As promised, here’s some notes from yesterday’s UK WebSphere User Group meeting (combined with the UK WebSphere Integration User Group) – held at IBM’s offices at Bedfont Lakes.
First of all – let’s start with a picture of the happy crew at our stand. Rohima did an excellent job hunting down victims to force business cards upon, with me and David Taylor in support.
The keynote presentation was by Rob High, the IBM Chief SOA Architect, concerning the 2009 technical strategy and directions for the WebSphere portfolio. Unfortunately (for you – the reader), much of what he said came with a “not for the public domain” health warning. Interestingly he was still banging the SOA drum and when I asked him later in the Q&A session about it he was quite dismisive of all the recent ‘SOA is dead’ dicussions on the web – he gave the message that I wanted to hear which was essentially this – there’s nothing new under the sun, good integration practices are still good, and so the current hype cycle status of SOA should not stop us from still understanding the fundamental business services of an organisation and supporting them with technology in an agile way. I think there is some marketing difficultly with the term SOA now maybe but there was no hint of IBM moving away from it.
Rick Robinson presented on Web 2.0, going through quite a bit of background material and then mapping that on to IBM products, and their support for REST, OpenAjax and Dojo. Whenever I attend this kind of presentation I always pick up a few Web 2.0-ish sites/things that I hadn’t seen before – I guess this is the nature of the relatively viral nature of the subject itself. My favourite was http://www.twitscoop.com/ – which gives a real time view of Twitter topics that are being discussed as a tag cloud. Another one mentioned was http://brightkite.com/, a social networking site that was location-aware before Google Latitude came along.
I then attended another session from Rob High about EA (enterprise architecture) and the relationship with BPM (business process management). For me this was more of an EA revision session (an IBM view on TOGAF to some extent) and I didn’t get so much from it, except the IBM roadmap for their recently acquired TeleLogic System Architect product and how that fits into the roadmap for WebSphere Business Modeller. The vision is that they will remain separate tools but eventually with a shared repository. Interestingly none of the Rational modelling tooling was mentioned apart from saying that it was focused on software rather than business modelling, so there was no vision to merge System Architect into Rational Software Architect in anyway.
One other thing Rob mentioned was an expansion of that massively overused phrase “IT-business alignment” (doesn’t every IT initiative that comes along promise this?!?) into more several more defined levels of alignment – this rang a bell for me and it’s something I’ll look into a bit more I think…
Whilst my colleague was presenting a DataPower case study from a customer project in another room, the final presentation I went to was a full on techy session from David Currie of IBM about the new features in WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) v6.2. I wanted to keep on top of where these products are going at a detailed level. The degree of change in each release is pretty amazing, but also leaves a slightly sour taste in your mouth as you realise that IBM are plugging feature gaps in the product that sometimes you knew about (e.g. code assistance to help deal with the SDO model) and sometimes you didn’t (ability to act as a service gateway – which seems a pretty fundamental thing for an ESB to offer). Apart from the fairly extensive changes to support service gateways (a number of new mediation primitives etc), the developments in the human tasks aspect of it are the most interesting to me. You can now attach documents to business processes, and users can override a business process flow (sounds dangerous! – but intended for those processes where business exceptions/interruptions can occur at any time). Sorry to finish on a negative, but one obvious gap was that SOAP 1.2 is now supported, but not for SOAP over JMS – purely due to them running out of time to get it into the release AFAICT.
So – all in all, a good user group meeting, especially as it finished with beers. Many thanks to Rick Smith and co for organising it.
smart421
Robin Meehan
Paul Russell
parmstrong
Jamie Milne
Richard Latham
dentysan
R Featherstone
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taylordr
Mark Bunn
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