Disclaimer

You’ll notice there’s a hot new disclaimer added to the website, in the top left corner. For some reason, I just feel the need to re-iterate that this blog is Dan’s thoughts about that topics that Dan deals with on a day to day basis. They could be right, wrong, biased or a combination of […]

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Planned IBM Certification Tests

Just thought I’d outline my current thinking towards which tests I’m going to prepare to write at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference 2008: 284 – IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances Firmware V3.6.0 093 – IBM WebSphere Process Server V6.0, System Administration 252/253 – IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V6.0/V6.1 Core Administration 664 – SOA […]

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Exploring The Contents of a WID Module Project

You are a developer in WID, you play around in your candy UI all day creating integrations. One day, you switch into the Resource Perspective and you are exposed to files and extensions that you’ve never seen before. What are they? How does it all hang together? Read on! In the root of your module […]

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Request for Questions & Comments

One of the benefits of having this blog is that I can see the search terms visitors are using in google to get here. Search terms include ““event sequencing” lock“, “com.ibm.wbiserver.manualrecovery api“, “fault handling websphere” etc. I actually do have more information on all those topics. It’s just a matter of being able to prioritize […]

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Addenddum to DataPower Parallel Invocation Support

Thanks to ‘the internet’ for letting me know that in the 3.6.1 revision of the firmware, DataPower can now invoke multiple endpoints in parallel. It introduces a new syncpoint action that will allow you to wait for the responses to come in. I’m still giddy about the prospect of an integration ‘server/appliance’ that actually introduces […]

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SIBus Explorer

Service Integration Bus Explorer is tool provided by IBM that allows you to browse the queues on your WebSphere Application Service. You can see individual messages, internal queues, clear queue points etc. The path to get this information requires so many clicks, that SIBus Explorer will quickly become an indispensable tool. There is a similar […]

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WebSphere DataPower vs WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

Yesterday, I blathered on about how great DataPower would be for usage in WebSphere Process Server. Your developer would be able to stay completely inside the Generic Business Object (GBO) data view while leveraging DataPower’s awesome ability to transform efficiently. Very neat indeed. An interesting is scenario where DataPower IS the ESB. No WebSphere Process […]

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Exploring IBM SOA Technology and Practice reviewed by Don Ferguson

Bobby Woolf posted on his blog that his book”Exploring IBM SOA Technology and Practice” was reviewed on Amazon by none-other-than ex-IBMer and ‘Father of WebSphere’ Don Ferguson. I have to send my congrats to Bobby. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his sessions at last years WebSphere Services Technical Conference and […]

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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.

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Interop between BOXMLSerializer and JMSDataBindingImplXML

I stumbled onto a technote about the interoperablility between the way XML is serialized by the BOXMLSerializer and the  format expected by JMSDataBindingImplXML. This is a concern if you serialize data from a business object and then put that data into a JMS Text message and choose ‘Text Message with DataObject Binding’ in the export. […]

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DataPower – Proxy & Co-Processing

I’ve started reading up on DataPower in anticipation of writing the certification test in May (At the WebSphere Services Technical Conference 2008). Two of the usage scenarios that have caught my interest are ‘Proxy’ and ‘Co-processor’. In Proxy, DataPower acts as proxy to your web service . The scenario given is a website that uses […]

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Business Integration Software Bakeoff Idea

In my random browsing of the internet, I came across Wikipedia’s comparison of Business Integration Software. I’m so WebSphere focused that I didn’t even know there were this many companies out there with “ESB” products (34). It sparked an idea in my head, I wonder what it would be like to bake-off all these solutions […]

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Asynchronous SCA One-Way Operations And How To Recover

From DeveloperWorks, comes the succinctly titled: <deep breath> Recovering from failed asynchronous SCA service invocations on WebSphere Process Server article Imagine this common scenario. You have a mission-critical Service Component Architecture (SCA) application running on IBM® WebSphere® Process Server. A message is sent to this application to invoke an asynchronous service, however, service invocation fails. […]

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How to emit a Common Base Event in Java

A quick tip on how to emit a CBE. I usually put this block of code into a utility java project and add it to my module’s dependency editor so I can emit events in my modules. ECSEmitter emitter = new ECSEmitter(“com/ibm/events/configuration/emitter/Default”, null); // create common base event eventCommonBaseEvent cbe = emitter.createCommonBaseEvent(null); // Work your […]

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JMS Function Selectors & Method Bindings

JMS Function Selectors and Method bindings are properties that you define inside of an SCA JMS component that answer the question “Which {component,interface} pair should a message arriving on a queue be delivered to?”. I had intended to go and write up in lay-mans terms what it all meant, but luckily (for me) I stumbled […]

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Console – Removing Auto-Focus & Output Line Limit

Cheers to David Currie for pointing out how to disable the focus grabbing ability of the console view in WID (and Eclipse). I’d just like to add that in the property page where you turn off the auto-focus, you can also either disable or greatly increase the size of the scroll back buffer. I usually […]

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Rational Performance Tester provides refreshing honesty

I’ve been on a small kick about performance testing/administration and I was directed to the Rational Performance Tester. It sounds like it would be a nice tool to use to tune systems, until I read the first bullet point: I mean damn.. No code testing, no point and click wizards, no report readability, no usability […]

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IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA (ITCAM)

My background to Business Integration and SOA has come from the ‘top-down’. I was a UI developer for Message Broker’s Flow user interface. Next I was the build guy for WebSphere Application Developer Integration Edition. After that I was again a UI developer for the Integration Test Client in WebSphere Integration Developer. I moved over […]

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Getting Started with IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric V6.1

Draft Redbook, last updated: Tue, 11 Mar 2008

– Discover the value of composite business applications
– Model, assemble, and deploy Fabric solutions
– Learn by example with practical scenarios

WebSphere Business Services Fabric (Fabric) is a comprehensive SOA offering that is designed to extend IBM’s business process management platform to deliver flexible composite business applications.

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Project Zero – Introduction

Project Zero is: ..about agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and running applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and […]

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Event Sequencing Message Locking – Resolution!

In a previous post, I discussed the DeveloperWorks Process Server Endurance article. In that article, they ran into a situation where the number of maxMessages was breached (100 by default). At my client site, we had a situation where messages in an Event Sequenced queue would remain locked forever, causing the maxMessages to be breached. […]

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IBM and Naming Conventions – Humor

IBM is a highly acronym-ized environment, so it doesn’t surprise me that sometimes things like this slip through the cracks. I was alerted by a colleague as to a new editor for Lotus Quickr services for WebSphere Portal.. Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you the FCKEditor Now, for anyone who has ever used an […]

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IBM Impact 2008 Attendance

It turns out that due to a weird twist of fate, I may be in attendance (and presenting) in Vegas for Impact 2008. Impact is: (an) annual conference on SOA and WebSphere offers unparalleled technical education about SOA and IBM thought leadership for LOBs, CIOs and practical application for users. From IT practitioners to senior […]

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What’s new in WebSphere Message Broker V6.1

This article introduces the major enhancements WebSphere Message Broker V6.1, and provides references to related resources, and describes technical aspects of V6.1 that are of interest to
architects, message flow designers, and developers. Readers should have some knowledge of WebSphere Message Broker concepts and features.

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The WebSphere Exception Trace: Deconstructed

If you’ve worked developing an application for more than five minutes, chances are that you’ve encounter a big long exception trace. The best thing to do is try to look at the very top for a non-generic exception that relates to your problem. This article will attempt to describe exactly what happened via the information […]

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