the webboy

After day 3 I have answered most of my questions, learned a lot, and don’t want to hear SOA anymore From what I have heard so far, it appears that we are going to try to stick to SIBus within WebSphere ND instead of pushing with WESB. I think it’s probably too big of a chunk to bite off at this point for the marginal benefits we would gain from it.

Otherwise, I mostly hit deep technical sessions for application server and got a few questions answered around deployment topologies and high availability best practices. Hopefully, I can cover these in the context of my experiences with them later on.

The food is good, the hotel is nice and I think I’m ready to go home…

“Google is a better interface to UPS than UPS’s own web site is.”

My 2nd day was quite productive at IBM Impact 2007. I came with 2 major questions that I needed to get answered. A lot of our applications use JMS with the WebSphere Embedded Messaging that comes with v5.x. Most of the applications just use it for a queuing mechanism but there are plans to begin integrating these together. This would mostly be intra-WAS messaging. I found out later that this is the key. I have the privilege of not having to integrate with any “legacy” systems or other points at this time. So based on this short background, I wanted to know if moving to a full-fledged persisted messaging queuing system would buy us anything at all and based on the new technologies in WAS 6.1, would moving to an enterprise service bus be a good idea to manage routes, transformations and such in a services environment.

I hadn’t had a chance to explore the new Service Integration Bus features in WAS 6.1 but found out that it is full featured service bus! In fact, if you are doing only intra-WAS messaging then it seems that it is just as good if not better than WebSphere MQ. When you assign an queue point to a cluster that queue will exist on all the app servers in the cluster making it highly available.

My other pressing question of the day was to find out if we needed to explore the WESB (WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus). When doing messaging between applications, the routing and mediation capabilities in WESB seemed to be more full-featured. I still don’t think I have a firm answer on this but it seems like the type of transformations required in this case, the WESB may be the answer.

On the WebSphere Application Server front, I got to sit in on the performance tuning session with Tom Alcott. There was a lot of great stuff surrounding large WebSphere deployments. Maybe I can present this at the user group about my experiences in our implementation. I caught another great session at the end of the day about XD and its capabilities as well as best practices for deployment and implementation. I think we will definitely be exploring this and moving forward as a possibility for next year. There is a lot of great stuff in the product.

I was privileged to hear Tom Alcott, Kyle Brown, Keys Botzum, and Billy Newport present and it is always a treat to hear such well-respected and brilliant people. So far so good…on to day 3!

SOA!!! You’d think the world revolved around it. Well maybe it does at IBM. I’m seeing the SOA Reference Architecture diagram in my sleep by now. IBM seems to be moving the strategic direction of their products to be focused around SOA and filling out the product stack in that arena, particularly around the WebSphere suite. Don’t get me wrong…after you get past the cynical front I believe in the direction.

The first day started with the usual keynote by several IBM execs that I won’t detail other than to say that “IBM is committed to SOA”. It was MC’d by Don McMillan whom I had never heard before but thoroughly enjoyed. He worked in a binary high-five (101), a girls brain being the null-set, and a great skit on Indian support and how they are going to turn the tables on us. Props to whoever got him. Last they had Mark Burnett, creator of Apprentice and Survivor give a motivational type speech.

First day was decent…trying to get oriented in the flow of the conference and structure. This was the first time IBM had staged a combined conference. I guess normally the SOA and technical conferences are separate so it looks like they were going through a bit of a learning curve. I’ve been doing this for 8 years and this is the first WebSphere technical conference I’ve attended so go figure. Only complaint so far is that some of the time there weren’t sessions running on the track that I wanted and the technical track might have been too broad; however, I always found something useful to attend. The first day I came away with more questions than answers which I suppose is good. I’ll detail those more as I fill in the blanks.

Ok…”Inner Circle”…what the heck is this? My account rep must have forgot to give me the goodies on this one. This secret society type of deal has all the good sessions, focused attention, and private luncheons with bouncer guys at the door! Seriously! Sounds like a circle I need to find more about. Hey Rick?!

Ok enough for day 1. I’m exhausted…long trip yesterday into early this morning (the joys of travel)…

There have been a couple posts speculating on a major Google announcement tomorrow surrounding Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I am a Google Apps for Your Domain user and have enjoyed the service which I have been using to host email and such for our church. Naturally, as somewhat of a Google fan, I went out to the Apps site and poked around. I don’t remember this page or this page being there before. Looks like Google Docs and Spreadsheets will be a part of both the free and premium versions and maybe Google Spreadsheets will get that update with charts while they are at it. The links from those pages are dead right now but with the rumors and this I would say tomorrow there will be something answering at the other end.

It’s here! Despite the glaring lack of java functionality on the Treo 700wx, Windows Mobile users and particularly Treo 700wx users will now be able to enjoy the functionality of Google Maps for Mobile. I wonder if this the beginning of seeing the push that Google had mentioned into the mobile markets and improving their existing applications. I would love to see Windows Mobile versions of the Gmail mobile application. A Windows Mobile version of Google Reader would be great as well; as would any Windows Mobile version of a Google product I suppose.

One of the duties of my day job is that of WebSphere administration. I will be posting more on this topic in the future as I see a lack of community information in this area.

I ran across a technote today while attending a WebSphere Support Technical Exchange webcast on Troubleshooting Database and Connection Pooling Problems. Occasionally, with SOX requirements and the like, we are required to change database username/passwords. If you have a lot of datasources setup within Websphere for your applications connecting to such a database, this can become a tedious process. Evidently, for about a year now, you can now change the J2C authentication data at runtime by connecting with wsadmin and using the WebSphere security mBean. Changing the J2C authentication data at runtime will hopefully be a huge help in the future. I have not tested this yet so if anyone gets to it before I do or has used this method in the past, let me know how it works. This is for 5.0.2.11/5.1.1.5 and greater and I’m assuming also included in 6.x.

Adobe has announced that they will be releasing the PDF specification to the AIIM targeting ISO approval which would open the format up and would most likely improve the penetration of the PDF format particularly in government and enterprise organizations. I think this would also increase the amount of tools available that natively support PDF documents. If this shakes out like it looks then I could see myself using PDF more often. In our corporation, I would much rather see documents in PDF format rather than all the Word documents floating around. Probably just a personal opinion though; what about you?

On the flip-side, Google announced that Gmail users can now import both documents and spreadsheets that they receive as attachments straight into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. When you receive an attachment, there will be a link that says, “Open as a Google Document”. Google D&S already supports PDF to some extent. With this announcement by Adobe, might we see automatic imports of PDF to D&S as well? I have been using the D&S platform for a while now and have loved it. With the ability to collaborate and share documents plus the added bonus of being able to publish in PDF format, this could really take off. Definitely holding my breath…

I am a Treo user. I bought a Palm Treo 700wx several months back and entered the smartphone world. After being intimately familiar with a a lot of the technology world, I was surprised at how bad the experience was in this new mobile world. I have been intending to start posting my experiences with the new device and have yet to do so. With the release of the new iPhone a couple days ago, I was initially caught up in the Steve Job’s Reality Distortion Field and was immediately impressed with how well this new device addressed all my woes. Well a few days later and many aren’t so sure. Apple has definitely pushed the envelope with the phone’s design but as per the previous post, is still lacking and leaving a lot of unanswered questions.

I hope that Palm will see this as a wake up call and begin work on those little annoyances that really make the experience worthwhile. Let’s jump in and discuss a few of the annoyances particularly focused on Palm-related issues this time around:

1. Battery life. Palm you make a killer phone with a lot of functionality but then don’t give us enough power to use it to the fullest. I still have the stock 1800mAh battery which will not even give me a full day charge with moderate use. If I have heavy use then by mid-day I am desperately needing a power source. Since then I have become aware of the extended batteries, 2400 and 3200mAh, which promise up to 10 hours of talk time. I’m sure I will be testing this soon. All in all, probably not a large fault of Palm except that maybe they could ship a beefier battery.
2. Java support. What’s up with no Java on the Treo? All the cool cats develop in Java right? Some of the latest mobile apps are Java and what’s worse is that there isn’t even a reliable Java engine available to install that works reliably on the device. Launching the new Google Maps and GMail apps is way to hard to make it even useful. Ship the phone with Java support already!
3. Wireless support. Using the Sprint network is a real treat. The EvDO connection is great and lightening fast in the areas that I am in and have traveled to. Where’s the wi-fi? No, an SDIO card is not an option. It won’t even fit in the holster and would probably break off. And saying the phone has bluetooth but you can’t nearly do a thing with it was very disappointing. What’s the point of voice command and bluetooth support if you have to drag out your phone to issue the command? Oh, and let me do phone-as-a-modem over bluetooth please.
4. Overall experience. The phone is big; but I can live with that provided great functionality and a seamless experience. It’s true; software makes most of the experience so Windows Mobile needs step up and bring a real solution. That’s for another day…

The thing that puzzled me when I first was exposed to Palm was that for the level of people they are exposed to in this market they fall very short in communicating in our world. No blogs that I can see from Palm; not even an RSS feed for the website.

Overall I have enjoyed the device but I think there are small improvements that could really take the device across the line.

Apple, Inc. today released a couple new products at Macworld, the Apple TV and the iPhone. After a closer look at these devices, some of the gloss begins to come off and we’re left with a little head-scratching and a lot of questions.

First introduced was the Apple TV (formerly iTV). This device connects to your TV and wirelessly streams media content from iTunes on up to 5 computers and auto-syncs with 1. Let’s take a closer look… Intel processor, 40GB hard drive (that’s all?), 802.11b/g/n, HDMI, component, optical, analog audio. Looks good so far and still syncs with iTunes on Windows. It apparently only outputs 720p making it almost obselete when it hits the market. At least it appears to upscale to 1080i. In my mind this device is a close second behind Netgear’s latest.

Truly the news of the day is the Apple iPhone. A widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet device all in one. It touts a quad-band GSM in a 4 or 8GB model with wi-fi, EDGE and Bluetooth. Runs OS X and is a mere 11.6mm thick. For some reason there is no 3G support and Cingular is the sole network provider. It yet remains to be seen how the device will hold up as far as battery life and heat goes with all that tech crammed into a small space. While it boasts wi-fi and EDGE support, you apparently cannot download your iTunes purchases or sync wirelessly with your computers. Truly innovative in the market with the user interface as is so characteristic of Apple but hopefully before June we’ll get some answers…such as, how are we going to keep that screen clean and scratch-free?