WebSphere Connectivity products v7 announcements

I briefly tweeted a few Fridays ago about one of the new products IBM announced at the start of this month.

Regular / long-term readers will know that WebSphere Message Broker is one of my technology specialisms – it’s a product that I’ve been working with for 8 or so years now, through various versions. A few days ago I also mentioned in passing about the new version of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Both of these products are part of my day job, working in product strategy and development in IBM Hursley.

So let’s just review the announcements in the WebSphere Connectivity portfolio, and pick out some my favourite new features and enhancements.

• WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition v7.0.2 – extension of platform support, enhanced security, richer scripting, and bridges to FTP and SFTP. As Ben says, it’s “cram-packed… with lots of good stuff!”.
• WebSphere Message Broker v7 – w00t! further simplification of components and prerequisites, a much enhanced administration interface, a multitude of new nodes, better integration with WMQ v7 (pubsub and HA), slicker integration with the BPM suite through SCA support… this product just keeps getting more streamlined, refined, and functional.
• WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus v7 (and Process Server and Integration Developer) – currency with the WebSphere Application Server and MQ platforms, support for the new Service Federation Management features, Open SCA support, and Business Space widgets.
• WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging v2.3 – enhanced high-reliability and self-management.
• WebSphere DataPower firmware v3.8.0 – lots of enhancements here, but some of the nicer things I spotted in the release notes are the improved load balancing, WMQ v7 support, JSON and REST handling, and more B2B capabilities on the XB60 appliance.
• WebSphere Service Registry and Repository v7
• WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Advanced Lifecycle Edition v7 – taking these last two together, WSRR v7 offers some great improvements in integration with products such as Rational Asset Manager and Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for SOA and the Change Configuration Management Database, REST and ATOM interfaces, the new Service Federation Management Console for cross-domain management and sharing of services, and widgets that work within the Business Space framework to offer an easy-to-recompose business interface to services and policies. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been working closely with my colleagues in the WSRR team recently and this is shaping up to be a great update.

Take a look at the announcement letters for individual products for full details of what to expect.

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.

Learn WebSphere Message Broker

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the highly talented Mr Martin Gale is allowing me to absorb his genius by osmosis, or at least by working in the same office. I also mentioned that he’s successfully learned the basics of WebSphere Message Broker, too. This is an enterprise middleware product which I’ve spent around 9 years working with – using the product, consulting with clients, writing Redbooks, and educating newcomers.

When I wrote that blog entry, I missed an ideal opportunity to mention that IBM has a trial version of WebSphere Message Broker which is available for download. It’s a great way to take a look at the product and start to develop your own skills. The Information Center and Samples Gallery (available from the Message Broker Toolkit once the product is installed) are very effective places to start, too.

A couple of additional resources that might be of interest to newcomers are the articles in the WMB Zone on IBM developerWorks (check out the “latest content” section), and an unofficial user forum called MQSeries.net which has an active discussion group about WebSphere Message Broker.

IBM WebSphere Application Server – free to developers

My friend Per and the guys who write the WebSphere Community Blog have already posted today to note that developers can now download and use WebSphere Application Server version 7.0 for free.

Nada. Zilch. Zip. Nuthin’. Nowt.

What’s the big deal? Well, before now IBM hasn’t made WebSphere Application Server (also known as WAS) available for free, you’ve needed a license. Although the Java Enterprise Edition programming model is broadly the same regardless of the choice of vendor, it’s always a good idea to develop, test and deploy on the same version of the runtime you’ll be using in production. Plus, you get the opportunity to learn more about WAS administration and hone skills with the product. It’s well worth a look.

And look, let’s be honest, I don’t post about WebSphere stuff half as much as I “should” – this is newsworthy stuff. Go take a look.

Building a mainframe with nodes and wires

Last Friday, I built a mainframe. It looks like this:

Well OK. That’s a very, very big exaggeration. Let me explain. I’m doing some work at the moment that involves using some Enterprise Service Bus logic with CICS and various other systems. In one particular case I needed to be able to invoke a CICS transaction across the CICS/MQ bridge. This is actually incredibly straightforward, but at the last minute I couldn’t get my queue manager connected to the host thanks to some firewall issues, so I decided to create a stub version instead.

My own “ESB of choice” is WebSphere Message Broker, and coincidentally that was what I was using to develop logic late last week. I’ve been using the product for about seven years now, on and off. The development environment for WMB enables the user to create message flows that receive data over various input protocols, and wire together various operations which transform, route or otherwise make use of the data.

All this “mainframe emulator” flow does is receive a message with a COBOL copybook formatted body; map the values into a response message (there’s some conditional logic in the map which decides whether to return an error of some kind based on the specific account number in the incoming message, to emulate different conditions); and then just reply to the ReplyToQueue specified in the input message.

Total time – about 3 minutes (OK… a bit more, as I was fiddling with the return conditions and a little bit of XPath in the mapping node). Obviously it’s not a real CICS system, but it served the purpose I needed. Since the interface to the actual CICS/MQ bridge is well-defined, it would be a simple matter of redirecting the message traffic to the real system if it was required for some other degree of testing.

Message Brokers and Forbidden Cities

I’ve been reading a lot about the Beyond Space and Time project, which is bringing Beijing’s famous Forbidden City to life. As an eightbar person I’ve been aware of the project for quite some time, but I have to admit that I’ve not really done too much digging into the underlying technology.

According to the reports, the project has been built using the Torque engine, with WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Message Broker on the backend, with dynamic provisioning of servers. This is awesome stuff. I frequently refer to Message Broker as “my pet product”, since it’s the product I’ve specialised in for the past 8 years of my professional life. I’m going to probe further into exactly how the middleware stack is being utilised.

As we’ve been evangelising virtual worlds within IBM (I’m not a full-time Metaverse Evangelist, but Ian and, in the past, Roo have frequently been kind enough to put me forward as a speaker on the topic when they’ve been unavailable), the question has arisen as to “why we’re even bothering with all this game stuff”. Well, as someone whose day job has been in enterprise middleware and transactional systems for the past several years, I’ve always seen some of the key connections here. The 3D Internet environment needs to be supported by a multitude of technologies, and enterprises with well-defined Service Oriented Architectures are well placed to have their systems connected to the next-generation environments. If they are going to be successful, Virtual Worlds need hardware to run on, they need some of the enterprise-quality levels of availability, security and service that we’ve become accustomed to in business, and they need to be able to connect up to existing systems. A product like WebSphere Message Broker is ideal for helping to enable this, as it essentially provides the ability to connect to any “legacy” backend and mediate requests on behalf of the avatar needing the data.

So, check out Beyond Space and Time, enjoy it, and you’ll probably forget all about the middleware that enables it to run – which is exactly how it should be. The whole project really does bear out some of the stuff that we’ve been discussing over on eightbar for the past couple of years, and I’m completely thrilled to see it launch.

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.

Smart SOA announcements for WebSphere

I’ve been waiting for the announcement of the WebSphere v6.1 integration products (Process Server, ESB, Message Broker and Registry/Repository) for a while. Yesterday they all broke cover as part of IBM’s Smart SOA fall launch announcements.

IBM WebSphere Message Broker V6.1
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/6/897/ENUS207-246/ENUS207246.PDF
IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository V6.1
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/5/897/ENUS207-245/ENUS207245.PDF
IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer V6.1
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/0/897/ENUS207-230/ENUS207230.PDF

I went on the beta class for Message Broker v6.1 back in the summer. I’d previously written the v5 Redbook and helped with the v6 beta program. This time I haven’t been quite so closely involved, but I’m still really looking forward to seeing the new release get out there.

Some of the key features in Broker that I think are really going to interest the customers I’ve been working with are:

• native file-handling capability.
• email output node.
• built-in adapters for Siebel, SAP and Peoplesoft interaction.
• an array of other new nodes… the approach is to provide more nodes which have configurable properties, in much the same way that the recent Transport Header Nodes Supportpac enables message headers to be modified without programming.
• ability to support much larger messages.
• closer integration with WebSphere Transformation Extender, WebSphere Registry and Repository, and the DataPower appliances.
• a leaner, faster toolkit.
• performance enhancements, particularly around XML parsing – and hey, the product is already darned fast!

I think this is going to be another great release. I can’t wait to get started.

Technorati tags: IBM, SOA, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, WebSphere Process Server, Smart SOA, middleware

Large files and WebSphere technologies

My friend and colleague Ben Thompson has been writing again – his latest developerWorks article Handling large files with WebSphere Transformation Extender has just been published. It describes a useful technique where a WTX map can be used to split a large file into multiple MQ messages each containing a single transaction, using the group header fields to keep the transactions together. Worth a read if you are interesting in processing these kinds of files.

Technorati tags: WebSphere, WTX, WebSphere Transformation Extender, MQ, WebSphere MQ, WMQ, files, developerWorks, Ben Thompson

Amazon SQS – some of us queue already…

I became aware of Amazon Simple Queue Service early last year. I haven’t had much of a chance to do anything with it beyond playing with demos. I thought I’d written about it, but can’t find the previous entry I believed I’d posted!

Over on the Amazon Web Services blog, there’s a very good post describing message queueing, and why asynchronous communication is a good thing. Choice snippet:

Queuing allows and encourages applications to become truly service-oriented. You will be automatically making the right architecture decision of making your applications service-oriented and independent to others.

Not only that, but some people seem to feel that the platform that Amazon have been building is pretty impressive. I don’t disagree.

Time for another look, I think. I’ve been dealing with message-oriented middleware for the best part of 7 years now, primarily with WebSphere MQ, and I’ve looked at a couple of the alternatives… the main issue I have with SQS in particular is the use of HTTP as the transport, but that makes some sense in the WOA view of the world. I’ll have to dig deeper.

Technorati tags: Amazon, AWS, SQS, MOM, MQ, messaging, middleware, WOA, queueing

WSTC – wrapping up

I took the weekend and Monday to recover from the jet lag etc of getting back from Vegas – I can never get used to flying west-to-east.

The WebSphere Services Technical Conference 2007 was superb. As you will see if you looked at any of my entries during the week, there was a huge variety of material on the agenda. It wasn’t just deep technical stuff either – I could have attended project management or professional development tracks. In most time slots I had a choice of 3 or 4 sessions that I considered “very interesting” out of around 20 on offer. I blogged most of the material that I reasonably could.

As always with face-to-face events, the absolute best part was meeting people in person. Colleagues and friends who have moved to other countries (Peter Burton, Mark Jeynes); US colleagues who I’ve not had the chance to meet in person before (T.Rob Wyatt, Wayne Schutz, Jeff Lowrey); people I was introduced to from different parts of the business; my own distributed team in the UK and Europe.

Aside from that, the accommodation was good – I stand by last year’s statement that the Rio Hotel is the right size for this kind of event without scattering people up and down the Strip.

What was the buzz? Well, as I’ve indicated in my posts, a lot of the talk was around Web 2.0 technologies and methods. I know this has been biting for some time in other parts of the software portfolio, but it was great to hear people in WebSphere talking about it, and hopefully I can bring my “social” experience to bear. What else? It was reassuring to hear that there is a lot of vigour in the part of the portfolio that I’ve made my living in for the past few years – messaging. I was also really interested to meet with people to talk about industry-specific trends in corridor conversations. Overall, there was a great range of material to learn about and feed on, and I’ve returned refreshed, invigorated… and mostly over the jet lag

Edit 02/05/07 – I really shouldn’t write late at night – repeated myself and overused the word “stuff”!

Technorati Tags: conference, IBM, Web 2.0, wstc, wstc2007

New Redbooks: SOA, WMB, WESB, DataPower, WSRR

Chris has already reported this over at SOA Tips’n'Tricks: a new Redbook in the Patterns for e-business series is SOA Design using WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB (I notice that WebSphere DataPower also gets a chapter or two). I’m fortunate enough to work in the same team as one of the authors, Kim Clark – one of the worldwide experts on SOA design and implementation. The book is currently in draft, but I’ll be checking it out anyway.

If you are familiar with WebSphere Application Server then you will no doubt know that the Handbooks are some of the key books to read. There’s now also a WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Handbook, and I’m sure this is going to be just as valuable as the other handbooks we publish.

Technorati Tags: books, DataPower, ESB, IBM, Kim Clark, redbooks, SOA, WebSphere, WebSphere DataPower, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, WESB, WMB, WSRR