Watch this space?

Following the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle an interesting discussion kicked off via email within our WebSphere practice. The general consensus was that it probably wouldn’t change things that much but that it would be interesting to see how they handled their new toys while the BEA ones were still pretty shiny.

Today I came across this article http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/g1-paid. Whilst consisting of nothing more than speculation it raises some questions and elevates this a little higher up my list of things to keep an eye on.

Is there anything in this? Have Oracle got a masterplan to make money out of Java where Sun failed?

 

WebSphere MQ Utilities

Comments on a topic I had previously posted about on my own blog http://john-rutter.blogspot.com/2007/12/websphere-message-queue-utilities.html but worthy of some repetition here.

 If you are using WebSphere Message Queue (WMQ), then a quick checklist of utilities you may find useful:

• RFHUTIL - still not automatically included in WMQ installations, but very useful for development and support.
  •  Get this as SupportPac IH03 from the IBM Web Site
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000637
• MQ Explorer – an Eclipse-based utility, included in WMQ V6, but previously this needed to be downloaded as another SupportPac for V5
  • (I believe a similar tool exists for SI Bus queues on WAS/WESB/WPS)
• MQ Pub/Sub Explorer – if using the MQ Pub/Sub Broker, this allows subscriptions to be viewed and cancelled from MQ Explorer
  • Get this from IBM as SupportPac IS02,
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24012457
• SaveQMgr – a utility that saves MQ Queue Manager definitions as MQSC scripts, which can be run against another Queue Manager instance to set up the same objects or queues
  • IBM SupportPac MS03
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000673
• Q utility – allows message data to be streamed from one queue direct to another
  • IBM SupportPac MA01
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000647
• PCF Java classes – if developing administration functionality in your own Java applications, this class library wraps up the Programmable Commands Format (PCF) in an easily-used design.
  • IBM SupportPac MS0B
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000668

Other IBM blogs and web pages provide plenty of other useful information on WMQ and WebSphere ESB/Process Server, such as:

http://hursleyonwmq.wordpress.com

http://mqseries.net

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmq.html

http://soatipsntricks.wordpress.com/

 http://webspherecommunity.blogspot.com/

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/rss/websphere.xml

Thanks to Andy Piper (http://andypiper.wordpress.com/) for pointing out some of these to me before.