I posted about the release of fixpack 2 for WebSphere Message Broker v6 about a month ago, but I’ve been meaning to comment on it further.
The user-visible changes in the toolkit are really nice. All of them are minor, but they contribute to usability.
The Message Set properties page now includes a little bit of additional text to describe what the parsers do – helpful if you are new to the product, or haven’t used a particular parser before.
When a new node is added to the canvas, the name is automatically highlighted so that it can be renamed to something more useful immediately – very helpful, and it cuts down on mouse clicks later.
Right-click in the Project Navigator pane in the Broker Development perspective, and you will now see a new Quick Start… menu option, which allows you to create resources more quickly – very useful for prototyping etc.. Select that option, and you’ll see this wizard…
The Quick Start wizard prompts for the name of your new Message Flow project, and then automatically fills in the name of a Message Set based on the name you provide. It will also optionally create a blank message flow for you, again using the project name as a base. Once you click Finish, both projects are created, project references are automatically added, and the blank message flow canvas is opened ready for you to get started.
These are all minor tweaks… but as a consultant, I know that IBM gets beaten up a lot over the usability of our products. I think these kinds of changes are evidence that we do listen to user feedback, and that we care about making life easier for users.
While I’m here, I’m going to sing the praises of the documentation team working on WebSphere Message Broker. If you’ve ever looked at the InfoCenter, you should have noticed that there are Feedback links at the bottom of every page. Got a comment, or a change that you think needs to be made? Click that link, fill in the form, and it will go directly to the documentation team in Hursley – in my experience, they have been very responsive to the changes and comments that I’ve submitted.
Technorati: websphere, wmb, broker, websphere+message+broker, IBM, usability
[…] So, it looks like you can now get autocompletion for MQ constants. I didn’t know about this – perhaps it was available before fixpack 2 came along? Either way, it is a handy feature. […]