We fly off to Majorca for a long needed week of relaxation tomorrow, so this blog will be a bit quiet. When I get back I plan to start doing more stuff in Second Life, including building a thing or two.
Holiday reading list:
Real Spike
Lana is a Dubliner, so to introduce her to Second Life, I though I’d take her for a tour of a virtual Dublin. It is an amazingly detailed recreation of the hlighlights of Dublin city centre, including Trinity, Grafton St, St. Stephens Green, Halfpenny Bridge, Temple Bar, the GPO and of course the spike.
Virtual Spike
…another sixteen hour coding session draws to a close. Only two failing unit tests to go, but they are stubborn ones.
Thanks go out to Ritazza coffee, KFC and Pepsi Max.
(With apologies to Philip K. Dick.)
As the Switzerland v Ukraine game was threatening to send me to sleep yesterday evening, I fired up Second Life and happened to meet up with Ian from eightbar, who gave me some great pointers about getting around and understanding the world (along with some nice bikes and boats!) Ian has been doing a lot of investigation into the area of virtual worlds/MMOs and how the potential that exists in virtual worlds may be harnessed. When reading and listening to him on the subject, you can’t help but be enthused.
So much so, that I woke up this morning from a rather vivid dream in which I found myself talking to a room of people about mash-ups, Second Life, wet-ware grids and a load of other Web 2.0/3.0 buzzwords. Quite worrying!
My dream also gave me an idea of what I might build in my first go at creating something in SL that interacts with the “real” world”, but more on that later…
P.S. A link for all your virtual sheep needs 
As I mentioned earlier, WebSphere ESB for z/OS is now released. There is an IBM Redbook residency currently being advertised to write a getting started guide for both WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB on z/OS.
Residencies are open to IBM and non-IBM employees and are a great way to increase your knowledge of these products, and to get your name in print! This residency is being run in Raleigh, North Carolina for four weeks starting on 23rd October. It is being led by a friend of mine, Martin Keen. More details and the application form are can be found on the IBM Redbooks site.
Following in the footsteps of many other colleagues, especially Ian and the guys over at eightbar, I’ve taken my first steps into the virtual world of SecondLife. At the moment, all I’ve done is purchase an England top, as displayed above, and visit an online appearance by the US rapper Chamillionaire. Seems like a pretty cool place, and I look forward to playing around some more. It runs fine on my T42p Thinkpad with 2GB of RAM, but is a bit slow on my 12″ iBook G4 (1.33GHz, 1.5GB RAM)
A pointer to a blog by Lana's brother Graham who is currently out in China for a month, followed by a year in Japan, after completing his studies at Trinity College Dublin.
WebSphere ESB fixpack 2 for WESB 6.0.1 has been released. This is a cumulative fixpack that will also bring the version of WebSphere Application Server up to version 6.0.2.9.
With WESB 6.0.1.2 we now also support z/OS.
Following on from my post about WebSphere ESB, a new Redbook is available titled Getting Started with WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6. This introduces both WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Integration Developer, explaining the key concepts with practical examples.
A lot of people will have heard IBM talking about ESB as being a pattern rather than a physical product back before the SOA related announcements made last year, so given that, why do we now have a WebSphere ESB product?
Well, an ESB still is a pattern describing the requirements for message routing, transformation and protocol translation amongst other things. WebSphere ESB is simply a product which can help to realise an instantiation of the ESB pattern, particularly when what you want to deal with is primarily XML sent over SOAP or JMS, and maybe a bit of integration with some back-end non-XML systems via adapters.
WebSphere ESB shares a common infrastructure with our WebSphere Process Server product, namely Service Component Architecture (SCA), Business Objects (Based on SDO) and the Common Event Infrastructure. All this sits on top of WebSphere Application Server.
The main functionality in Websphere ESB comprises the concept of a mediation module, a type of SCA module, which can contain a mediation component. The mediation component allows you to build up flows to handle the mediation of messages as they flow as requests or responses over the ESB. You get a set of pre-defined mediation primitives for things like logging, database lookup, XSL Transformations and content based routing. What's more you can write your own custom mediations in Java.
You can develop mediation components and their flows in the WebSphere Integration Developer tooling, and deploy them to both WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server.
There's a whole lot more to be said, and I'll weigh in with more one this blog regularly. For now however, I'll refer to you some useful articles from IBM Developerworks:
