Category Archives: SOA

WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 Announced

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IBM have today announced the forthcoming release of WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus 6.0.2, along with new releases of WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer. All will be released electronically on 22nd December, or 19th January 2007 on physical media.

I’ll be highlighting the new features in WESB 6.0.2 in a number of forthcoming posts, but to give a short rundown you can expect:

  • Greater dynamicity – e.g. the ability to dynamically reconfigure endpoints, ability to view and modify mediation primitive properties after deployment via the admin console/commands.
  • Dynamic service selection – ability to select an endpoint based on some criteria for example by using the Database Lookup primitive, or the new Endpoint Lookup primitive which interacts with the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
  • New mediation primitives – Message Element Setter for directly setting parts of the SMO without the need to use XSLT. CEI Emitter for outputting Common Business Events from within a mediation flow to feed directly into WebSphere Business Monitor.
  • New bindings – Connect directly to native WebSphere MQ queues, and MQ JMS rather than using MQLink. Provided data bindings for all JMS message types.
  • Usability improvements – easier configuration and administration, especially for clusters.
  • Performance improvements – across the board performance improvements

That’s a lot of new function, and on top of all that you now also get the WebSphere technology adapters bundled in as well.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository

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Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks, but my blogging has suffered as it’s been particularly busy at work recently.

Talking of which, IBM is gearing up for our big SOA launch and announcements on October 9th, and after that I’ll be using this blog to start to discuss some the the ESB related aspects of what we will be announcing in more detail.

One thing that sneaked out in advance of the launch is the first release of our new WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. WSRR provides the tool to tackle one of the thorny issues of SOA, namely the management of metadata. At the most basic level services require description of what they provide, and WSRR provides the repository to hold these enabling your ESB to dynamically discover and route to these services. WSRR extends beyond the like of UDDI to enable management of much more than WSDL. It can manage arbitrary XML, XSD, BPEL and SCA metadata for instance.

However WSRR provides much more than a simple repository by enabling you to define relationships and categories of services, the data they use and much more into an ontology which is relevant to your business. Features such as impact analysis enable you to quickly identify what impact changes to a service will have.

All this helps to tackle the issue of SOA governance. If you can use WSRR to hold the definition of services within an organisation and use a meaningful categorisation scheme then you can go a long way to fostering an environment in which your SOA implementation can deliver on the promise of reusable business services.