Make SOA real with IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances, Part 2: Use WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances extension functions for certificate-based XML standard encryption

Looking for a way to manage the interoperability among applications using different protocols that need to exchange confidential data? Consider combining the functionality of IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances. Find out how you can get a secure, agile, and extendible solution with a little effort in terms of code.

I'd say that if you happen to have both of these products, you are better of attempting to offload most of the logic to the datapower box and use the ESB for business functionality.

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From IBM Redbooks, IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances Part II: Authentication and Authorization

Redpaper, published: Tue, 1 Apr 2008

• Integrate IBM Tivoli Access Manager with your DataPower appliance
• Implement enterprise security and identity management
• Configure authentication and authorization using LDAP

IBM® WebSphere® DataPower® SOA Appliances represent an important element in the holistic approach of IBM to service-oriented architecture (SOA).

This is the second of four Redbooks available about DataPower. This one focuses on Authentication and Authorization which are amongst the top reasons for purchasing the box.

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From DeveloperWorks, Developing integration solutions with WebSphere Process Server relationships

The Relationship Service in IBM WebSphere Process Server is an infrastructure service that is well integrated with other transformation components. It includes a comprehensive administrative interface that you can use to easily implement complex integration scenarios without custom development of cross-referencing logic mixed in with your business logic. This article introduces the capabilities of the WebSphere Process Server Relationship Service, including those new in V6.1, and explains when and how to use these capabilities. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

To be honest, I've never used the relationship runtime and I haven't encountered a client who has either. I just get the feeling that is has a lot of 'moving parts' so little use that recommending it would result in more problem reports than the functionality is worth.

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From Developerworks, BPEL or ESB: Which should you use?

When designing an SOA solution, it's not always clear whether you should use a Web services BPEL process or an ESB mediation flow. This article describes considerations that will help you decide which is right for you.

In v6.0.x, this is an easy question to answer: BPEL always. WebSphere ESB is only simple and straightforward when involving a transformation from a single source to a single target. Anything more than that and you'll create a Frankenstein that will puzzle support people for years. It uses a non-intuitive XSLT editor and the mittens are tight enough that you'll land up putting custom java code everywhere. In v6.1, as we saw in the 'Whats new' articles for both products there a lot of flow related constructs that have been 'pushed down' into WebSphere ESB. I do have a few issues with this article though. Under the section about ESB strengths is the following statement:

Another strength of an ESB is performance. An ESB is designed to be able to handle large volumes of messages. If, for example, the requirements say that there will be 200,000 messages per day, the ESB would clearly be the better choice.

Now. A WPS Module and a WESB Mediation Module are very similar constructs. Both of them use the SCA runtime to execute their code, they both get packaged as utility ears on generated EJB projects, they both leverage the underlying abilities of WAS (SIBus, Transactionality etc). The only real difference between them is the usage of a Mediation Flow component vs a BPEL Flow and I don't think the performance differential between the two is significantly large. They share so much code in common and must spend so much time performing common tasks, yet there's always this implication that Mediation Flows are magically faster. With the introduction of these flow-like constructs to mediation flows, the performance benefit of Mediation Flows must be closer to the performance of BPEL. They are both pretty much doing the same workload. I would severely discount performance as a reason for choosing one over the other. I guess the other thing I don't like about the article is that it kind of cops out on WESB entirely by lumping Message Broker in the same category. Message broker is severely expensive and does its job extremely well and has been for years but when someone talks about 'BPEL vs ESB', they are usually referring to WESB. The bullet points that make the ESB case sound so great are actually message broker features. So whats my point? I guess that even in the v6.1 product my point of view on deciding which to use will still be: "Lets do it in a Process Server Module." unless my use case is ultra-trivial (or the customer simply doesn't have Process Server). As a customer, why would I want to learn two different runtime components when they are probably pretty equivalent in performance? Build the skill the in process server, the superset.

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From DeveloperWorks, What's new in IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6.1

Check out the latest features introduced into IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6.1 and its associated tooling, IBM WebSphere Integration Developer. This article describes the transport protocol binding, data bindings, and administrative and mediation support. You should have basic knowledge of the features and functions of previous versions of WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus to follow along with this article.

For my money the top new features are:

1. Enhanced custom mediation support: Custom Mediations can have n input terminals and n output terminals.
2. Business Object Mapping runtime added: Thank you! I never understood why something as fundamental as BO Maps weren't available in mediation flows.
3. The XSLT mapping editor has been updated: See you later crummy old XSLT editor and hello new XSLT editor that behaves like the Business Object mapper from process server modules.
4. Service Invoke primitive: No more abusing 'custom mediations' to actually do service invocation. We've got our own primitive.
5. Fan Out and Fan In mediation primitives. Oh my, looks like we've got more process choreography primitves in this release. In 6.0.2 you could only execute one path from start to finish. With these primitives you can finally perform multiple.

In Summary, it looks like the line between when to choose a mediation module vs a process server module is thinning. With a mediation module in v6.1 I have yet another full suite of primitives I can use to author complicated composite business services. I noticed that theres no mention in the article about performance improvements. Lets hope that it's just a tool-centric article and not an 'admission via exclusion' that things haven't gotten better. I'm glad to see this functionality included, it was sorely missed. There were a ton of scenarios I encountered in the field where the v6.0.2 mediation module made no sense (or worse, allowed you to author a mediation with no errors that couldn't run). It's good to see that IBM realized that too.

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From Developerworks, "Building clustered topologies in WebSphere Process Server V6.1"

Learn to use WebSphere Process Server V6.1 to create a clustered "Gold" topology using a template-driven approach. This article shows you how to create the cell and federate two empty nodes to it, create a deployment environment, which is a template for the clustered topology, and test the topology.

A good step-by-step resource to have on-hand if you are ever put in the situation where you need to create a cluster.

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From IBM Redbooks, Techniques for managing large WebSphere Installations:

Redbook, published: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 - High availability manager and core groups - Tuning recommendations - Configuration best practices As WebSphere Application Server installations grow to accommodate the growth of business processing, the question "How large can a WebSphere Application Server cell be?" is being asked more often.

If you ever find yourself in a large WebSphere installation, this Red book is for you. It's also good if you ever want to know all the communication that goes on between the various components of a cluster.

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From DeveloperWorks, Map Web services with WebSphere Integration Developer

Learn how you can use WebSphere Integration Developer to create an interface mapping between two Web services, then test the mapping with WebSphere Process Server. This article also describes how to use the Service Data Objects (SDO) model to manipulate data objects.

A simple article outlining how to use the mapping functionality in WID.

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From IBM Redbooks: IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances Part I.

Draft Redpaper, last updated: Mon, 10 Mar 2008

- Understand and effectively deploy DataPower SOA appliances
- Parse and transform binary, flat text, and XML messages
- Learn how to extend your SOA infrastructure

IBM® WebSphere® DataPower SOA Appliances represent an important element in IBM's holistic approach to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

DataPower is an interesting product. It's basically a network device that's really really good at transforming XML messages using XSLT. The marketing-speak says that it does it "At Wire Speed" (aka really really fast). Now you may wonder why you would need this box when WebSphere Process Server can transform messages itself. The devil is in the details about the hardware. In order to transform an XML message, theres a ton of work needed by your server to convert the structure into java and then run the transformation engine etc. Why use your expensive server hardware for such a trivial task? Offload that work onto an appliance designed for just that task and use your process server for the actual business integration that you bought it for.

One thing I hear about DataPower is that it's a very expensive product. What most people miss though, is that it allows you to buy a less powerful server in exchange. You interact with the box via SOAP/HTTP calls which allow the transformation to be used by any application, not just process server. I also hear of it being used a lot in conjunction with WS-Security, allowing the box to put the appropriate headers onto the messages in a "pass-through" manner.

Yet another goal of mine this year (actually by May 2008) is to do more learning about DataPower and how to get the box to work its magic. I plan on writing the certification test at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference 2008 in Vegas.

This Redpaper is actually the first in a series of four that are scheduled to come out this year.

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