Making an IMPACT

Apparently there’s some Rational software conference in Orlando at the end of May. Of course, Lotusphere was out there at the beginning of the year too.

Pah! Forget those!

For me, the place to be is IBM’s IMPACT SOA conference in Las Vegas – in just a couple of weeks’ time. Barring unexpected circumstances, I should be in town for the duration of the conference.

I’ve been heading to Vegas on a regular basis for the past few years, but it has always been for internal events rather than customer ones. In my role, I’ve always been excited by technology and the innovation we get up to internally – but much, much more importantly, I need to be talking to customers and partners to understand how that technology and innovation is being used in the real world. I’m very much looking forward to talking to WebSphere and other IBM customers about their experiences with our products, what they are looking for from Service Oriented Architectures, and taking those messages back into our labs.

I’m also looking forward to finally meeting a bunch of my colleagues such as the legendary “Social Media Sandy” aka Sandy Carter herself, who I’ve known for a number of years now through various networks, but have never had the opportunity to talk to face-to-face. Incidentally, Sandy has some great background info about different events and partners at IMPACT on her developerWorks blog[*]. I’ve just read her most recent book, Marketing 2.0, and I’ll try to post some comments on that soon as well.

One nice feature of the conference site is that there are a range of widgets and social media tools directly available there, as well as links to different social networks where it will be possible to pick up some of the content.

Let me know if you’ll be at IMPACT, as it would be good to connect with my blog readers.

[*] I’m worried. Sandy has got nearly as many blogs and social network profiles as me now. I need to step up!

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

WSTC – Rational Application Developer 7

I didn’t get the chance to sit through this introductory talk in full, but I did jot a few notes down. I haven’t been able to use RAD v7 yet - these notes are probably not news to most people, but they were of interest to me.

Due to various improvements, RAD 7 has better size and performance characteristics than 6. It is based on Eclipse 3.2.1 running on JDK 5.

The Web Diagram view has been completely redesigned and enhanced.

Ajax is supported inasmuch as the JSF components have Ajax behaviours and do not force page reloads. Graphical portlet development is supported.

The XML Schema editor by default attempts to restrict choices to guide users towards best practices in creating schema definitions – the advanced view exposes all schema functions.

Kelly joins the SOA Tips and Tricks blog

IBM’s Kelly Drahzal has just joined Andrew, Chris, and I as one of the contributors to the SOA Tips’n'Tricks blog.

This is great news, as Kelly will be providing a Rational software perspective alongside our more WebSphere-oriented posts (and may even bring some celebrity guest bloggers with her, who knows?).

Kelly kicks things off with a nice post entitled Rational: Empowering the ‘A’ in SOA.

Go. Go now. And when you’re done, subscribe to her blog, too.

Technorati tags: Rational, IBM, Kelly Drahzal, SOA

Kelly on the move

Kelly has decided to merge her web presences into her WordPress.com blog. I’m pleased that she’s giving WP.com another try, as I was responsible for enticing her over in the first place, and I was a bit disappointed that she and WP didn’t get on.

Go and check her out – she’s one of the more interesting bloggers in my feed reader, and I’m proud to count her as a great friend, who I just happen to have met through blogging. She’s also a fellow IBMer, a Web 2.0 addict, a cool mom, a technology junkie, a great writer, a fantastic wit… the list goes on, but ultimately, Kelly defies definition

Why I blog

This is my second “go read someone else’s blog” post for today – but then, my time is limited right now.

I kust wanted to say that everything Kelly says over here is basically the same for me. That post puts it far better than I would have done.

Technorati tags: blogging, IBM, Kelly Drahzal, Rational

Kelly blogs RSDC, and rocks

Just to note that Kelly Drahzal is currently conblogging the Rational Software Development Conference. Go check out her work blog if you want to know more. Sounds like it is a great conference. Plus, it’s in Orlando… sigh…

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

Keyword substitution

As a long-time CVS user, one of the things that has always puzzled me about ClearCase is that it hasn't natively supported keyword substitution. This is a feature whereby you can place a tag in your source code and have the version control system expand it for you. So I could put comment lines like

/* $Author:$ */
/* This is $Revision:$ */

and, if you use the right options with CVS, they will automatically get updated at every checkin with the latest information.

/* $Author: andyp$ */
/* This is $Revision: 1.4$ */

At the last company I worked for before IBM, we used to put a static const char into our C source files containing one or more of these tags, so you'd be able to see the exact versions of the source that a binary was compiled from using the strings command on UNIX. Of course, the new versioning feature in WebSphere Message Broker version 6 also works brilliantly with this kind of function, as you can add keyword substitution tags into the version properties on your flows and message sets, and see the results at runtime.

Time for rejoicing, because Daniel Diebolt has just had a developerWorks article published which describes how to do this using a ClearCase merge manager script.

Incidentally, for those that don't know, I'm one of the authors of SupportPac IC04, WBIMB V5 Change Management and Naming Standards. We are updating this for version 6, but unfortunately the guy who helped to write the ClearCase section has left IBM. This may mean that I get to know ClearCase a whole lot better in the near future, which can only be a very good thing.

Technorati tags: clearcase websphere cvs

RAD/RSA/Eclipse and CVSNT

A colleague in ISSW was having problems getting Rational Software Architect v6.0.0.1 to talk to CVSNT.

Some people talk of me as "a CVS guru", although I'm not sure I'd go that far.

There has been a long-running issue with Eclipse not fully supporting CVSNT (or maybe it is the other way round!). CVSNT is a fork of the UNIX CVS code, integrated more closely with Windows, and it doesn't quite work the same as vanilla CVS. When an issue arose way back in the mists of time between Eclipse and CVSNT, the Eclipse project decided to stop supporting CVSNT. I'm not claiming to know the history here, but I do know that there were Eclipse bugs raised – go have a look in bugzilla at eclipse.org.

So we are now in a situation where, if you try to connect Eclipse 3.x (RAD, RSA etc.) to a CVSNT repository, you get told "CVSNT does not always properly communicate resource paths in this mode resuliting in failure of some specialized Eclipse CVS operations. The use of a repository prefix should be disabled if the full functionality of the Eclipse CVS client is desired."

However – it can be made to work – and I've personally found no issues.
There are three options (listed here in decreasing order of difficulty, so go with option 3 and work backwards!)

1. Obtain one of the earlier version of CVSNT. Until recently, I used 2.0.51d. There are archived versions at http://www.cvsnt.org/archive/ – but it looks like the earliest version now available is 2.0.58. If you run one of these versions you will still see the error, but there is a CVSNT option "Act like a Unix server". If you set that option, the error will disappear.
2. Instead of using the "Act like a Unix server" option, you can set the Repository name and location (both fields) to have the drive prefix (like "C:/cvsrepository"). CVSNT will issue a warning, but Eclipse will work fine. I believe that this works in both 2.0.51 and the latest, 2.5.0.1.1076.
   
3. Set the "Respond as cvs 1.11.2 to version request" option on the Compatibility tab in CVSNT 2.5.0.1.1076. You should also ensure that "Emulate '-n checkout' bug" is set (which it usually is by default).
   

Hope that this information helps someone out there.