WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Redbooks

One of the products I’ve been becoming increasingly involved with as part of my work at Hursley has been WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Rather than redefine what the product is here, I’ll take a snippet from the WSRR FAQ:

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is a system for storing, accessing and managing information, commonly referred as service metadata, used in the selection, invocation, management, governance and reuse of services in a successful SOA. In other words, it is where you store information about services in your systems, or in other organizations’ systems, that you already use, plan to use, or want to be aware of.

The Registry and Repository is becoming increasingly central to many SOA deployments and is strongly integrated with several of IBM’s runtimes (including hooks with my long-term product specialisms, WebSphere MQ and Message Broker).

Version 7 of WSRR was announced at the start of October (more on this later in the week), but in the meantime it’s worth noting that a great set of Redbooks and Redpapers for the current 6.3 release have recently hit the publications website:

• Redbook: Service Lifecycle Governance with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Advanced Lifecycle Edition
• Redbook: Service Lifecycle Governance with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Message Broker
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with WebSphere DataPower
• Redpaper: Integrating WebSphere Service Registry and Repository with Tivoli Security Policy Manager

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to know many of the IBMers who worked on these books and papers personally, and I have to say that they are the absolute experts on the topics. I know I’ll be reaching for these publications when I need to know my way around specific topic areas.

WebSphere Message Broker for the win…

The very brilliant Martin Gale joined my team at work last week. I’ve known Martin for a few years now and we had a bit of a shared experience last year going through our professional certification at the same time. He’s an unbelievably clever and talented chap, and it’s a privilege to now be sharing an office with him… I’m hoping that some of his Master Inventiveness rubs off on me!

Whilst he gets settled in, I’ve had the opportunity to seed my own technology preferences into his mind… this week, he’s been playing around with my personal favourite, WebSphere Message Broker (WMB), whilst developing his own newly-acquired interest in WebSphere Business Events (WBE). He’ll be an expert in both by, oh, 10am tomorrow…

I was very pleased that Martin has enjoyed his Message Broker experience so far! I’ve been using and consulting with the product for many years now, so I know I’m regarded as a bit of a bigot in this area, but it’s a pleasure to see someone using the product for the first time!

NB @martinjgale stream is private, this screenshot used by permission

The secret of success? I believe that it’s the fact that the programming model and toolkit for Message Broker have seen steady improvement and evolution over a number of years – rather than having large chunks of the model revamped between releases. It really has steadily become a stronger and stronger product.

Anyway – victory! More converts needed

The future of enterprise collaboration

I have just finished talking to a group of university students who were invited to IBM Hursley today. I had about 15 minutes to discuss Enterprise Collaboration, and I used the time to take a quick tour through IBM’s size, diversity and organisation, and talked about how the way I operate has changed since I got engaged in blogging internally four years ago, and how I “broke through” the firewall.

Towards the beginning of the talk, I asked three questions to get some group discussion going, and asked the students to shout out some answers. Here’s a summary of the responses.

1. What kinds of tools do you think enterprises use to communicate internally today?
“Skype”, “online meetings”, “MSN” (email and phone came right at the end of the list)

2. What kinds of tools would you like to use in a work environment?
“Facebook”, “Skype”

3. Is it a good idea, or appropriate, to communicate and share through firewalls?
“It’s important, for networking”, “companies could have their own version of Facebook internally”

I didn’t seed any of these responses! Very interesting… I think I’d expected the answers to question 1 to be email, wiki, blog etc., but those are all old school (and possibly, irrelevant) as far as this group was concerned. I guess the outcome of this entirely unscientific survey will be old news to some people, but I found it fascinating.

Update 17th June:
Thanks for all the interest in this post! I should just reiterate that this is not new news – as @andysc said to me after the talk yesterday, the idea that “email is how I communicate with my parents” is as commonplace as the idea that some of us may have had that “snail mail is how we communicated with our grandparents”. The point here is about the expectation of speed of spread of technology within corporations. I found it a very interesting perspective, although I guess I’d half-expected some of the answers. I just hadn’t expected the “old tech” to be buried so far down in the consciousness. But then, when I left university, web browsers were just emerging and I had a desktop email client at home, but yet I suddenly found myself at work using a green-screen terminal emulator to access what was, to my mind at the time, a hideously hard-to-use mail system called MEMO which required the use of line-editing commands.

One other point, given my own interest in these two technology spaces – Andy C asks below about microblogging, and I certainly mentioned our use of these tools internally and externally, but it didn’t seem to be on the students’ radar; secondly, I spoke about attending meetings in virtual worlds and the relative effectiveness compared to a teleconference, but again that didn’t come up as an idea in the responses to the questions at the start. So it seems (again, based on a highly unscientific study of a limited pool of London MSc Management students) that the technologies that are “expected” in the enterprise are those that have reached widespread consumer adoption outside it.

Blue Fusion, the 2009 edition

One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).

This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).

So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.

There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.

Things I learned

1. Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
2. If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
3. Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).

A now, some notes just for my team…

Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:

• my home power monitoring
• my Twittering weather station
• IBM Smarter Planet
• Andy Stanford-Clark’s automated house
• Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).

And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.

One photo, eight views

Although the iPhone camera is not the best by a long shot (although the recent addition of the Clarifi has helped, in the case of close-ups anyway), it is still possible to do some interesting things with it. The App Store helps a lot here. There are one or two really handy applications for playing around with images – I actually have a whole page of them. I’m not going to list them all, but my top picks are probably Photogene, which is a small photo editing program for cropping and adjusting levels etc.; and CameraBag, which can apply a number of different processing effects to images either from the camera roll, or taken straight on the camera.

Consider the shots below – the first one is the original, and the others were all created with CameraBag.

     

For uploading I tend to use Tumble to post snapshots to my tumblelog, or FlickUp to get them up to Flickr.

In the office

Taken by Aaron Kim in Hursley today, shared on Twitpic. Click through for the non-thumbnail version, since I apparently can’t display the full image from Twitpic here on my site.

Features of note – Martin Packer wearing his zSeries Wordle t-shirt… Age of Conversation 2 on the desk… me wearing my Dogear Nation t-shirt

Office space

Although the new job officially starts next week, I now have a place to sit and I’m starting to get involved with activities for my new team. Kinda cool since I’ve not had a “regular” office for a while…

(taken with iPhone, edited with Photogene – thus the border which would be cooler if it had transparent edges, posted with WordPress app)

Time to make a change

It’s time to move on. Maybe there’s something in the air, since Roo left recently, and Dale has just written about his switch to new things.

A seven-year itch?

Almost exactly seven years ago, I was offered my current job with IBM. I left what used to be the Post Office IT Services, took a month off (during which I was supposed to visit New York and Washington… never happened, sadly), and then started consulting on WebSphere for what used to be IBM Software Group’s London Solutions Practice. When I joined the group I was young, single, and figured I could “do the consulting thing”. Looking back, I was a good techie but fairly green as a consultant… I think I’ve matured and improved!

I’m still in the same role today. Working in IBM Software Services for WebSphere (ISSW) has been an absolute blast. I’ve had the opportunity to develop my industry experience across a whole range of sectors: finance, media, manufacturing, retail, public sector; deepened and broadened my technical skills; mentored newcomers to our team; and watched the group – and indeed, IBM’s WebSphere brand and Software Group – develop and grow.

I’ve also had the pleasure and privilege of working with the most talented individuals I’ve ever come across. IBM Software Services is a truly great group. Some of the ideas that my colleagues have come up with have been completely mind-blowing (hint: the simple ones are always the best), and influence software architectures I’m seeing everywhere today. Maybe it isn’t all rocket science, but several people in my team actually could be rocket scientists, and in my opinion are simply geniuses. Thank you, everyone – it’s been an honour.

I’ve spent a total of eight or nine years learning IBM’s messaging products (particularly WebSphere MQ and Message Broker) in detail and they really are fantastic pieces of technology. I’m not going to be leaving those alone any time soon.

If you follow my blog or other online presences at all you’ll know that my interests go way beyond WebSphere, connectivity, transactions, integration and messaging systems – essentially, I’m into that stuff, but my passion extends out to the bleeding edge of technology, the frontiers of the enterprise and more fundamentally, how those in the real world – users – want to use and interact with technology and new concepts.

What’s next?

So, to borrow a phrase from Roo, what’s next? Well, I have a new role – still at IBM, and starting full-time next month.

I’ve built up a lot of experience in how our products are used, and I now have the opportunity to take that back to our Development labs. I’ll be providing a direct link between product development and customers… feeding back what is out there, what our customers want, and influencing future products. Refining product usability based on real experiences, and acting as a “customer champion”. It’s a role with worldwide scope, and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it.

One thing I don’t expect to change is my wider interests – Web 2.0, virtual worlds, and communities. I’ll still be engaging with folks in all kinds of places – part of what I do as a “social bridgebuilder” (props yet again to James Governor for that description). It’s in my online DNA, I guess.

I’m not going far from my roots, but this is a significant change for me.

What’s up with MQ?

I haven’t blogged about my core work for a while, so it’s probably about time. This is a bit of a round-up of some of the things I’ve observed happening around in the MQ space lately.

WebSphere MQ stuff

It’s a year of anniversaries. Apart from IBM Hursley hitting 50 (reminding me that I’ve yet to post my Spitfire photos from the celebratory open day weekend), IBM Warwick is 30 and WebSphere is celebrating 10 years. WebSphere MQ was formerly called MQSeries, of course, and has been around a few years longer than the “parent” brand, with a 15th birthday this year.

I’m sure the numbering is merely a coincidence, but there’s a good article on IBM developerWorks entitled The top 15 WebSphere MQ best practices.

WMQ reached version 7 this year. I had some very positive experiences with the alpha version of the product last year, although I’ve not yet had a play with the GA release. The new HTTP support is particularly interesting from a Web 2.0 perspective, and I keep meaning to build some demos around that that feature.

In related news, WebSphere MQ now has a Twitter account, so if you want to catch the latest news and announcements you might want to follow that.

I picked that last nugget up from my friend and US colleague T.Rob Wyatt, who has been blogging for a while now… T.Rob is an expert who is absolutely worth following if you work in the MQ space. He’s also pointed out that there’s a new blog for IBM’s new Managed File Transfer product which was announced last month.

Other messaging-related notes

For some non-IBM messaging middleware updates, just to note that 0MQ (ZeroMQ) sounds intriguing (via Matt Perrins, who notes that it is nothing to do with Project Zero). I’ve done a lot of work with clients in the financial sector in particular, so I’ll be interested to see how this develops. One of the nice things about my other “pet” product, WebSphere Message Broker, is that it sits in the sweet spot of connectivity between different transports and protocols, so I guess I’ll be looking at how to make things talk to one another if 0MQ takes off.

Current Cost

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

IBM Hackday 5

I just uploaded a small set of images from the local Hackday event at IBM Hursley to Flickr. Feel free to add tags or notes if you took part.

The Hursley blogging network

It is interesting that I’m usually identified as “an IBM Hursley person”, but officially I’m actually not – I’m a mobile worker with an office maildrop in London. It is true that I’m in Hursley as often as possible… largely because I love the location, a lot of my good friends are based there, and the products that I support are developed there.

I thought I’d mention a few of the blogs that we have going now:

• eightbar – what is now generally known as a virtual worlds blog began as a blog about the cool “other stuff” that happens in and around IBM Hursley. Actually that’s how I first got involved with eightbar (or should that be, “the award winning eightbar”?)
• Hursley on WMQ / IBMers on Messaging – various IBMers writing about IBM’s messaging products (this recently moved onto developerworks)
• Testing Blues – a group of testers from Hursley discussing issues around software testing.
• The Master Terminal – a CICS blog that I only discovered the other day!

Those are just the group blogs – there are a bunch of talented folks who work around Hursley with their own blogs too, of course (and sometimes I seem to be counted as one of them).