This issue of the IBM® WebSphere® Developer Technical Journal represents several of IBM's most important initiatives, namely Smarter Planet™, cloud computing, and extreme transaction processing. You will find excellent foundation material here to get you started with IBM WebSphere Sensor Events for Smarter Planet projects, and IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale to help you achieve extreme availability. Two article series featuring IBM WebSphere CloudBurst™ also continue, plus you'll find exciting information about the latest IBM WebSphere DataPower® SOA Appliances, a new IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tool for Java™, and some tips for basic WebSphere Application Server high availability. Read on to learn more.
Featured articles: Two new article series begin, one introducing the basics of WebSphere Sensor Events and Smarter Planet initiatives, the other presenting a primer on WebSphere eXtreme Scale. Two other series continue, one describing how to use the WebSphere CloudBurst REST API for managing a private cloud, the other on performing advanced pattern customizations using WebSphere CloudBurst script packages.
Columns: In this month's Comment lines, find out what's new in the latest firmware release of WebSphere DataPower, and how a multiple cell strategy can keep your WebSphere Application Server environment running happily 24x7. Also, The Support Authority explains how to use the IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center to find out what's really going on in your JVM.
The IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center is a lightweight tool that monitors IBM virtual machines for Java with minimal performance overhead. It provides live information and recommendations about classes being loaded, the virtual machine environment, garbage collection, locking, and profiling. This introduction to the Health Center presents an example of how it can be used to check the impact of a minor source code change in a Web application.
"WebSphere DataPower products have been enhanced and have evolved, both because of the smart, focused people who work on them, and because of IBM, whose vast experience building 'business machines' led to design changes that added redundant, field-replaceable power supplies, fans, and other components to the appliances. With each major firmware release, from 3.5 to 3.6 to 3.7, a rich new set of features enhanced and expanded the appliances' capabilities. I can easily say however, that the release I am most excited about is the new 3.8 firmware release, and, in particular, the Application Optimization feature. So let's take a moment to explore some of the tricks and treats in this bag of goodies..."
"Multiple cells provide the ability to selectively enable specific infrastructural components to participate in an active production configuration. Through careful control and configuration, various parts of the infrastructure can be removed from the production environment on a planned or unplanned basis..."
(From September) "SupportPacs are add-ons that complement various products in the IBM WebSphere MQ family. SupportPacs available for WebSphere MQ include product extensions, user and administration tools, exits, and they exist to help you make the most out of your IBM WebSphere software. There are hundreds of SupportPacs available and it would be impossible to do justice to all of them in a single article, so I'm going to tell you about the ones I rely on most..."
(From September) Aggressive tuning doesn't always equate with improved application performance. This installment of The WebSphere Contrarian discusses why this is the case, provides some high level performance tuning guidance, and explains why sopme of your old tuning tricks might not work with newer versions of WebSphere Application Server.
