Rachel Reinitz is a Senior Consulting IT Specialist with IBM Software Services for WebSphere,
focusing on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services enablement.
She consults with clients and ISVs to help them achieve their business and technical
objectives using SOA, enterprise service bus, and Web services.
Rachel is a frequent conference presenter and co-author of the popular 8-part developerWorks
series article,
Building an Enterprise Service Bus with WebSphere Application Server V6.
Rachel has a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and a M.E. degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. After completing her M.E., she joined IBM® in Bethesda, Maryland and spent the first few years of her career doing project management, test, service support, and product management for a variety of now dead products. In 1994, Rachel jumped at the opportunity to join a new exciting consulting practice in IBM, the Object Technology Practice (OTP), which focused on large Smalltalk projects. She spent several years living on airplanes for that team, and then moved into a new services group under Software Group doing lab-based services for Smalltalk and Java™.
Rachel has the distinction of leading the first servlet project in 1997 with a customer using ServletExpress alpha code, which later became the first version of WebSphere®. Rachel focused on OO, Java, and WebSphere for a couple of years and learned a lot from working with Kyle Brown. She co-led one of the very first XML projects with a client. She left IBM for three years from mid-1999 to mid-2002. She spent one year as a development leader for the
startup Chemdex (a.k.a. Ventro) and experienced the ups-and-downs of startup stock. She then spent two years doing independent consulting with a focus on eXtreme Programming and Java. She got to know and collaborate with some great XP leaders and had a lot of fun.
In 2002, Rachel happily returned home to IBM joining the IBM Software Services for WebSphere
as a senior consultant focusing on Web services. As the industry and IBM's focus on Web
services and SOA has grown, Rachel has expanded her role and now leads Web services, SOA,
and ESB for WebSphere Services. She works closely with many organizations across IBM
including development, marketing, and IBM Global Services.
Rachel's greatest accomplishment, challenge, and pleasure arrived in late 2004 when she had her baby Natasha. Prior to Natasha's birth, Rachel traveled extensively around the world visiting 33 countries. She has slowed down her travels, but not by that much. Natasha has accompanied Rachel on 12 business and fun trips and has her own passport and frequent flyer miles.
This 8-part article series, co-written with Andre Tost, is based on our experience
implementing several ESB projects using the Service Integration Bus (SIBus) feature of WebSphere Application
Server V6. The article describes how to use various features of SIBus to build an ESB in
the context of a business problem. You can use most of the articles as standalone guide
to a specific feature of SIBus.
In this article, I answer a series of Web services questions on a
variety of topics. One addition to the content is that WebSphere 6 supports
J2EE 1.4 and WS-Security 1.0.
In 2003, a small team of us in WebSphere services were doing Web services projects with
customers and had developed an advanced training course for our consultants on Web services.
We had a client ask us for our Web services best practices. This article is the result.
It covers the architectural challenges posed by Web services, examines how to use (and not
to use) Web services, and describes some best practices in applying Web services for
solving tough architectural problems. Almost all the practices still hold true with a
few caveats I've explained below.
The practice which cautions the use of Web services between application servers and the
comments
about differences between SOAP/HTTP and RMI/IIOP performance no longer holds true in WebSphere
6. SOAP/HTTP outperforms RMI/IIOP in most cases. The discussion on multiple business
delegates is still valid, but there are more options available today with multi-protocol
support in WebSphere's implementation of JAX-RPC, and in Service Component Architecture (SCA).
We would not recommend using WSIF any longer.
This article examines the key scalability issue of storing client data on the server,
and some approaches for making your servlets perform in a high-traffic environment.
Katherine Neville's books are filled with twists and turns across several centuries
filled with historical settings. She has strong interesting characters and plots, which
keep you reading. Her book The Eight is one of my favorite books and I reread it
every few years.
I'm a techie recommending a marketing book. But this book is about a lot more than
marketing; it is a theory of event interactions. It is a very engaging book that
will have you talking to your friends about what you read. I read it when I was pregnant
and learned interesting facts about TV programs for kids. There is a wide variety of stories
included.
This is my favorite travel book for Europe, which helped get me started on traveling.
Rick Steves also has very good country specific books, a PBS show, and tours. His Web site
has lots of good information. I went on one of his tours and it sold me on walking tours as
a great way to get to know a city.
If you buy one book or DVD on parenting your infant, this should be it! It provides
you with techniques to soothe your unhappy baby, which they all are at times. I like the
DVD as it quickly teaches you the techniques. I've given this book to a lot of my friends,
who are parents-to-be and they all agree it is a must-have.
So on to technical topics - my favorite reference for all the facets of WebSphere
Application Server and WebSphere Studio. It is comprehensive and a good read. Kyle's
articles are also always full of insight and value. I am biased in that Kyle is one of
my favorite colleagues to work with.
This book is written by IBM consultants working with customer on Web services projects.
It looks at Web services from a variety of perspectives using a core case study.
It also covers both general overviews and technical details.
The first edition is the classic and first XP book. The practices have been revised by
various XP practitioners and by Kent in his second edition. Either edition is a good
starting point for learning XP. To truly embrace XP, I recommend hiring an XP coach to
guide your team in its transformation.
This is a great book, which anyone working in an OO language should read and keep
handy. It will help you to clean up existing code and improve your new code. Many of
the patterns have now been instantiated into refactoring tools.
Martin Fowler is one of my favorite writers. I particularly like his focus on looking at the impact of agile processes on organizations, which is at the core of his article on offshore development.
Finally, I'll close with a recommendation for my mother's book on how to execute a mural
project in a school for those readers who are connected with educational institutions.
