I reached the conclusion that calling myself a “blogger” was passe… everyone was becoming a blogger with the increasing democratisation of content. So what?
And yet… I’m also, apparently, now barely even a blogger. I began this gig as a way to expose thoughts I’d been sharing on IBM’s internal social sites like BlogCentral; migrated to a mindset of “public by default, private/intranet where necessary”; but as microblogging and other forms of social sharing have accelerated, and being honest as my role at work and priorities have changed… I’ve blogged far too infrequently.
Here are a bunch of topics I need to pick off, soon:
what WebSphere MQ Advanced Message Security can do for you
the new Connectivity and Messaging podcasts
IBM IMPACT and our new Unconference
Boris Bikes!
the London Java Community and lightning talks
WebOS and the HP revival
History and its importance as an academic subject, and how history can get lost on the realtime web
Funky awesome things what I learned at the University of Queensland whilst attending LCA… and haven’t yet blogged about… because I’m full of #fail.
So there we go – some public declarations of intent. I’m sure I can rely on @QuirkyBean and my many other online friends to keep me honest!!
I’m excited. About a week ago we released the latest update to WebSphere Message Broker, version 7.0.0.2 (also known as fixpack 2 for version 7), as well as the new Hypervisor Edition of the product.
Version 7 and “what’s new”
I’ve mentioned the new drops of WMB in passing during the year, and I’ve spoken about them in detail as I’ve visited customers and conferences during 2010. So far though, I don’t think I’ve written about it at length this year. Considering I’ve written developerWorks articles and Redbooks on the subject in the past, it’s something of an omission that I need to fix! The version 7 release has had four overarching themes:Â Universal Connectivity for SOA;Â Dynamic Operational Management; Platforms, Environments, and Performance; and (perhaps most importantly)Â Simplicity and Productivity.
I said I was excited, and that’s for two reasons, I think. Firstly, as a technical integration developer, I’m constantly interested in the new function being introduced to enhance the capabilities of the product – I’ll list out a few of those in a moment, but the number of new nodes and functions that have been added to enable you as a developer to get at your information, connect to your services and endpoints, and transform your messages, is just fantastic. Secondly, under that theme of Simplicity and Productivity, the product has been hugely streamlined, and with the usability enhancements and patterns support that have been added, it is faster than ever to get going even as the function becomes richer.
There’s too much to talk about that has dropped into the product capabilities since version 7 became available just over a year ago, but to whet your appetite you’ll find that the 2 updates in 2010 included solidDB support, CORBARequest nodes, a DatabaseInput node, FTE nodes for coordinating or responding to file transfers in WMQ FTE, EmailInput and FileRead nodes, a JSON parsing domain and RESTful web service examples, performance profiling, JDEdwards nodes… this is a team that never stops delivering fantastic, high-quality content. The WMB 7.0.0.2 release notes and details are available on the IBM Support pages, you can check out MGK’s summary of the release at MQSeries.net, or you can jump to the What’s New section in the Infocenter to catch up on 12 months of enhancements!
Patterns and Communities
One of the big items that has been delivered in version 7 has been Patterns – the ability to take a predefined operation or template, fill out a few parameters to customise it for your environment, and deploy a working set of message flows. Ant Phillips has just blogged about the enhancements in patterns authoring in the latest release, and the creation of the new Patterns Community which is over at MQSeries.net. If you saw Ant at any of our conferences this year you’ll know what a great speaker he is and how cool the demos of this technology are.
I’m excited about this, as I know it can help to maintain consistency, learn good practices, and speed along development – isn’t it much easier to build something when you have a framework to follow? I know one of the first things I tend to do when learning something is to look for a good example, and then as a good citizen I like to share what I’ve done to help others, when I can. If you’re a Broker developer I hope you’ll be keen to share and learn within that community. I know Ant and the rest of the team will be eager to listen to your feedback, as they have been doing actively for the past couple of years. There is a nice introductory article on how to create your own patterns on developerWorks. Get contributing!
By the way, I love this paragraph from Ant’s post announcing the community, as it echoes and reinforces what I’ve been talking about in my role as WebSphere Messaging Community Lead. I’m sure he won’t mind me borrowing it:
With this in mind you might be interested in a new global pattern community –Â mqseries.net has added a pattern community where you can find, download and share patterns. We will be putting some very cool example patterns up over the next few weeks to help get it started. Why mqseries.net? Well communities are all about people, and mqseries.net is where the Broker community go to find answers.
Hypervisor Edition
The final thing I want to mention is that WebSphere Message Broker can now be deployed into a virtualised environment from the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. This is cool, particularly when you start to see some of the tie-ins with things like patterns and scripting which enable you to customise the broker instances. A video is worth at least another three paragraphs of waffle though, so I’ll hand over to my colleagues…
I don’t have time to post an in-depth update on the latest announcements from IBM Hursley today but will hopefully have a chance to dig deeper on some of these later in the week. My colleagues in Development have been working hard on new and updated software offerings in the WebSphere Connectivity space, and today was “the big reveal” of a slew of them. For now, here are the links to the announcements… I’ll try to fill in more detail on some of the areas in which I’ve been particularly interested, soon.
WebSphere MQ Advanced Message Security (AMS) version 7.0.1, also available for z/OS of course! This is a new product providing significant enhancements to MQ’s security story by encrypting data at rest with no need to re-code your applications. This is one I’ll definitely be coming back to in a future post… it’s very cool indeed, particularly since it’s non-invasive and transparent to the user.
WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition V7.0.3 adds some nice web and REST features, as well as ad-hoc transfers and sweeter integration with WebSphere Message Broker (which itself gained new FTE nodes recently). There’s a fantastic story developing around enterprise managed file transfer interoperating with an ESB, here. Oh yes, and this version also works with AMS if you need to thoroughly encrypt your FTE data, both on disk as well as the existing wire capabilities using SSL channels.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Registry Edition V7.0 puts the SOA registry at the heart of the ESB (which is quite honestly where it belongs!). There have been great improvements in WSRR and WebSphere ESB lately, and again I should come back to point some of these out soon.
Phew. Busy developers. If you follow me online you’ll know I’m a techie so it should come as little surprise that I’m excited, and dare I say it, “pumped”, about some of these updates. Looking forward to playing with them in more detail.
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.
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Once upon a time, my business cards declared me to be a: “blogger | photographer | techie”.
Andy Piper
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