WebSphere Today

How would your business like a simple to install appliance that provides e-mail and shares and manages documents?

Lotus Foundations Start is just that. It gives you the capabilities of a complex IT system without the complexity of having to install and manage it. It’s an appliance (like DataPower)–just plug it into a network, configure it, and start using it. You can read more about it in IBM’s New Appliance Eases IT Headaches as Small Business Server Alternative.

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Let us show you how to integrate IBM Lotus Forms with IBM WebSphere Portal. As part of this integration, we show you how to create a portal application that responds to both a user request for a form and a user submission of a completed form.

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Prepare for the IBM Certification Test 992, IBM WebSphere Business
Modeler Advanced V6.1, Business Analysis and Design. In this tutorial, you’ll
learn how to develop a process model capable of simulation, as well as how to
assess the risks and benefits of a future process design based on simulation
data, process design goals, and using statistical distribution to describe
allocation of resources in the model.

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Prepare for the IBM Certification Test 992, IBM WebSphere Business
Modeler Advanced V6.1, Business Analysis and Design. In this tutorial, you’ll
learn how to develop a process model capable of simulation, as well as how to
assess the risks and benefits of a future process design based on simulation
data, process design goals, and using statistical distribution to describe
allocation of resources in the model.

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Part 4 of this series shows you how to build an IBM WebSphere ESB
mediation module to interact with WebSphere Business Events, IBM’s premier
product for business event processing.

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This article describes how to enable the sales catalog
feature in the catalog asset store when using the extended sites model
in WebSphere Commerce Version 6.0 Feature Pack 4.

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Boulder, Colorado is being wired as a smarter planet city.

I’ve talked about Technology for a Smarter Planet (More Smarter Planet Info) such as a Smarter Air-Traffic Control System. Now comes news in “Boulder, Colo.: America’s First ‘Smart Grid City’” (ABC News) talking about houses in Boulder being wired by Xcel Energy:

Soon, 50,000 homes in Boulder will soon be decked out with the latest in environmentally-friendly, energy-saving technology — including solar panels, electric cars and, for some, a specialized heating, cooling and lighting system — all of which will be integrated into a monitoring system that reports the home’s carbon footprint to the homeowner.

More details about this program are in “Xcel moves hybrids one step further” (Denver Business Journal) and “Alternative Energy Economy - Part II” (IT World).

Of course, it’s not all good news. One of the main features of Smart Grid City is that homeowners can produce their own electricity from sources like solar panels, and when they produce more than they can use (including charging batteries in the house and their hybrid/electric cars), they can add the excess power to the city grid. What they add gets subtracted from the power they use from the grid. Ultimately, if a house generates more power than it uses, the homeowner gets paid by the power company. A good idea? No so fast. “Consumers as Producers” (Wall Street Journal) reports a concern that homeowners should be encouraged to use less power and generate more of what they use, but not to become energy producers. Homes producing electricity for other homes would be a bad thing?

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Canada is installing a smarter air-traffic control system around Hudson Bay.

“New System Makes Air-Traffic Control Cheaper and Safer” (Wall Street Journal) reports:

Nav Canada, the privatized provider of air-traffic-control service in Canada, has installed five ADS-B ground-station receivers around Hudson Bay, a vast, remote expanse of northern Canada that is busy with jet traffic but has no radar coverage. The system will go into daily use in January after extensive testing and certification.

As I discussed in GPS for Air Traffic Control, ADS-B is the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system, which tracks airplanes’ positions using satellite rather than radar. When widely deployed by airports and used by airlines, ADS-B “has the potential to save fuel, shave time off long flights and enhance safety.”

It occurs to me that ADS-B is a good example of the sorts of Technology for a Smarter Planet (More Smarter Planet Info) that IBM has started talking about. It’s a way to take something we already do and need and use technology to make it much more efficient such that it saves energy and causes less harm to the environment.

(Separately, the Wall Street Journal also reports that Metallica: Back on Track. I guess they cover a wide range of news topics!)

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This two-part series shows how IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used
to improve performance and scalability when processing complex business
events. Part 1 introduces a traffic monitoring scenario and uses an Object
Grid on a stand-alone server to show how the scenario works. eXtreme Scale is
used to pass high-volume raw events to a prefiltering application, which
significantly reduces the processing load on WebSphere Business Events. Part 2 builds on
this scenario and uses a distributed ObjectGrid to partition the events based
on the Business Events context ID. This introduces high availability and
scalability, as events can be processed by multiple Business Events instances.

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Prepare for the IBM Certification Test 992, IBM WebSphere Business
Modeler Advanced V6.1, Business Analysis and Design. This tutorial covers
information about modeling business processes. We’ll review the various data
models supported by WebSphere Business Modeler. We’ll also discuss process
flow control logic and process layout. Finally, you’ll learn about sharing
processes using configuration management tools as well as import and export
functions.

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This article explains how the Relationship Service in IBM WebSphere Process
Server handles the creation and the deletion of the database schema objects that it
maintains for every relationship installed on WebSphere Process Server. It clarifies
why and when the system deletes objects. In this article, you use a convenient utility
to return the list of database object names for a given relationship or delete the objects from the database.

Prior knowledge of WebSphere Process Server Relationship Service is recommended.

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Learn how you can leverage the features of WebSphere Business Services
Fabric to build composite business applications that support dynamic binding
and orchestration. Part 4 of this series describes how to create metadata for
a business process based on the Fabric Business Service Model. This metadata
enables users to reuse and extend existing components, and enables dynamic
endpoint selection at run-time.

[Read more →]

This two-part series shows how IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used
to improve performance and scalability when processing complex business
events. Part 1 introduces a traffic monitoring scenario and uses an Object
Grid on a stand-alone server to show how the scenario works. eXtreme Scale is
used to pass high-volume raw events to a prefiltering application, which
significantly reduces the processing load on WebSphere Business Events. Part 2 builds on
this scenario and uses a distributed ObjectGrid to partition the events based
on the Business Events context ID. This introduces high availability and
scalability, as events can be processed by multiple Business Events instances.

[Read more →]

This article explains how the Relationship Service in IBM WebSphere Process
Server handles the creation and the deletion of the database schema objects that it
maintains for every relationship installed on WebSphere Process Server. It clarifies
why and when the system deletes objects. In this article, you use a convenient utility
to return the list of database object names for a given relationship or delete the objects from the database.

Prior knowledge of WebSphere Process Server Relationship Service is recommended.

[Read more →]

Learn how you can leverage the features of WebSphere Business Services
Fabric to build composite business applications that support dynamic binding
and orchestration. Part 4 of this series describes how to create metadata for
a business process based on the Fabric Business Service Model. This metadata
enables users to reuse and extend existing components, and enables dynamic
endpoint selection at run-time.

[Read more →]

both deliver
Virtual images make installing and configuring software faster and easier than ever
before. IBM products shipped with virtual images, such as the beta versions of
WebSphere Application Server V7 and WebSphere Portal V6.1, have seen great success.
The work being done on the Open Virtual Format (OVF) standard, for packaging and
describing virtual machines and applications for deployment across heterogeneous virtualization platforms, should make it
even easier still. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

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Whether you believe function or style is the more impotant element in
software development, discipline,
efficiency, and consistency are almost always required for a development project to
be a success. Static analysis, the task of reviewing application source code, is a method you
and your team can use to fulfill these objectives. This article explains the
benefits of static analysis and important characteristics to look for in a static
analysis tool. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

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Just because IBM WebSphere sMash simplifies Web 2.0 application development and
deployment doesn’t mean you have to scarifice clustering and high availability.
Learn how to use your WebSphere sMash application JVMs as
a cluster in IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, and how the On Demand Router
component can help you easily manage request flows to these sMash applications. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

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Certain aspects of service orientation are best served using an IBM
WebSphere MQ cluster. The cluster provides the location independence, run time
resolution of names, and concurrency required by SOA applications. For these
reasons, adoption of SOA is driving migrations from point-to-point messaging
networks to clustered environments. This article looks at how migration, failover,
and the scaling of queue managers are affected in an SOA context. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

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When you encounter a problem, the first thing you usually want to determine
is whether there is a quick resolution available, or if you’re
going to need advanced assistance. The freely available Log Analyzer tool can help you save critical
troubleshooting time when you need to make this initial evaluation. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

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