New BPM SupportPacs site

Fresh into the world is the new WebSphere Business Process Management SupportPacs website.

Much like the WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Message Broker SupportPacs, these offer a variety of additional functions for IBM’s SOA family of products.

Some SupportPacs are fully supported product extensions, and others are provided “as-is” as examples to get you started more quickly. Be sure to check the category of any SupportPac you choose to use to ensure that you understand the basis on which it is being provided.

One particularly interesting release is BA78, a plugin for WebSphere Integration Developer that speeds up the development of applications that use the WebSphere MQ-CICS bridge.

Technorati tags: SupportPac, WebSphere, SOA, WebSphere Business Process Management, WebSphere Integration Developer, plugin, BPM

New WebSphere Message Broker updates

Just announced are fixpack 4 for WebSphere Message Broker version 6 (release notes here) and cumulative interim fix 006 for WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit 6.0.2.

Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Technorati tags: WebSphere Message Broker, Message Broker, Toolkit, maintenance, fixpack

Automating WebSphere Message Broker deployment

During the past few years I’ve come across a number of instances where customers have wanted to script the build and deployment of WebSphere Message Broker solutions. I’ve actually spoken about this a few times at conferences. The most common approach that customers have adopted has been to use Ant to tie in with the rest of their application build processes.

In an earlier developerWorks article, I included an example plugin node that could invoke an Ant task. There should be a build.xml file included with the sample code for this article that could help you to get started. I’ve also helped customers to write their own automated build and deployment processes using Ant.

Now, a new developerWorks article from Zhongming Chen, Ida Leung and Dave Spriet covers the use of Ant to drive the mqsicreatebar command for scripting the creation of broker archives. It’s a great article and well worth a look.

This isn’t the end of the story. Often, the overall process will also include checking out of source control, apply version tags, and deploying the BAR file. However, this article introduces the topic and should be a good starting point. You could also use the Configuration Manager Proxy API to control other broker tasks, as Matt Lucas describes in another developerWorks article.

Incidentally, if you want to know more about Ant, I personally really like the book Java Development with Ant by Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran.

Technorati tags: developerworks, WebSphere Message Broker, Ant, Java, broker, IBM