Zero

When I got back from the WebSphere Services Technical Conference in April, I posted about the level of interest in simplified development, Web Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0.

Yesterday, Project Zero emerged.

We’re talking REST, PHP, Groovy and mashups.

Come and take a look. For full details, read the FAQ and follow the blog. Then, download the code and join the community.

Technorati tags: Zero, Project Zero, IBM, PHP, Groovy, mashup, web 2.0, community driven commercial development

WSTC – all Jazzed up

For the final morning of the conference, I attended a talk on Jazz by Scott Rich. It was another talk with a live demo – very cool to see the technology actually running.

Jazz is an extensible and scalable collaboration platform for the development cycle. It has a client/server architecture and runs on either an open source stack of Tomcat + Derby + Jabber, or an IBM one (potentially others I suppose, but that’s sheer speculation).

Several announcements were made around the middle of last year, and the Jazz site is out there in the open. There was some information about it at the RSDC talks last year. You’ll find analysts talking about it already.

The demo was extremely neat. Again, this is building REST, RSS/Atom, a rich web UI (as well as the Eclipse one) into the platform. I can’t say too much at this stage, but it would be worth getting involved in the Jazz community site if you want to know more.

Do I sound excited about it? It looked great. I can’t wait to see this start to appear in the open.

Technorati Tags: Eclipse, IBM, Jazz, development, Rational, WebSphere, wstc, wstc2007

Coming up: new stuff for WMB

We just announced some goodness around WebSphere Message Broker. In particular, there’s a set of ease-of-use enhancements to the toolkit and some new functionality for Web Services.

It all looks very exciting indeed. Should arrive just in time for Christmas

In the meantime, take a look at all this other stuff:

• There are new SOAP nodes available in SupportPac IA9O, which will work with the new function in the toolkit.
• A new version of the WMB Administrator Eclipse plugin is available.
• SupportPac MR01 describes how to setup an HA Link from WMQ to the WebSphere SIBus.
• Check the new RedPaper on SSL with WMQ and WMB.

Technorati tags: WebSphere, Broker, WebSphere Message Broker, WMB, WMQ, SupportPac, SSL, IBM, Redbook, SIBus, Eclipse

New Broker and MQ Administration tooling!

Very exciting news.

SupportPac IS02 was released today. From the text description, you might be lulled into suspecting that this is just another Eclipse plugin for MQ Explorer. In fact, this is a very cool extension that enables WebSphere Message Broker resources (brokers etc.) to be managed directly alongside your queue managers. It also means that WMB administrators no longer need to install the full Message Brokers Toolkit if all they want to do is perform basic administration tasks such as BAR file deployment, create/start/stop brokers, etc..

Congratulations to the development team. I got to take an early look at this in the lab, so I’m really keen to show it to our customers.

I’d post a screenshot but I don’t have the bandwidth to upload one at the moment. Watch this space.

Software updates for the WebSphere family

Two important updates that are worth mentioning:

• WebSphere Message Broker version 6, fixpack 6.0.0.1. Check out the release notes.
• WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, version 1.0.1.0. The list of new features includes web-tier clustering, simplified deployment, and improved portability to other members of the WebSphere Application Server family.

Technorati tags: IBM WebSphere WASCE Message Broker WMB fixpack

More news in brief

Random interesting things from around the web that I've been looking at this week:

• Doug Tidwell on Eclipse
• Using Eclipse for building UNIX applications
• Migrating from Outlook Express to Lotus Notes
• DB2 on Linux HOWTO
• The $39 experiment

Technorati tags: IBM Notes Eclipse DB2 Lotus

The end of SWT? Mustang kicks back

One of the big annoyances I always had with Java was how bad rich client / desktop applications looked. They can be ugly, and even with Swing, the look and feel often never quite matched the native desktop… this was particularly true on Linux, and I was also disappointed with the lack of antialiased (smoothed) fonts for Swing GUIs on Windows until recently.

Ensode.net has some screenshots of the new GTK look and feel that is due to come along in Mustang (aka Java 1.6), and it does seem that it is likely to be a much better match for my Linux GNOME desktop.

Of course, this isn't enough to sway me away from SWT, which always looks completely native, and as a programming framework it gets richer by the day. developerWorks has an article comparing AWT, Swing and SWT, and a tutorial on how to migrate your applications from Swing to SWT.

WAS CE 1.0.0.1 – a good looking update

I just installed version 1.0.0.1 of WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, which is based on Apache Geronimo v 1.0

The admin console for this release has had a significant revamp, with some nice icons added to the GUI. It has some very useful functionality (I like the log viewer in particular).

Unfortunately (and foolishly) I ignored the warning not to install over the top of an existing installation, and pressed Next after the installer had told me to choose an alternative install path or uninstall first. As a result, I lost my existing server configuration. Fortunately, it was trivial to redeploy the sample JMS application I've been playing with:

C:\WebSphere\CE\bin> deploy --user [user] --password [pword] deploy ..\samples\jmssimple\sender.war

Sadly, I haven't had a chance to try out the Eclipse plugin yet… but this looks like a nice step forward.

Technorati tags: IBM Websphere WASCE geronimo Java

Database shootout

Following on from my posting about DB2 Express-C, I was very interested to read an article comparing Cloudscape/Derby with MySQL. Cloudscape is a slightly different product to both DB2 Express and MySQL, since it can be embedded inside your application and doesn't need any specific administration tools. The database is hidden from the user. This can be a huge advantage, depending on your application requirements.

For example, in WebSphere Message Broker version 6, the Configuration Manager now uses Cloudscape instead of DB2 to store its information. This means that it is easily portable (it now runs on all of the WMB supported platforms), and you don't need to install and use DB2 if you don't want it.

Take a look at Cloudscape, also known as Apache Derby, if you are interested in a lightweight embeddable database. If you need something a bit bigger and don't mind some administration, DB2 Express-C is worth a look.

Technorati tags: db2 database derby mysql IBM websphere broker

Java, Eclipse, SWT – a blog

I just discovered that Joe Winchester, of Eclipse Visual Editor project fame, has a blog. I shall have to follow it.

Extending WebSphere MQ Explorer

The new WebSphere MQ Explorer in WebSphere MQ version 6 is based on Eclipse 3.x, which makes it highly extensible. Dale Lane from IBM Hursley (author of at least two WMQ SupportPacs) has written a developerWorks article on writing tests in Java which can be used in WMQ Explorer.

Technorati tags: websphere mq ibm eclipse java

SOA and the IBM product stack

Tempted though I am to weigh in on the recent post by Rich Turner of Microsoft UK on the perceived differences in style between IBM and Microsoft, particularly in the consulting arena, Richard Brown seems to have it covered with his usual mix of good humour and sharp perception. Suffice to say that I believe Richard is absolutely right in saying that we don't all work for Global Services, and that MCS and IBM Software Services have very similar missions. I'll come back to this point later.

So instead I want to talk about the series of articles on The Register by Phil Howard of Bloor Research. The final entry in the series suggests that IBM has a problem with the SOA message – we just have too many products.

I heard this same statement from a customer earlier this week. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• Sure, we have a number of products which fit in across the whole swathe of an SOA. Let's talk about at a few of the development tools, for example: Rational Software Architect, Rational Application Developer, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Business Modeler. These are all based on the Eclipse platform (as are all of our tools), and provide functionality appropriate to their target audience: architect, J2EE developer, ESB integration developer, business analyst. The look-and-feel is consistent. If necessary they can be combined into a single workbench. What's so scary about that? You can choose the products you want, and combine them as you wish.
• IBM is strongly behind open standards, and we go out of our way to ensure that our products conform to agreed open standards wherever possible. We don't go around evangelising a rip-and-replace strategy. We know that many customers have a technology soup already, and there are heritage applications and platforms that aren't going to be going away any time soon. I've been with IBM for 4 years, working with our WebSphere integration products, and literally every day of my time with the company to date has been about applying our technology to integration problems that customers face. By following a strategy based on open standards, the ability of our products to interoperate with those from other vendors is greatly increased. Again, you can pick and choose what you need from our portfolio to fit in with the needs of your business.
• What if we just had a single, "uber-product" for SOA? How much sense would that make? It just isn't reasonable, surely? And just how "simple" would such a product be? What we have is a set of software products which cover the challenges which customers are likely to face as they set about building an SOA. I also believe that we have a consistent message and that each of our software brands makes its own strong contribution as part of the SOA strategy. You need a development tool? Look at the Rational brand. You want to look at collaboration? That's Lotus. Monitoring, security, systems management? Tivoli products. We have excellent coverage; it doesn't matter which point you want to start from, we can help you to deliver an SOA.

The final point raised by the piece is that one of the really key aspects of implementing an SOA is that of the cultural impact, which I think we can talk about in terms of governance. Phil Howard argues that since this is more a business issue than an IT issue, it is outside the domain of IBM Software Group. I agree with him up to a point; but this is where we dovetail neatly (I hope!) back into the point about IBM Software Services and IBM Global Services. IBM Software Group may not be able to cause a cultural change simply through the software that we release*, but as a Software Services consultant I certainly go out of my way to talk about the business impact of SOA. It simply isn't going to work if the business decides to build an ESB and then the IT development groups fail to use it – you miss out on the benefits. Strong leadership and governance is critical. As a consultant part of my role is to not only transfer technical skills to our customers, but also some of our experience and understanding of the cultural impact of SOA on both business and IT people.

* unless… we came up with some kind of mind-control software… interesting… I'll have to talk to the guys in the labs…

Technorati tags: SOA ESB websphere IBM rational tivoli lotus Eclipse