IBM WebSphere for Service-oriented Architecture

May 9th, 2008 | by hantu |

My Honours supervisor, Dr Sita Ramakrishnan, received an invitation a while back from IBM, to attend their WebSphere for Service-oriented Architecture technical briefing [1]. Having chosen a topic related to service-oriented architecture, she asked me to call up IBM, and ask whether I can attend in her place. I did, registered myself, and I went :)

I enjoyed the briefing altogether, below are some brief notes I made during the seminar/talk/workshop:

(Off topic: IBM fed us pretty well, light breakfast, tea breaks, lunch, lots of coffee, thank you!)

Few things I noticed:

  • Commercials between topics, they are pretty funny.
  • Comparisons to other competitors (eg: Oracle, BEA, Microsoft) - and IBM always win, perfectly.
  • Lots of blue color scheme in their slides.
  • Their presentations are very marketing-oriented, if that makes sense.
  • They like VMware so much, they had 22 images for the demonstrations.

Introduction

Enterprise faces different challenges.

What do they need in this situation? Service-oriented Architecture.

Why? Because of the ease of integration, the agility and fast time to solution.

Gary Andrews introduced us to a fictitious company called Service Oriented Finance.

A service: repeatable business task.

Service orientation: business as linked services.

Service-oriented architecture: an architectural style

Application Infrastructure to Get Started with SOA

WebSphere Application Server.

Free community edition, uses open source technology [2].

Examples: Wimbledon website (1 million hits / minute), Ebay etc.

WebSphere XD = able to update cluster without having to shutdown the server.

Demonstration of WebSphere XD is amazing, they also showed us graphically how things are being processed in a cluster if they are upgrading one of the server in the collection.

WebSphere for SOA

Need more efficiency in your business? Model the processes.

Model processes - WebSphere Business Modeler

Implement processes - WebSphere Integration Developer

Run processes - WebSphere Process Server

+ Human workflow support is what differs IBM from other competitor, WebSphere Integration Developer can generate human support code.

Monitor processes - WebSphere Business Monitor

+ Provide role-based dashboard
+ Detect business situations and take actions
+ Monitor performance of active + historical processes

Integrate People with Process to Enhance Business Value - Portal

WebSphere Portal = Front-end of SOA

Portlets = user facing business services

Used to improve customer satisfactions

Available in B2C, B2E, B2B

REST = Representational State Transfer

Components of Web 2.0 = REST, AJAX, XML data feeds

Portal is quite Web 2.0-ish, from the demonstrations.

IBM supports Dojo toolkit [3], used in Portal.

Web 2.0 Portal vision = An Open Architecture

Note: These notes are not complete, you might be able to see the slides on IBM website [4].

ref:

  1. The IBM WebSphere for SOA Event
  2. IBM - WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
  3. IBM Contributes Ajax Software Development Technology to Open Source Community
  4. WebSphere for SOA

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