Seems there’s a whole “7” theme going on around here lately… Barcamp London 7, WebSphere Connectivity v7…
I’m very excited that WebSphere Message Broker version 7 has shipped today. I have a huge amount of respect for my colleagues in IBM Hursley and the other labs that made this possible.
How did I find out that the eGA (electronic GA i.e. downloadable media) was available? Guess what, it was via Twitter.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen this week at IBM IMPACT is some of the new technology that has just been made available in a WebSphere Feature Pack. The technology is for Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) – yes, it’s another one of those great technology industry TLAs!
I sat down with Savio Rodrigues for a discussion and demo of the Feature Pack. It is very, very clever stuff. What it essentially enables is a simple “click-to-call” button on a web page which can create a secure voice and cobrowsing connection between two users. If you’re familiar with Skype, or voice chatting on Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk, you’ll understand the principle that there’s no need to make calls over the phone all the time – I’m increasingly making use of voice-over-IP technology for my day-to-day tasks, so this is a natural capability to expect in web applications as far as I’m concerned.
The best part? The amount of effort required to build the functionality into a web page is really small. Obviously you need to be running on WebSphere, but the front-end website code is trivial, just a few lines of HTML and some Javascript includes.
The Communications Enabled Applications content was slightly low-key at IMPACT, compared to CloudBurst, BPM BlueWorks, and other big splashes – but don’t overlook this capability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
