Technology Blog - SemanticSpace, Prolifics and Arsin - Global IT Providers

The Importance of Unique Cell Names in BPM 7.5

2012-03-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

In order for the many features of IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) Advanced 7.5 product to function as designed, one must plan accordingly and pay attention to detail, specifically around naming conventions.
BPM 7.5 includes a feature known as the Process Inspector. This feature, in Process Designer, allows developers to run and debug processes in the Process Center authoring environment, as well as, remote Process Server environments that are connected to the Process Center. Process Inspector provides a centralized location for viewing and debugging running process instances in any environment connected to your Process Center. Table 1 below outlines some of the main tasks that the Inspector allows a developer to perform.

Table 1 – Tasks in Process Inspector (IBM, 2011)

In order to use the Inspector functionality to its full potential, it is important to ensure that each of your BPM cells has unique names. According to the IBM BPM 7.5 InfoCenter,

“Use a unique name for the deployment manager cell. A cell name must be unique in any circumstance in which the product is running on the same physical workstation or cluster of workstations, such as a Sysplex. Additionally, a cell name must be unique in any circumstance in which network connectivity between entities is required either between the cells or from a client that must communicate with each of the cells. Cell names also must be unique if their name spaces are going to be federated. Otherwise, you might encounter symptoms such as a javax.naming.Name NotFoundException exception, in which case, you need to create uniquely named cells.” (IBM, 2011)

Process Inspector does make use of connectivity between the cells and also from a client that must communicate with each of the cells. When connecting to Process Center through the Inspector, there is cross-cell communication that occurs when Inspector goes to look for the running instances you have in one of your remote Process Server environments. As an example, if a developer has deployed code onto the Process Center server (also known as the playback server) and is now ready to test the code on a remote Process Server environment, Process Inspector will allow the developer to kick off a process instance and debug the code step by step through the process, provided the snapshot has already been deployed to the remote Process Server. The drop down box in Figure 1 shows the various Process Server environments that are connected to the Process Center.

Figure 1 – View of Process Inspector while running a process instance

Normally, after selecting an environment to test your process instance on, Inspector would connect to the remote Process Server and allow you to execute your tests. However, if your BPM cells for all of your environments are named with the exact same name, you may see a screen resembling Figure 2, even though you have already successfully deployed the snapshot.

Figure 2 – Error messaging indicating no snapshots are deployed

When the BPM cell names are all the same, cross-cell communication experiences issues that will cause you to lose key functionality of the products, as described above. Figure 3 provides a high level view (as an example) of the connectivity between Process Designer (which contains Process Inspector), Process Center, and Process Server environments:

Figure 3 – Cross Cell Communication for Deployment in BPM 7.5 (Markowitz, 2011)

In conclusion, it is imperative that you review the pre-requisites for installing IBM BPM 7.5 Advanced, or any products for that matter, thoroughly to ensure a successful implementation. The old saying “measure twice and cut once” is always a good rule of thumb to avoid rework and further expense down the road.

Works Cited:
IBM. (2011). Naming considerations for profiles, nodes, servers, hosts, and cells. Retrieved February 16, 2012, from IBM Business Process Manager 7.5 InfoCenter: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmndhelp/v7r5mx/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.wbpm.main.doc%2Ftopics%2Fcins_naming.html
IBM. (2011). Running and debugging processes with the Inspector. Retrieved February 16, 2012, from IBM Business Process Manager 7.5 InfoCenter: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmndhelp/v7r5mx/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.wbpm.wle.editor.doc%2Ftopics%2Frunning_debugging_procs.html
Markowitz, E. (2011, 11). Product Development Director at Prolifics.

Seth Gagnon, a Senior Consultant for Prolifics, has over seven years experience in the healthcare industry and has worked with business process management technology to automate member enrollment and claim adjudication for a Fortune 200 healthcare client. He has experience in IBM middleware products such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Business Process Manager, and other products in the IBM BPM stack. Seth received his BS in Management Information Systems from the University of CT and his MS in Technology Commercialization from Northeastern University.

Expectations for Pulse 2012

2012-02-27T11:05:00.000-08:00

IBM Pulse 2012 will offer new opportunities to learn about IBM’s ongoing initiatives around integration between their numerous products lines. The Tivoli product line continues to become more integrated with Rational, WebSphere and Lotus brands. Existing integrations between products such as IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Application Diagnostics (ITCAMforAD) and Transactions (ITCAMforTrans) and Rational Performance Tester (RPT) will be augmented with further extensions of the already powerful integration between ITCAM for SOA and WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR). Centers of Excellence are in place at many key Fortune 500 companies and products from the IBM portfolio that support this effort continue to be leaders in their technology areas.

Expanded integration with SOA environments is an area of particular interest for Prolifics, given our strong focus, proven record of success and acclaimed expertise in the areas of Technical Monitoring, Governance and Business Process Management (BPM). Prolifics is uniquely positioned among IBM Business Partners to deliver world class architecture and deployment services in this extremely complex business and technical area.

To see what Prolifics will be up to at Pulse 2012 click here.

Dan Kern joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.

Considerations When Monitoring IBM DataPower

2012-02-27T10:56:00.001-08:00

Effective and comprehensive monitoring of SOA environments that leverage the power, and complexity, of IBM DataPower appliances requires a multi-tiered approach. The various appliances deliver enhanced security, message transformation and routing and as key components of business critical applications, require close attention to insure high availability in all regards.

Coverage for DataPower appliances must include monitoring of services and resources. While the appliances expose a good number of metrics through SNMP MIBs, monitoring of the services they provide allows proactive alerting, to both Consumer and Provider communities. Operational teams focused on the health of the appliances must be informed of any issues related to the appliances themselves, such as power, cooling and hardware errors to proactively address any degradation in performance or availability.

Service monitoring of the appliances starts with engaging the application teams, Consumers and Providers, to establish the Service Level Agreement for the deployed services. Live traffic is then analyzed and factored against the requested response times and availability levels for all subscribed Services and Operations. This additional level of validation allows more comprehensive tuning and distribution of alerts, increasing service and operation availability and reducing Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) in case of performance degradation.

DataPower appliances are most often monitored by a combination of agents, such as those supplied by IBM as part of the Tivoli Composite Application Management for SOA (ITCAM for SOA) Platforms package. ITCAM for SOA includes agents to monitor both Service execution and Resource Usage of the appliances, supplying invaluable data and insights to Operations, Application Support and Software Development teams. The Services and Resource agents are most often deployed on the same remote server and poll the appliances via SOMA and SNMP protocols. This architecture allows more centralized deployment and reduces license cost.

The monitoring team interfaces with a variety of teams, from Network Security, DataPower Support and Enterprise Architecture, SOA Governance and Application teams. Each operational team provides their own level of expertise to the architecture and deployment effort and their involvement helps insure a solid and well supported deployment.

Application teams in SOA environments are heavily invested in the success and availability of their services, so the overall effort will benefit from their early and frequent involvement. ITCAM for SOA provides unique insight into Consumer and Provider service response time and can assist in validation of the business logic and rules driving service architecture and deployment.

Dan Kern joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.

Business Rules, ILOG and WebSphere Operational Decision Management

2012-01-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

Business Rules and why they are needed?
Business rules have been a very familiar term not only in the insurance, banking and retail sectors but the public sector as well. Change is inevitable in any organization’s business. What drives them apart is how quickly one can adapt to change. But this is what everyone talks about - change and adapting to change. Where do business rules fit in here?

Rules are policies that are defined by the business and they are designed by definition to expect constant change. Moreover, since rules are defined and designed by the business, they make more sense to the business. Traditionally, a business has been dependent on IT to implement any change that occurs in an organization. Business rules give the power of implementing that change back to the business. This is what drives organizations to the world of business rules.

The prime and most robust solution to implement business rules is IBM’s Websphere ILOG JRules. The entire rule management solution is known as a BRMS (Business Rules Management System). In this article, we will look at the latest IBM offering – WODM (which is ILOG v7.5). Before diving into WODM, let us look at ILOG JRules and what your organization needs in order to implement ILOG JRules.

Exploring ILOG JRules
ILOG comes from two French words – “Intelligence” and “Logiciel” meaning intelligent software. When business rules are implemented in ILOG, they tend to act as intelligent systems which can give you an answer based on relevant information that you provide, hence the name.

Before moving on to a rules-based solution I recommend asking the stakeholders in your organization the following:

Do you need to improve your organization’s current decision collaboration with more visibility and transparency?
Do you need to see instant change or automate real time actions with high performance and reliability?
Is your organization spending too much time and money to change minimal decision logic?
Do you need increased speed and agility in your change control process?

If the answer to any of the above was yes, then ILOG JRules is the way to go.

An ILOG BRMS gives your organization the capability to put all your business rules in one place. This is called a rules repository. Not only are these rules separate from your application code but also independent of any change that occurs in your application code across the enterprise. Apart from being independent, rules in ILOG can be changed by the business without IT collaboration. Managers can monitor changed rules and for the first time business logic becomes transparent as opposed to embedded deep somewhere in that ugly thing called code.

In order to make a recommendation to your organization, you need to get a background of what would need to be done in order to implement ILOG’s BRMS (business rule management system). Let’s look at what components ILOG JRules consist of.

Components of ILOG JRules
WebSphere ILOG JRules has three different components. These are:

The standalone developer tool – Rule Studio Eclipse for JRules.
Rules Execution Server – web based tool to deploy and execute the rules.
Rule Team Server – web-based tool to change/update rules on production, for the business owners/ users.

Apart from the above, there are testing tools that might be needed; these include Decision Validation Services or Rule Scenario Manager (in the older version of ILOG JRules).

Since ILOG JRules is now being replaced by WODM we will now shift our focus on WODM (version 7.5)

WODM (WebSphere Operational Decision Management) – What, Why and How?
In an effort to package and market ILOG JRules as a more robust solution for entire decision management, IBM renamed ILOG JRules to WODM recently. This is ILOG’s 7.5 version. WODM gives your business the enhanced capability to integrate business events with business rules.

Before exploring further, let’s look at how one can distinguish between a business event and a business rule. A business event is something that occurs such as ‘a claim’ or ‘a transaction’ or ‘an alarm’. It’s the trigger that causes business rules to get invoked. An event does not care about the “logic” that goes with a business policy or change, rather it acts as a signal to invoke rules and generate a response based on the business rule.

Based on the above we can safely say that WODM does not really change the way ILOG has been as far as implementing a BRMS is concerned. It provides integration with business events but when it comes to what needs to be done to implement rules and a BRMS, there are hardly any surprises. Bottomline – if you are familiar or comfortable with ILOG JRules, you don’t need to worry about any learning curve in transitioning to WODM.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s look at one shall we?

The above picture represents a high-level view of WODM. The entire arrow on the left represents rules, and in parenthesis you can see “WebSphere ILOG BRMS.” The right hand side of the picture includes WebSphere Business Events.

Exploring WODM
In order to improve the quality of repeatable transactions and process-related decisions, a combined business rules and business events platform is needed. WODM provides this solution. It enables stakeholders within any line of business to create decision logic, separate decisions from processes and applications and execute real time decisions based on various interactions.

Components of WODM and Differences from ILOG JRules
Below is a figure representing components of WODM:

From the figure above, there are two specific components that need mention – Decision Center and Decision Server. Let’s look at what these are and how they differ from ILOG’s previous versions.

And, that is it. The way business rules were designed previously in ILOG does not change. Instead of using Rule Studio eclipse, now the enhanced Rule Designer is used. Decision Center for business space offers the capability to change namespaces out of the box and view enhanced reports for business rules and events.

Having discussed what WODM (and ILOG) is and what it consists of, let me now propose a delivery structure that gives you an idea of how your organization can implement a BRMS.

Proposed Delivery Suggestion for WODM
In order to establish a new BRMS system, there has to be detailed steps involved with Installation, Testing and Integration of the BRMS with application server environment. A new BRMS delivery approach should be broken down in four phases:

Installation of Decision Server (Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server) on IT developer and Architect’s personal machines.
Installation of Decision Server (Rule Execution Server) on dev/qa boxes and rules exposed as a service to be consumed by other services.
Installation of Decision Center (Rule Team Server) on dev/qa boxes in order for rule reviewers and business users to change rules on the fly.
Replicating qa installations of Decision Server and Decision Center on prod boxes. Note: Decision Center prod install is optional based on your organization’s governance policies.

The above breakdown of phases in which a WODM-ILOG based solution is delivered ensures that the rule solution has first been integrated within the SOA enterprise before the rules are exposed for being edited by the business. This breakdown also ensures if any leaks and gaps are present they get detected in the first three phases rather than breaking the system and causing damages on production when business users make a change on the fly. The above breakdown also takes into consideration the learning curve associated with making business users comfortable with changing business rules.

Transitioning from ILOG to WODM is an easy process and all your organization needs to do is get the latest software from IBM and follow the four step process above. Learning curve is almost zero if your organization is already using ILOG.

Conclusion
Business rules in general drive your organization towards becoming highly agile and flexible to change. Implementing a BRMS in your organization gives you an edge over your competitors in today’s world of quick adaptability. Automated decision making capabilities reduce cost and overhead for your organization. IBM’s WebSphere Operational Decision Management is the most robust solution to achieve your organization’s goals of having transparent and improved quality of transactions and process related decisions.

Akshat Srivastava is an ILOG consultant at Prolifics with 5 years experience in the IT industry having worked in insurance, banking, retail and public sector companies. He is experienced in all aspects of the development life cycle, including bottom-up estimates, analysis, design, development, testing, release management, and bug-fixing. He has created rule based solutions at various clients, authored rule repositories and best practice documents while focusing on ILOG as the implementation environment.

Exceptional Web Experiences 101

2012-01-11T11:45:00.000-08:00

As I continue to prepare for Lotusphere 2012, I am reflecting on my experience last year at the conference in 2011. At Lotusphere 2011 there was lot of attention on providing an “Exceptional Web Experience” to the customers. And rightly so. At the end of the day, it’s all about making the customer, the end user, the client (or whatever they are called) happy. There can be a lot of misconceptions in the User Experience space about the concept of “web” experience”

So I asked my self this question: Is an iGoogle Page (that I view every single day) a good web experience?

Sure enough, the iGoogle page provides me with the information that I need. But to get the information, I had to enter my zip code 5 times and my address a couple of times. And none of the snippets or widgets of information talk to each other. Is this what you would call “Exceptional”?

This year, I participated in a few IBM Social Roadshows last year and I decided as part of Prolifics commitment with IBM I would talk about the whats and hows of this social experience and also present some trends in the space.

So what exactly is an “Exceptional Web Experience”? How do you achieve it?

When I looked up the meaning, I found the following answer: “it’s about how a person feels about the system”. To me that said it all, but the real question is how do you design the user experience (UE) so that it makes the end user feel good about the system? How do you attain the level of excellence?

According to me, these are some of the key drivers in creating a great User Experience
1. It’s about Relevance - Create highly personalized customer interactions

2. It’s not only just about the product - Design experiences, not features

3. Go beyond the desktop or laptop - Having a mobile presence is a must

4. Earn the trust of the customer - Improve customer loyalty and relationship by enabling “Social”

5. It’s about Web 2.0 and beyond… Web 3.0 - Visual Appeal + Ease of use = Wow customers. Keep the UI Simple, Interactive and Responsive (SIR principle)

For over a decade, IBM WebSphere Portal has led the web 2.0 space in providing a seamless web experience. But now with the help of its accelerators (Social, Collaboration, Mobile etc) it’s poised for providing greater results in the enterprise business and social space. IBM WebSphere Portal delivers greater flexibility by creating personalized web experiences that seamlessly combine back-end applications, commerce solutions, social media sites, and cloud-based services.

Speaking of Social, there is phenomenal potential in the power of introducing “Social” into day-to-day business.

I have observed some trends in how customers and clients are using the power of social to engage customers.

Social Trend #1 - Engage the Customer on the Site

This is the single biggest focus of most customers and clients. Two questions that normally arise in a UE discussion are: how do we keep the user engaged on the site? How can we have share information with users and between users?

Answer: Leverage Social. By Enabling Users to Socialize:

Share conversations and information between users
Wikis, blogs, forums, communities
Ratings, commenting, tagging
Shared bookmarks, files, activities for work & ideas

Search
• Based on profile: expertise, projects, responsibilities, and interests.

Customer Service
• Enable customers to get problems resolved quickly with click-to-chat functions.Provide them targeted results

Social Collaboration
• Improve brand awareness by syndicating content across the web, into other online properties, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google etc.

IBM WebSphere Portal provides a great point solution to start your social initiative. Concepts like tagging and rating are essential components for developing collective intelligence about the site/product. They have also proven useful in engaging customers on the site and creating a trust and a sense of community between the end of users. Out of the box templates like Blogs, Wikis, Newsletters, Communities have made it very easy for clients to share information with the users. (Requires no development, only customization). Tools like click-to-chat, integration with RSS feeds from external sources like Facebook, Twitter, Google etc have added a great social dimension to Portal which was always perceived as “single point front end solution to IBM SOA framework"

Now if your business is ready for a more mature Social strategy IBM Lotus Connections is the right solution. To highlight some of the key features that product presents
• Profiles – Find people and expertise in your social network
• Community - Connect with people of common interests to share ideas
• Forum - Start discussions to solicit feedback from end users
• Activities - Dashboard of to-dos and activities within your network
• Files - Share variety of artifacts with your individuals and groups

Social Trend #2- Expand Beyond Traditional Web

There are 4.6 Billion mobile customers. To me it means 4.6B reasons to expand the outreach of your products to beyond traditional desktop. Having a mobile presence does not mean that users can access your site via a smart phone. But a true mobile experience comes from having a site to adopt the rendering process based on the smart phone. UI elements like themes on the portal pages, the navigation schemes should be able to differentiate between an iPhone or a Blackberry or any other smart phone.

Keep in mind the following consideration for developing a mobile strategy

Create a device agnostic presentation
Utilize common business logic and services
Cater to device specific requirements (iPhone maps, geo location etc)
Create lots of screen presence despite limited real estate
High Response time despite broadband limitations
Leverage one common theme

There are several questions in this space. What sort of a mobile strategy should customers adopt? Should I create a native iPhone app? What about a mobile website? What’s the buzz about HTML 5?

Consider your requirements before choosing a solution. Here are some options

There are several other options for non-Portal, non-IBM based customers as well, such as using one of the open source mobile and HTML 5 based frameworks.

Social Trend #3- Optimize the Experience with BI Analytics

One of the focus areas in social business is optimizing the experience based on real-time data, site usage and social analytics.

What drives BI Analytics?
Who is coming to my site?
How did they find it?
What are they doing?
What did they search for? Did they find it?
What are the most popular areas?
What are the most popular topics/content?

Leverage analytics to:

Improve user engagement by measuring and then fine tuning the customer experience
Intelligently manage your marketing resources
Make better decisions faster
Exceptional web experiences engage, attract, satisfy and retain customers and partners.
Being nimble and agile is required to keep web content fresh, engaging and relevant.

I look forward to seeing how these trends have evolved since Lotusphere 2011 and discover new trends to look for in 2012. Click here to see what Prolifics has in store for Lotusphere next week, including information about our 4 speaking sessions.

Niral Jhaveri is the User Experience Practice Director at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM Lotus, WebSphere and Rational family of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Niral has an extensive background in the design and development of IBM WebSphere Portal, SOA and Web 2.0 applications with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Finance, Retail, Insurance and Technology.

A 'Smart Web' Pattern for Tomorrow’s Enterprise

2012-01-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

With over 5 billion mobile subscribers and 627 million mobile web users, projected to reach 1.5 billion by 2015, 'Mobile Platforms' are here to stay. Most Enterprises want to take advantage of these platforms to stay competitive and provide value to consumers.

Despite widespread adoption what daunts most technology teams today is the maintenance of multiple code bases across Web, Tablets and Smart phones. Web applications were developed targeting desktops and laptops as smart phones were a luxury a few years back. However, enterprises have taken note of the recent mobile wave and added support for smart phones and tablets rather than a ground-up redesign. The immediate need was to get a mobile presence out there which was accomplished using an ‘App’ or a mobile website in addition to existing assets. This adhoc solution approach leads to code fragmentation and maintenance becomes a nightmare in due course of time.

The following article discusses in detail strategies that could be employed for building mobile frameworks and apps with maximum re-usability and minimal code fragmentation: 17 Solutions to Build your own Mobile Application

Enterprises look for a development pattern that helps in the development of Web Applications and native mobile apps (iOS, Android) in a seamless manner through a single application code base. The pattern should be flexible to accommodate existing web applications. Such a pattern could be achieved by having an abstraction layer on top of mobile platforms (created using COTS Products) and integrating new code with their existing web applications.

We explored various options available in the market and zeroed in on Titanium IDE provided by Appcelerator. Titanium follows the same pattern as followed by Java, in that it’s a ‘Write once , run everywhere’ platform. It creates an abstraction layer in Javascript that helps developers generate native code for individual platforms without going through the process of maintaining individual code bases. The generated project, essentially a collection of Javascript files could be integrated with existing code base resulting in a single code base across platforms. Of course, a few tweaks are required in the build process to create customized builds for each device but that’s a one-time effort. The entire development process is seamless and bodes well for the organization in terms of maintenance and gives them extra leverage to react to changes in this ever growing market.

Selecting the right COTS Product for Mobile Development is a challenge given abundant products available in market today. Titanium IDE is based on Open standards and generates native code for mobile platforms. It provides Out-of-the-box Mobile ecosystem and connections to Enterprise data, content and processes. This results in shorter development cycles, manageable code base and code reuse across platforms. Enterprises can spend their dollars building new features and reacting better to market changes by adopting the above 'Smart Web' pattern.

Laks Sundararajan is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management and Collaboration technologies. He has led the implementation of many global projects using IBM WebSphere Portal and has extensive background in design and development of enterprise portals. He specializes in providing Enterprise SOA solutions leveraging WebSphere Portal, Content Management, Tivoli and Mashup’s. He holds Masters in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a Graduate Degree in Engineering from BITS, Pilani.

A Social Approach to Solving Business Problems

2011-12-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

In today’s world of empowered individuals, world leaders and businesses must use potent new technologies and harness social media to organize themselves, to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith.

Social can be categorized broadly into: socializing with your external subscribers and socializing with your own employees. In order to maintain a healthy relationship and get active feedback, a system that enables subscribers to provide an honest opinion that lets you address the issues and concerns in a timely manner is critical to business. Facebook, G+, Twitter, and Foursquare are established open platforms that can very well engage these external subscribers. Another way to engage and socialize with your subscribers is through a secured and controlled platform, your own corporate portal, which empowers your subscriber with information that they need, when they need it and how they need it.

Social engagement within an organization can be looked upon as socializing between the employees, departments, channels etc. The synergy that you can generate through a true social enterprise can show dramatic ROIs on your record books. IBM Connections is one such product that helps organizations create an internal platform that they can leverage to manage internal and external social networks. Connection's mobile capabilities ensure that employees are connected 24/7 across the globe providing the best possible value to subscribers. In conventional systems, information flows via emails; appreciations, issues and suggestions are shared in a closed loop. However, with Connections they are discussed openly, bringing in the necessary empowerment and transparency to work culture.

Discussing a business requirement with one of my customers, I realized how the Social aspects between External subscribers and Internal Employees could be bridged using an IBM Connections platform. The customer wanted to revolutionize information exchange between their subscribers and customer service representatives. As subscribers login to the Web Portal, they would receive a highly personalized set of alerts, links to blogs and content relevant to their preferences. The subscriber can ask questions, share their concerns or any other appropriate information including rich media with the customer service representative. As we worked with the customer through this requirement to identify relevant COTS Products, IBM Connections came in as the closest fit. Given the social value provided by IBM Connections, the decision was an easy one for the customer to make.

A social approach to solving common business problems can help businesses optimize their processes, bringing in necessary transparency to their subscribers and employees. It also adds a different dimension to the traditional delivery approach by promoting an active engagement between various stakeholders.

To learn more about Prolifics' social business solutions, click here or visit our website at www.prolifics.com.

Prabhakar Goel is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team of IBM WebSphere experts involved in architecture and delivery of Business Integration solutions, High transaction commercial portals and Solutions based on Open source technologies. He is an expert providing End-to-End SOA implementations utilizing IBM suite of products like Portal, Connections, Content Management, Process Server. He holds Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani and a Graduate Degree in Electrical Engineering from Kurukshetra.

Why I think Lotusphere is a Great Event

2011-12-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of the year again. As we enter the holiday season, I’m already looking forward to starting the New Year with an overview of the latest industry trends and learning about new technology opportunities.

I always felt that it would be nice if someone could give me a quick session and bring me up to speed with technological changes that happened over the past year; what others did with technology and how it helped them, some hands on labs where I could touch and feel all these new technologies in order to increase my confidence when recommending a solution. Lotusphere is just about that for me - it’s a dream come true; exactly what an IT Manager, Decision Maker, Architect, Developer would love to start the year with.

Lotusphere offers Jumpstart sessions to know and understand new products and get a personal touch and feel for them. You get to look out for new technologies offered, their business value, implications, and related opportunities.

In short, Lotusphere features:

Sessions that provide a comprehensive, step-by-step detail on specific technologies
Sessions that provide practical solutions that others have used for solving complex problems of new technologies
Sessions that cover a breadth of topics from core development skills to those needed to build social applications
Sessions that talk about the latest features and product capabilities, deployment techniques
Sessions on product architecture specifically helpful in planning future data center needs and possible opportunities in that area for being creative

If this dose of solid knowledge foundation wasn’t enough, you get to meet and discuss with IBMers from across the globe that are part of design and development teams across most of these technologies. In general, you wouldn’t get to meet this many IBMers under one roof even if you visited an IBM office. Lotusphere presents a great opportunity for every one to socialize and interact with like-minded people, visionaries and thought leaders of the industry.

Finally, the amount of business opportunities Lotusphere presents for everyone is unlike any other show. I have met many of my current customers at previous Lotusphere conferences and had opportunities to interact with them and share how the latest technologies can be leveraged to solve even their toughest business challenges. I make sure to bring many of my customers to Lotusphere so that they can gain knowledge on new trends and technologies. It makes it much easier for me to discuss these new technologies and apply them to their current business problems.

And for me the fun just doesn’t end there; it’s a welcome break from the snow and freezing temperatures of Colorado to spend a week in the warm setting of Orlando!

Prabhakar Goel is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team of IBM WebSphere experts involved in architecture and delivery of Business Integration solutions, High transaction commercial portals and Solutions based on Open source technologies. He is an expert providing End-to-End SOA implementations utilizing IBM suite of products like Portal, Connections, Content Management, Process Server. He holds Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani and a Graduate Degree in Electrical Engineering from Kurukshetra.

What I Am Looking Forward to at Lotusphere 2012

2011-12-15T06:47:00.000-08:00

The main theme of Lotusphere 2012 is ‘Social, Mobile and Cloud’. I would like to use the acronym MoSCo for the same. 2011 represented a key year in terms of a key shift from PC to Mobile world i.e. the year in which Smartphones and tablets will out ship PCs for the first ever time. Consumers no longer use Desktop as the sole channel to access to Web and this opens a window of opportunities in the Mobile and Cloud space.

Lotusphere has over 300 sessions scheduled over one week’s time and it would be a truly overwhelming task trying to come up with a schedule. The complete list of sessions can be viewed at:
http://ibmtvdemo.edgesuite.net/software/lotus/lotusphere/lssessions.pdf

Each session is unique and a lot of homework needs to be done to come up with a schedule that caters to individual needs. Since I’m specifically interested in developments in the mobile space particularly enterprise adoption and multi channel delivery I’m looking forward to the following sessions:

SPN204 Harnessing the Power of Enterprise Mobility
BP210 From Desktop to Mobile and Smart Phones – Lessons Learned: Taking Web Applications Mobile
AD301 Developing Exceptional Mobile and Multi-Channel Applications using IBM Web Experience Factory
AD302 Deliver Rich Mobile Experiences with IBM WebSphere Portal Mobile Theme
ID228 What's New in IBM Connections Mobile

Considering the MoSCo theme of Lotusphere, I’m keeping an eye on the following sessions too, depending on my schedule:

SPN213 The Future of Social Business: A Faculty Panel Discussion
SPN207 Securing and Connecting the Cloud: Insider Tips on Successful Cloud Adoption Strategies
INV302 Strategy in Action: IBM Mobile for Social Business
BP105 tick.tick.tick.tick. #! It's time to Evangelize, Educate and Energize your users to Get Productive, Get Social and Do BUSINESS!
GEEK101 SpeedGeeking!

Another thing I’m really looking forward is the ‘Meet the Developers’ lab. I plan to meet up with folks who worked on ‘Web Experience Factory’ to understand how they tailored the product to suit various delivery channels. Customers are looking for solutions that address multi channel delivery and ‘Web Experience Factory’ addresses the concern in a seamless way. It would be fascinating to go behind the scenes and work with engineers who designed the product.

Finally, I can’t wait for the Wednesday Night Party, a must go for attendees and Blogger Open on Thursday afternoon. There is so much more at Lotusphere than all the wonderful sessions.

Laks Sundararajan is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management and Collaboration technologies. He has led the implementation of many global projects using IBM WebSphere Portal and has extensive background in design and development of enterprise portals. He specializes in providing Enterprise SOA solutions leveraging WebSphere Portal, Content Management, Tivoli and Mashup’s. He holds Masters in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a Graduate Degree in Engineering from BITS, Pilani.

The 3 levers of Business Agility in Action. Prolifics Weighs In!

2011-12-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

In October, IBM hosted a Business Agility Executive Forum in New York City that was streamed live around the world. The event was focused on how organizations can transform their businesses for continued growth in today’s marketplace. During this information-rich forum, those of us in the audience and streaming the video live, were able to hear how successful companies are improving agility through interconnected business processes supported by a flexible infrastructure.

The Business Agility launch was focused on three key levers – decision management, process management and technologies. Another key theme of the event was how organizations should “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast.” All of these themes resonated well with Prolifics and our customer, IDP, who was the keynote client speaker at the event in NYC. Prolifics also had the opportunity to participate, as our VP of BPM and Connectivity, Anant Gupta, was chosen to speak on the panel with IDP. We were pleased to be a part of such a highly informative and interactive panel discussion.

I’d like to discuss IDP’s solution in greater depth, which is a great example of the three levers in action.

Achieve better decisions driven by analytics and business rules - IDP incorporates a sophisticated business rules engine (via ILOG JRules) which is insurance carrier specific and involve algorithms that determine policy rates in real time. Not only does JRules provide the complex logic behind the ratings, but its ease of use allows business analysts, not programmers, to create the rules for each carrier. Another key feature is the governance around the rules. Each configuration can be versioned, and the auditability feature means that it is easy to show compliance with any regulatory needs.

Take a smarter approach to process and integration - IDP integrates data through its usage of IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus across the platform and can deliver data via Web 2.0 on desktops and mobile devices. IBM WESB mediates between the Agent Portal and the third-party Web services carriers use, such as credit reports, payment processing, and claim history repositories. The beauty of the enterprise service bus is that it enables each carrier to link to Web services without affecting the core SaaS solution. No matter how customized the user experience is, the SaaS solution doesn’t have to know anything about the back-end systems it is calling.

Accelerate application, service and information delivery with SOA and extend reach to cloud and mobile – IDP’s solution is a SaaS-based insurance agent portal. Since SaaS is administered by the provider on a one-to-many basis, it’s easier for the provider while also freeing carriers and agents from software administration. Additionally, SaaS is future-proof by scaling and allowing for growth. IDP also offers 24/7 access from anywhere in the world thanks to its mobile component which requires zero architectural changes to the platform. That means that companies can immediately increase efficiency by having insurers, agents and customers all have access to the tools they need and be self-serving.

Another key theme at the launch, “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast,” is a philosophy that Prolifics has always adopted helping customers move toward SOA and BPM. In previous years we won the Impact award for work that we did at customer, Equinox Fitness. I recall for that account we created a 3-year strategic plan and roadmap for them, yet we created quick wins to help them realize value immediately while moving them toward fulfilling their long term vision. This is definitely an approach that I would recommend, combining both strategic and tactical activities.

For a video replay of the Business Agility Executive Forum, please click here. I would also like to share some photos from the event. You can read about Prolifics' solution at IDP in this case study. To learn more about how Prolifics is helping companies with their SOA and BPM initiatives, visit our website: www.prolifics.com.

Devi Gupta, Vice President, Marketing for Prolifics

IBM Security Portfolio

2011-11-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

Ever wanted a quick, no nonsense explanation of what IBM security products are and where they came from? Well, here it is:

ISS – network and host security (X-Force acquisition)
TIM – identity management (access360 acquisition)
TAMesso – desktop single sign on (Encentuate acquisition)
TFIM – federation of access (homegrown)
TDI – data transformation (Metamerge acquisition)
TAMeb – web app access control (Dascom acquisition)
TSIEM – security event management (Q1 Lab acquisition)
TCIM – compliance dashboard (Consul Risk Management acquisition)
DataPower – XML gateway
i2 – crime prevention
BigFix – patch management
Guardium – database security
Openpages – governance risk and compliance
Algorithmics – financial risk management

Alex Ivkin is a senior IT Security Architect with a focus in Identity and Access Management at Prolifics. Mr. Ivkin has worked with executive stakeholders in large and small organizations to help drive security initiatives. He has helped companies succeed in attaining regulatory compliance, improving business operations and securing enterprise infrastructure. Mr. Ivkin has achieved the highest levels of certification with several major Identity Management vendors and holds the CISSP designation. He is also a speaker at various conferences and an active member of several user communities.

Self Service Applications and Case Management

2011-10-24T07:13:00.003-07:00

In today’s electronic world, any organization that serves its customers should have a means of communication to provide higher levels of service. Gone are those days where customers use to make phone calls or visit a customer service center to get their work done. Today customers are using electronic mediums like PCs, mobile devices, tablets, kiosks, to perform their tasks. Need therefore arises to build self service applications that are intuitive and time sensitive to information that customers need.

IBM Case Manager is an enterprise case management system that provides a 360 degree view of any case that is being worked upon. Information flow to and from the case management system can be from multiple sources. Case Management systems are predominantly viewed as an internal application to be used by knowledge workers and the management in an organization. Customers normally do not have access Case Management system. In order to provide a seamless integration between the customers and the Case Management system a self service application is required. Self Service Applications could be internet enabled web applications that have seamless connection to the Case Management System. The IBM Case Manager provides industry standard interfaces to enable such Self Service Applications to communicate with the Cases and their data.

Case Study:
Our customer, a large city organization, is in the process of modernizing its systems to provide better services to its members. As part of this Modernization effort, Prolifics is helping this customer in building an enterprise case management solution leveraging IBM Lotus Forms to capture the member inputs in electronic format and submit it to IBM Case Manager for further processing. Members can also view the status of the case using the Self Service Portal deployed in IBM WebSphere.

Benefits of Member Services Self Service Application:
Members can log on to submit their request over the web either from PC or other web enabled devices like smart phones, tablets, touch pads, etc.

Members can have a 360 degree view of their service requests and collaborate with their service provider for processing their requests

The turnaround time for processing member service requests is reduced from weeks (using paper request) to few days (using electronic forms)

Technologies Used:
IBM Case Manager 5.0, IBM Lotus Forms, IBM ILOG JRules Engine, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Cognos Now, IBM FileNet P8 5.0 Platform, DB2, Red Hat Linux

Kiru Veerappan is a senior ECM Consultant with 15 years of Software Development and Management experience. He has been working on Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management solutions for more than 10 years. He has created unique solutions while mentoring team members in solving real business issues in a timely and cost effective manner using the latest technologies. He believes in interacting with clients not just to deliver a piece of software but acting as an agent for change, delivering ideas while gathering requirements and providing real knowledge transfer. He has specialized in Content and Workflow Management solutions using IBM FileNet suite of products.

Modernization Project Using IBM Case Manager

2011-10-24T07:13:00.001-07:00

Business Application:
Service Purchase Plan Process

Business Challenge:
Prolifics is currently involved in a project at a large public retirement system. In an effort to modernize its infrastructure, the company wanted to ensure that the architecture is interoperable and robust by proving architecturally-significant functionality rather than demonstrate complete business functionality. Equally important is the need for the system to demonstrate that it is agile enough to be modified (e.g. associated business processes and rules) significantly faster than its UPS (Unified Pension System) counterpart. In addition, the Project must demonstrate that straight-through processing is achievable by allowing exception-free instances of processes to execute to completion without any manual intervention.

IBM Case Manager provides an installation framework where you can install IBM Case Manager in a distributed architecture where IBM Case Manager is installed on a separate system from FileNet P8. The IBM Case Manager installation program installs Case Manager Builder, Case Manager Client, the IBM Case Manager administration client, and the IBM Case Manager API.

The distributed system architecture is ideal for large production environments. The following graphic shows the typical architecture of IBM Case Manager in a distributed environment and the features that IBM Case Manager can integrate with.

Solution:

Using an existing business process, Purchase Service Request, we designed and built the environment, which will be established on a VM configuration. This includes the installation of the requisite IBM Case Management, ILOG JRules, Lotus Forms, Datacap and Thunderhead software. Here is an example of the process flow and how the difference technologies in Case Manager are leveraged:
Case Builder is used for Business Process Modeling and configuring workflows
ILOG Rules Studio authors and tests rules in JRules that are harvested from the existing UPS system
Develop and integrate Lotus Forms user interfaces
Configure a Datacap batch class and release scripts to load documents into FileNet
Define and generate XML payloads containing the data necessary for the production of member correspondence
Create test data, test cases and validation of the testing results
Functional and integration testing of the ICM, ILOG JRules, Lotus Forms, Datacap and Thunderhead application components

Value Proposition:
The company supports Member Service Request transactions online and risk-based quality control, giving them the ability to shorten cycle times, improve service levels, and mitigate risks across their Service Processes. This enables increased throughput and capacity with existing resources and eliminates costs associated with document shipping, inbound document processing and operations processes.

How does IBM Case Manager help our customer?

Provides knowledge workers with a contextual environment and 360-degree case view
Helps knowledge workers create and participate in ad hoc and structured workflows
Delivers real-time case metrics and integrated sentiment and content analyses to streamline workloads and remediate obstacles
Offers a business–focused design that includes interview-style interfaces for case construction and the ability to capture industry best practices in templates
Facilitates sophisticated decision management using an integrated business rules management approach, which uses automation and dynamic business rules to simplify assessment and payment processes and easily respond to ever-changing policies and legislation
Simplifies collaboration and boosts productivity through social software and communication

Key benefits IBM Case Manager Solution:

Program efficacy: achieve better outcomes and results
Employee and case worker effectiveness: handle more cases with fewer resources
Optimal case outcomes: improve safety, cut costs and increase revenue
Process efficiency: leverage automation wherever possible and focus on exceptions
Compliance and visibility: manage risk and achieve compliance cost-efficiently

Khaled Moawad is a business consultant with 15+ years of experience in the field of IT. He has participated in large IT projects at multinational organizations in different fields. Khaled's business consulting experience is in IBM Enterprise Content Management, IBM FileNet, IBM Advanced Case Manager, and Lombardi Business Process Management. Khaled has excellent analytical and wide application-based process re-engineering skills, including project management expertise. During his career, he has gained a wealth of experience throughout all stages of pre-sales, implementation, support, software development and project management.

Choosing a Messaging System: WebSphere MQ vs. WebSphere Application Server Service Integration Bus

2011-09-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

A question that sometimes comes up in our architecture whiteboarding sessions is about the different messaging strategies that are available in Websphere Application Server. IBM developerWorks has now published a great article detailing the differences between WebSphere MQ and the Service Integration Bus that comes with WebSphere Application Server. Check it out by clicking here.

Cyber Security in High Demand

2011-09-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

The old adage says: "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer". In this day and age, the IT department of your organization does not have to worry about the second part. The enemies are already at the gates. And keeping them out is an increasingly challenging task.

A recent study sponsored by Juniper Networks showed that not only there has been a dramatic rise in the number of security breaches in the past year, but the targets have also gotten bigger. The CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Senate, and various state police agencies had their systems under attack. In the first half of 2011 security and data breaches have cost U.S. enterprises almost $96 billion. At this rate the cost for the whole 2011 will be almost twice as much as it was in all of 2010. Consider the fact that 2010 saw 90% of businesses compromised with least one security breach. More than 50% of the compromised businesses had at least two breaches.

Another problem is that "the gates", where the enemies are trying to get through, are everywhere now. The entry points are in the software used by employees. They are in files, emails, web apps, web sites, databases, in everything that is on the information highway. The number of incidents related to malware went up from 4 million in the first quarter of 2010 to 6 million in the first quarter of 2011. It is expected that last year's record $63 billion that companies spent on security will be $75.6 billion in 2011.

As the study showed, the enemies get smarter and the attacks get more complicated in every year. Throw all your defenses up, get every firewall ready, the host and network intrusion protection and detection system, anti-virus, anti-malware, application firewalls and it will still be not enough, because the enemies are a step ahead. The solution? "Know yourself and know your enemy" (Sun Zhu, "Art of War"). Get the right security talent on board and use the right strategy.

The correct strategy, rooted in the governance, risk management and compliance methodology can go a long way. Consider the governance, a system by which an organization controls and directs security development, as a backbone of the approach to managing security and how it relates to the business (http://www.cert.org/governance/ges.html). Then, focus on the compliance and regulations, a key to proactive defenses and enforced regulations of a company's behavior as it pertains to security for a specific nature of the business. Governance is strategic, while compliance is tactical and specific. Addressing compliance and security regulations allows business to focus on particular challenges and vulnerabilities specific to the business type and the vertical it operates in. Finally, adjust risk management, a set of technologies that address day-to-day security work, and include mature components of security such as penetration testing, application security analysis, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems. The success of the security strategy depends on the attention to all three components.

The talent is a different thing. With the increase in the demand for the security experts, in response to the increased attacks, the security talent is becoming more expensive and harder to find. So far, the number of college students with who focus on cyber-security has not been keeping up with the demand. There are even less opportunities in finding experienced security consultants who are up to par with the criminal masterminds of the security underground. Security may be on the radar for around 1.9 million people, but there are only around 346,000 fully dedicated security professionals.

There are, however, security consulting firms, like Prolifics Security Practice (http://www.prolifics.com/business-solutions-security.htm) that can help you both with the talent and the strategy. They bring the best and the brightest security personnel on site to analyze, architect, develop and implement proper defenses and policies to address modern security threats. They help set up proper strategy, so you protect the flanks, tie up the loose ends and govern smartly.

With the increasing number and the caliber of the security breaches you cannot afford to sit around and wait. Find what others are doing, go to conferences, ask consultants, bring help, but do something, because enemies are at the gate.

If you want to read more on the recent rise of the cyber attacks look here: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/05/business/la-fi-hacking-security-20110705

Prolifics will be discussing cyber security in greater depth as a sponsor and speaker at the upcoming Cyber Security for Energy Delivery Conference on September 27-28. The event takes place in San Jose, CA and brings together major utility and asset owners and key government agencies from across North America. I will be co-speaking with IBM at this conference. With experience providing security solutions for the energy and utilities industry, we will be sharing our security solutions and recent case studies around ID and password management, single sign-on, directory services, Web-based authorization, federation and other areas. For more information on the Cyber Security for Energy Delivery conference, please click here.

Alex Ivkin is a senior IT Security Architect with a focus in Identity and Access Management at Prolifics. Mr. Ivkin has worked with executive stakeholders in large and small organizations to help drive security initiatives. He has helped companies succeed in attaining regulatory compliance, improving business operations and securing enterprise infrastructure. Mr. Ivkin has achieved the highest levels of certification with several major Identity Management vendors and holds the CISSP designation. He is also a speaker at various conferences and an active member of several user communities.

Test Automation for SAP Packaged Applications

2011-08-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

SAP Packaged Applications allow you to rapidly configure and customize business processes as your environment changes. To ensure the quality, performance and reliability of these applications, you need a sophisticated testing solution that can be configured and customized as quickly as your SAP landscape. In this article, we will show you how you can use your IBM® Rational® Functional Tester (RFT) toolset along with tools from IBM Ready-for-Rational partner, Arsin.

In this blog entry, I will discuss:

A structured approach to SAP testing
SAP current test automation paradigm and its challenges
The need for a new solution for SAP test automation
How Arsin Packaged Test Automation for SAP integrated with IBM Rational Functional Tester helps address these challenges

We will examine the functionality of Effecta Validation Engine, in conjunction with RFT, to collect the test requirements, define and build the test cases, build the test procedures, and execute and analyze the reports. Use of RFT and Arsin's tools enables you to greatly expand your test scope, significantly compress your test schedule, and reduce testing costs.

A Structured Approach to SAP Testing
SAP implementations pose some of the most intriguing and difficult challenges in the QA universe. The thickly netted system is extremely integrated and is typically linked to every business process in the enterprise. To tackle such an immense system, QA engineers must approach SAP applications with care.
With more than a decade of experience in testing SAP systems for a large client base in myriad industry verticals, we have developed a test maturity model assessment and improvement framework to bring about an organized and a structured approach to SAP testing. This framework has a three pronged approach, which offers process improvement, knowledge management, and test automation, as follows:

1. Process improvement. Process improvement deals with the assessment of the current Test Maturity Model and developing a plan to improve the Test Maturity Model to the next level and then implement it. A mature test process that has standardized templates, well-defined processes, clear protocols, and no bottlenecks provides for a complete and comprehensively tested SAP system. By comparing the current test maturity model with industry standards and identifying the gaps and focusing on them, test maturity can be improved.

2. Knowledge management. Knowledge management deals with institutionalizing QA knowledge collected over time. Traditional testing for SAP systems relies on the functional and technical consultants of the SAP system for subject matter expertise to deal with various instances. In this phase, test artifact libraries are built for critical business process for regression. The following test artifacts are documented:

Test Requirements
Test Cases
Test Procedures

3. Test automation. After test artifacts have been documented in the regression library during the knowledge management phase, they are ready to be automated. However, before they are automated, these test artifacts are analyzed for feasibility of automation, the effort required for automation, the frequency of use of the business process, and the longevity of the business. With automation, execution components are developed using RFT, and Validation Components are configured using Arsin's Effecta Validation Engine to execute them automatically.

The remainder of this discussion focuses on the test automation aspect of the Structured SAP Testing Approach. Our belief is that RFT, in conjunction with Arsin's Effecta Validation Engine, makes SAP testing thorough, comprehensive, easy, and cost effective.

Importance of Test Automation in SAP Implementations
The SAP landscape is continuously changing, as a result of changes to SAP modules from SAP, business process changes within the client’s company, changes to the system environment, changes to applications interfacing with SAP, and a multitude of regulatory compliance mandates.

In order to keep up with these changes, SAP systems must be thoroughly tested. With every change, there is a regression library of test cases that needs to be executed to ensure stability. Each test requires time and effort when executed manually; by comparison, automated test take a very small fraction of the time and effort to execute. Automation also helps makes most of the test assets reusable.

Current SAP Testing Solutions and their Limitations
The existing SAP testing model on the market today makes a very rudimentary use of automation, in terms of:

Validation: In most cases, user interface (UI) tools that are available are used to automate test execution, which is only about 25% of the total testing effort. Validation represents more than 75% of this effort, and scrubbing the data using UI test automation tools is difficult. A certain level of validation is possible through UI based test automation tools, however it takes a long time to script this validation and any change requires a lot of coding following the first implementation.

Data management: Traditionally, data used for testing is captured and maintained in spreadsheets. Searching and sorting through this data is difficult, as is maintaining the consistency of data across users and locations. This difficulty is compounded by ever increasing volumes of test data to be maintained. In addition, there is no intelligent association between SAP metadata and its corresponding test data.

Managing change: Changes to SAP implementations occur during reconfiguration or the addition of custom-built components (programs). In these situations, the scripts for automated test execution need to be changed regularly, which is difficult. Moreover, when using UI tools for automation, 75% of the effort needs to be constantly re-worked to keep up with the changes to the SAP system.

Addressing these Limitations
The limitations above described call for a new solution that can address these issues. We offer a complete and scalable testing solution that combines Arsin Effecta Validation Engine with IBM Rational Functional Tester.

By automating the validation of data, business processes, custom development and integrations across SAP applications, you can increase the quality of implementation, support multiple changes in their environment and mitigate business risks. Also, by eliminating manual testing you can avoid greater difficulties in production that ultimately impact the quality and performance of the business. Arsin’s Effecta Test Suite provides the benefits of a complete testing solution by automating impact analyses of changes, test data maintenance, test execution and validation.

Figure 1: Arsin Effecta Solution Architecture for testing SAP applications

Test Data Manager
Stores test data along with criteria in the Effecta database. Before executing an automated test, validity of test data is checked on the target system and system is automatically updated. If the test data no longer exists in the target system or cannot be reused, the data set update feature will help to refresh with new valid data.

Script Manager
Automatically enhances recorded scripts and eliminates need for customization. Script manager enables script less automation of IBM Rational Functional Tester.

Change Impact Manager
When changes occur in a system, Change Impact Manager automatically extracts affected objects and identifies test cases to be executed for regression testing. It also identifies objects being changed that don’t have test cases in the library.

Report Manager
Report Manager provides out-of-the-box reports for tracking test artifacts, development and test execution. Detailed test results pinpoint failed events in test case.

Test Manager
Effecta promotes reusability and repeatability with the following features:
- Ability to create Test Requirements and link them to Test Cases and development objects
- Ability to create Test Cases and link them to Test Requirements for coverage analysis
- Ability to create separate Test execution steps in the form of Test Procedures and link them to Test cases
- Defect management
- Dashboard for reporting and metrics

Validation Manager for Middleware
Simulates inbound messages at various data interchange points and validates outbound messages.
Automatically validates translations and mappings

Validation Manager for Transactional Systems
Validation Manager for Transactional Systems is a completely configurable, customizable and readily deployable validation library of components for various business processes. It significantly accelerates validation by automatically extracting the actual data created by transactions and comparing it with expected results. The Validation Manager is specifically designed to support SAP systems.

Validation Manager for BI
Tests Business Intelligence systems during initial implementation and during maintenance and support pack deployments. It also automates the validation of data loaded from multiple ERP and other systems. Provides sophisticated reporting including detailed results.

Conclusion
The benefits of using automation in SAP testing are abundant. Test automation, deployed with minimal effort, enables increased test coverage, which in turn reduces cycle time and enables efficient bug detection early in the development cycle. Since test automation is designed for reusability, routine tasks are eliminated and total cost of ownership is reduced. Test automation is far more precise and consistent, and features standardized reporting, enabling clear test analysis across the QA environment.

Sarat Addanki is the Vice President, ERP Practice. He has 18 years of experience in the ERP arena including design, development and testing of ERP implementations. He was part of a SAP Quality professionals team contributing to the design of SAP Test Accelerator TAO. He founded the ERP Division at Arsin, which focuses on developing frameworks and accelerators to ensure delivery excellence, reduce the overall cost of ownership and increase productivity in ERP implementations. The Test Accelerators he designed significantly improve the testing process, knowledge management and test automation. His division focuses on providing quality services for SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sterling, Retek and Middleware applications. His domain expertise ranges from Pharmaceutical Distribution, Hi-Tech, Manufacturing to Retail industries. He is a PMI (Project Management Institute) certified Project Management Professional (PMP). Sarat holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.

Panther Applications in Croatia

2011-07-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

Brief History
When the Prolifics application development toolset came to the Croatian market in 1990, independent software vendor company Pardus (then 4-MATE) chose it to develop a back office application for a large retailer. The character-mode JAM5 application was running on an Intel-based UNIX system, with 60+ concurrent users, the largest in the region at that time.

Based on the successful experience with the Prolifics toolset, Pardus developed another large integrated information system for retail banks. The platform was again character mode JAM5 on UNIX, with custom mechanisms for distributed database support. The system has since migrated to the recent version of Panther and is still in use today.

Pardus continued to use JAM and Panther for its own development, and started to distribute it to other Independent Software Venders (ISV) and end user organizations with their own IT staff. Programs for JAM and Panther training, consulting, project management, and end-user development team mentoring were created. This contributed to the rapid success of the tool in the Croatian market.

As a result, Panther is now used by the two largest banks in the country. One of them still uses the originally Pardus-developed software for its core data processing, supported by 70+ in-house Panther developers and a team of Pardus consultants. Other users, apart from ISV houses, include departments like the Croatian postal services, customs, health insurance, several ministries and Zagreb municipal administrations.

An Example: Forensic DNA Database
Pardus uses and encourages other fellow-developers to use Panther for a wide variety of applications. One interesting example is the Pardus-developed eQMS::DNA application, a DNA “fingerprint” database, now in use in Central Forensic Laboratories in two countries.

When the opportunity to develop such an application arrived, Pardus again chose Panther because of its excellent rapid prototyping abilities, flexibility of its scripting language and the versatility of its database transaction generator. Native XML import and export capabilities were an advantage.

The resulting eQMS::DNA application is a system primarily used for maintenance and efficient searching of database of human genotypes for forensic purposes (such as identification of biological traces like blood, hair, skin etc), but also has the capability to be used in fields such as livestock lineage tracking.

DNA fingerprinting relies on the fact that certain points in human (or other) genome (loci) change relatively quickly (display polymorphism) from generation to generation – fast enough to form a combination unique for an individual, but slowly enough to be stable within single individual's cells. The type of polymorphisms and number of loci used for constructing genotypes in eQMS::DNA is configurable, but typical installation will employ a standard set of 13 to 18 STR (short tandem repeat) loci.

The system maintains data on individual donors with optional end-user configurable personal and demographic data, multiple samples containing genetic material taken from the donor, and genotypes obtained from the samples, possibly using multiple techniques and identification kits. Both processed genotypes and optional additional data such as peak quality, confidence parameters and raw electroferograms can be kept. The system also keeps profiles of unidentified traces.

Manual entry of data to Panther screens, from plate gel electrophoresis is possible, but the typical data source results from automated capillary electrophoresis sequencers. Communication with systems such as Interpol DNA Gateway is also supported.

The searches can be performed interactively or in full automatic mode. All searches, including those using partial profiles and relaxed criteria are typically done in less than a second. The system also supports mixed-stain searches with provisions for common contaminant identification (such as genotypes of laboratory or other forensic personnel).

Interpol maintains a list of available DNA profiling systems (probably the most well known being FBI CODIS). eQMS::DNA is the only application from a commercial software developer.

Figure 1:Screen shot of eQMS::DNA profiling application

New Developments
Pardus has assisted many clients in modernizing their legacy character-mode JAM and Panther applications.

For example, a Complex Card Management application for a leading Croatian bank was recently ported from JAM5 character-mode to Panther5 GUI. Initial functionality was complete within a month, with an additional month spent adding capabilities made possible by the new version of the Panther tool.

Pardus mentored several of their customers as they transitioned from character-mode to GUI to the Web environment, and from 2-tier to multi-tier architecture. One example includes developing a Java wrapper to call mainframe-based Web services from within a 2-tier GUI and Web Panther application. Another customer, a public health institution, uses the similar Pardus-provided tool to provide their clients with controlled access to their LIMS software (also developed by Pardus) that contains data on analysis of food and water samples.

Despite the market focus shifting away from dedicated application development toolsets, Panther stays a viable product in the Croatian market, thanks to the high penetration and the level of experience and expertise available to its customers.

For more info see http://dna.pardus.hr/ and http://lims.pardus.hr/.

Dragi Raos is a co-founder of Pardus d.o.o a software development and IT consulting company from Zagreb, Croatia. Pardus is a distributor of Panther and JAM in Croatia. Dragi has three decades of experience in technical and scientific computing, design and development of complex financial applications and training and coaching of development teams, he has served as team leader or technical consultant with clients ranging from International Atomic Energy Agency to large regional banks to public health institutions. Dragi's technical expertise includes database management systems, middleware, CASE tools and a wide range of development environments, including 20 years of experience with Panther and all versions of JAM.

Learn About Security: Open Authorization in Federated Applications using IBM Security Tools

2011-07-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) simplifies application integration by providing single sign on between disparate web applications, so the users do not have to share their passwords or re-enter them. TFIM uses various protocols to achieve federation, which include SAML, WS-Federation, and OpenID. Our Security LoB has been invited by IBM to participate in a beta program to implement the popular authorization protocol, OAuth. OAuth, which stands for Open Authorization, is a protocol that allows users to approve applications to act on their behalf. OAuth makes it possible to exchange critical information across distinct organizations based upon a service level agreement that states one application as an OAuth client and the other as an OAuth provider. One major benefit of the OAuth protocol is its emphasis on authorization, when compared to its alternatives. This is giving rise to a hybrid model in which our customers can combine protocols like SAML or OpenID for authentication and OAuth for authorization. OAuth, besides making the token exchange mechanism transparent to the user, provides mechanisms to define the scope which the Client could access regarding the user’s data on the Provider.

Here is a fictitious example. Imagine PFAP as a financial application dashboard developed by Prolifics that provides a user with a consolidated view of his account balances across multiple banks. First, PFAP would have to be in an agreement as an OAuth client across all of the banks, from which account information would be obtained on behalf of the user. Once an agreement is set up with each Provider, PFAP would be registered as an OAuth client to those particular banks (Providers) and so would be provided with a client ID and a shared secret for each one. This information (Client ID, Shared Secret) would help the Provider determine, if the application (Client) requesting data on behalf of user, is one of its trusted OAuth clients. Assuming an agreement between Prolifics and a leading financial firm, PFAP is one of the OAuth clients that has access to the Firm's customer data, upon approval. The first time a user logs into the PFAP application, he will be asked to add his account number to PFAP. Once the user selects “Add Account” button, the user would be redirected to the Firm's website, where he would be asked to put in his credentials. At this step a token would be requested by PFAP from the Firm in the background, which gets authorized upon user logging into the Firm's website. This action grants access to PFAP to act on the user’s behalf.

From the user’s perspective, once logged in the Firm would display a “Consent to Authorize” page where the user would needs to permit access to PFAP to act on his behalf and retrieve information within a certain scope, which in this case would be user’s account balance. Once the user agrees to permit PFAP to act on his behalf and retrieve balance information, a verifier code is sent to PFAP in the background. PFAP would then request an access token from the Firm's application sending the verifier code, Client ID, Shared Secret and few other parameters to request an Access token. The Firm would verify the Client ID and Shared Secret to determine if PFAP is one of its OAuth clients and then would verify the Verifier Code to generate an Access token. Once PFAP receives the Access token, it enables PFAP to get the user’s data on his behalf though within a permitted scope, which in this case would be the account balance. So next time the user logs in, since PFAP would already have an Access token, the user would be able to see his balance information without having to login to the Firm's website. Now, implementation of hybrid models is being thought upon, where a combination of OAuth with protocols like SAML or OpenID would help us achieve SSO at the same time. For instance, once logged into PFAP, an implementation of hybrid model would enable the user to perform other operations in the Firm's website like balance transfers, by launching a new link to the Firm without the need to login again (SSO).

BPM Best Practices for the Financial Industry

2011-07-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

In our current economic environment, the financial industry is challenged today by two very significant needs to improve efficiency and enhance service. I spoke about these business needs last year at an event hosted by Prolifics and IBM, and they couldn’t be more significant today. To satisfy these requirements, organizations are tasked with driving down costs by consolidating duplicated and siloed systems into well-defined, reusable services and managing customer service levels with greater flexibility.

This industry has a collection of 'habits,' or best practices, that have a powerful effect on business performance in these critical areas. Over time, we have captured the best practices that have proven to be successful with process management programs within the financial industry. At this seminar, we reviewed 11 specific practices that help financial services organizations experience success with projects/delivery, team competency and leveraging Business Process Management (BPM) across the enterprise.

I’d like to share some of these ‘habits’ with you now:

Make BPM about Productivity and Visibility

Metrics, KPIs and SLAs should be part of the DEFINE phase
Don’t scope out metrics
Remember: visibility is critical to improvement

Never “One and Done”

Iterative Approach: continuous process improvement
Additional phases or versions will always happen: The value in BPM is that you can get your first version out there quickly, but the real opportunity here is really in version 2, 3 and 4 where you are bringing entirely new levels of capability and sophistication of efficiency of effectiveness to your organization

Don’t Skip Process Analysis

Processes are done by many different parties! Process analysis helps you understand: What does the end-to-end look like? What data is needed at different points? What is the velocity that we need in this process? How quickly do we need turnaround time?
Process analysis sets apart traditional applications development from building process applications

Build a Complete Team

Have the right mix of resources on the team with a broad set of skill sets
Java (.NET) developers aren’t all you need

Establish the Owners

A requirement for succeeding with BPM is that processes must be business-owned. You need people from the business to engage and determine what the process priorities are.
They key benefit to this iterative approach is that you can make tradeoffs and changes to adapt to changing business conditions and requirements. A level of business engagement will ensure that the right decisions are being made.

In addition, financial institutions face a highly demanding environment requiring exceeding agility. The seminar focused on how customers can reap the benefits of the business rule approach to operational decision making in the areas of payments, credit and lending, risk management and customer care for financial institutions. With business rules, key decisions in your financial processes can be changed in minutes to days rather than months - bringing new levels of efficiency to day-to-day operations.

To read more about these 11 Habits for highly successful BPM programs and the benefits of a business rules management system, please take a look at this presentation. For any questions about these topics or Prolifics’ solutions for the financial industry, please email solutions@prolifics.com.

Don Rivera is a Client Executive with Prolifics managing the NY & NJ Metro territory. Don is a certified IBM WebSphere Solution Sales Professional working with SMB and Enterprise accounts to determine how to leverage IBM software technology to meet their critical business objectives. He brings over 16 years of experience working in the information technology industry in various system engineering, sales and business development roles with companies such as Computer Sciences Corporation, Level 3 Communications and BBN Technologies.

Application Security for QA Managers

2011-07-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

Historically, application developers and Quality Assurance (QA) teams have not focused extensively on security. IT management typically asks developers to achieve two goals—build innovative features and see that the project is completed on time. On the other hand, QA teams ensure that the application functions as intended and that it can scale effectively and perform under load (functional and performance testing). Unfortunately, during the development and QA phases, security testing doesn't usually take place. In fact, it is often viewed as an initiative that works in opposition to the aforementioned goals, as it can extend the already lengthy development and testing phases. Far too many organizations treat security as an afterthought as opposed to integrating it throughout the development process. In addition, most developers, QA professionals and QA managers do not consider themselves responsible for application security—assuming that security will be managed while the application is live.

Application Security is a Quality Issue:
The majority of vulnerabilities in Web applications reside in the custom business logic of the application itself. Compensating controls provided by external products are temporary solutions which simply hide the vulnerability. It is typically only a matter of time before an attacker identifies an alternate entry point or is able to encode an attack in such a manner that a signature-based technology is unable to detect the attack packet. Only by implementing security in SDLC is it possible to fully protect the application. This is the reason that developers, QA teams, and the QA management must share the responsibility of implementing security at SDLC. Application security is most effective as an iterative process that is applied consistently throughout the development process. Some of the risks posed by an insecure application are financial in nature and the cost of a single security breach can be significant. It is important to remember that the total cost can be difficult to fully measure due to the intangible nature of many costs. While the cost of labor to remediate the damage would be an obvious cost, damage to a corporate reputation caused by a defaced website or an unavailable application due to a distributed denial of service attack can be much more difficult to measure. Regulatory risk is another substantial and growing concern. Failure to adhere to a growing list of government and industry regulations can lead to fines, discontinuation of services, and even civil and criminal penalties.

I will be speaking more about the importance of Application Security at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in October. I look forward to presenting my QA technical paper and sharing more of my thoughts. To learn more about the conference, please click here.

Dr. Ravi Kiran Yerra is an internationally known speaker with his doctorates degree in internet security management. Dr. Yerra has over fifteen years of real-world experience in delivering application security, product security, information security and software testing across the globe in numerous industries and verticals. Since 1995, Dr. Yerra has been involved in multiple information security projects and played a vital role in establishing various private and government information security initiatives.

Leveraging your Panther Assets with Web Services

2011-05-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

Software applications have become a valuable component of modern enterprises. They contain critical business knowledge, and represent significant design and development effort. It only makes sense to extract as much value from these applications as possible. As enterprises grow and merge, the need to share the information in these applications becomes imperative. This applies to your Panther applications we well. For example, order entry systems need to talk to billing systems, shipping systems, and so on.

While there are many methods for accessing your Panther applications, Web Services provides a common method, across diverse platforms, products, and computer languages, in a well-defined manner. As long as each application implements the Web Services standards, applications can freely interoperate with each other. This bi-directional communication is independent of the technology that the target application was written in.

Your Panther applications can participate in this inter-application communication by implementing Web Services, multiplying the value within them. In this way, systems throughout your enterprise, or beyond, can benefit from the existing code and data within your Panther applications.

You can also utilize your Panther tools and skills to create new RAPID Database Transactional Web Services for just about any application. This is totally independent from your existing Panther applications and utilizes the same rapid development platform.

For a complimentary Discovery Call, please call your Business Development Manager at 1 (800) 458-3313 ext 2 or email crm@prolifics.com.

Prolifics BPM Methodology - 5 Steps to Improve Your Process and Build Your Evidence-Based Business Case

2011-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Business process improvement is a systematic approach that helps organizations become more efficient by optimizing their core business processes to increase productivity and reduce cost; business process improvement initiatives have emerged to become essential drivers for organizations to compete in a rapidly and unpredictably changing market. According to a Gartner EXP Survey, improving business processes has been one of the top 5 business priorities for the past 5 consecutive years.

The business process improvement approach is a series of actions taken by a process owner to improve a business process to meet a new goal defined by the organization. Those actions have to follow a methodology or a framework in order to create successful improvement results.

Any process improvement methodology consists of 3 macro level steps that occur in the following order:

In this white paper, I will present Prolifics' methodology for process improvement. The methodology is designed to address those fundamental challenges with traditional process improvement approaches; it also provides a simple road map for process improvement that is powered by innovative technologies that will guide you step by step in your process improvement journey and expedite the process improvement cycle. This methodology is presented in the context of a real customer initiative to improve a core business process.

To read this white paper, click here.

Hanna Aljaliss is a Solution Architect in the BPM & Connectivity practice at Prolifics. He has over 7 years of consulting experience in the IT field - 5 of those were focused on IBM Business Process Management and SOA implementations. He has led several major enterprise initiatives across different industries from the conceptual stage to the live solution stage. Hanna holds a Master degree in computer engineering from Stevens Tech and has been a frequent presenter at the IBM's Premier Conference for Business and IT Leaders (IMPACT).

Converting your Legacy JAM Application into a Panther Web Application

2011-04-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

Converting a legacy JAM/Panther 2-tier application into a Panther Web Application offers a significant advantage: a conversion allows reusing a significant portion of the existing code as most JPL and C functions continue to be fully functional.

Although straightforward, the conversion process is not trivial or automatic. The conversion process does present some challenges and involves making changes and additions to the existing code.

In this document, I start by quickly describing some key differences between a JAM/Panther 2-tier application running on a GUI environment and a Panther application running on the web. Then, I proceed to discuss aspects of the application that are reviewed during the process of converting a GUI application to the web.

Key differences between a GUI application and a Web application
In a GUI environment, when a JAM/Panther application is executed, it runs on a dedicated process that performs several tasks for the application: this one process makes the calls required to display the screens and widgets to the user, handles the screen event cycle and maintains the application state. In this same process, all the screens and JPL code are loaded and executed. This process, also, connects to the backend, which is typically a database that is accessed through the Panther DBi.

When an application is executed on the web, the architecture is quite different. For starters, instead of having one process perform virtually all the tasks required for the application to work, several processes (residing in different hosts) are involved in performing the tasks required for an application to run on the web.

On the web, the browser is the only program running on the client computer. It allows the user to interact with the web pages dynamically generated on the server. Once a given page is displayed to the user, there is no interaction with the server until the user performs an action that results in submitting a request to the server. More specifically, as the user interacts with a page in the browser, several events are generated and they can be divided into two groups: events that are handled locally by the browser alone (for example, when the user tabs between the fields in the page) and events that require server processing (for example, when the user clicks on a push button to perform a search in the database).

When an event in this second group occurs, the browser submits a request to the HTTP server. The request is then passed along to an available Panther Web Application process, which executes the appropriate Panther code and replies with a new rendition of the screen in the form of a new HTML page. This HTML code is then transmitted back to the browser and displayed to the user.

This is perhaps the root cause of most of the changes required for converting an application to the web: whereas in a GUI environment, a single process continually handles the screen event cycle, executes the appropriate Panther code and displays the application screens using the platform’s native API. On the web, these operations are split between the browser (which renders the HTML code it receives and maintains its own event cycle as the user interacts with it) and the Panther Web Application processes residing on the server (which receive requests from the clients, execute the appropriate Panther code, and reply with HTML code that is sent back to the browser).

The Panther Web Application processes that actually execute the Panther code are a pool of processes called Jservers. Each of these Jserver processes handles one request at a time, and generates a response. Being stateless processes, the Jservers retain no memory of previous transmissions: as soon as a Jserver process has produced the reply for a request, it again becomes available to process more requests, which may come from the same user session or, in most cases, from an altogether different user session. Using stateless processes is a common practice for web applications because they allow excellent scalability: a small number of stateless processes can handle requests coming from a large number of users.

Maintaining the Application state
So, if the Jservers are stateless processes: how is the application state maintained for each user session on the web? The short answer is: by caching data.

Panther Web automatically caches application state data, such as the values of hidden widgets, scroll state of widgets, and bundles.

Two modes of caching data are supported: embedding the cached data in the generated HTML code, or keeping the cached data on the server and embedding just a reference to the cached data in the generated HTML code.

Panther Web also provides functions to define and use context global variables from JPL code. Such variables are set by a specific user session and remain private to that user session.

Functions to store and retrieve data in HTTP cookies are also provided.

HTML Generation
As described previously, the application screens are dynamically rendered as HTML code to be presented on the browser. Panther automatically generates the HTML code for the screens and the widgets in them.

The HTML generated by Panther may need to be customized, mainly for 2 reasons: to fine-tune the visual appearance of the screen on the web and to integrate JavaScript code.

Using the Panther editor, the name of a pre-existing HTML document can be specified in the HTML-template property of a screen thereby providing the structure of the HTML generated for the screen. This allows you the flexibility to determine how the HTML for the screen is generated. The provided HTML template is tied to the Panther backend by embedding Panther-provided tags into it, thus specifying the exact location where the HTML code for the dynamic elements are to be included in the resulting HTML page.

Custom HTML properties can also be set for the individual widgets on a screen. These properties allow making additions or changes to the HTML attributes within the INPUT element that Panther generates for a widget.

These properties can also be used to hook in JavaScript functions and JavaScript libraries such as Dojo and jQuery.

To give you an example of the kind of things that can be done by customizing the HTML generation, see the screen shot of an application screen in the Panther editor.

By including the code shown below in the screen JPL, the attribute property of the Single Line Text widget called “i_odate” is modified before Panther generates the HTML for the screen:

When the screen is displayed in the browser, see how the widget is no longer displayed just as an input field, but as a Dojox calendar widget.

Navigation
GUI applications typically have menu bars that allow the user to navigate between screens. On the web, there is no natural replacement for menu bars and many alternatives are available for providing navigation controls on the web. During the conversion, it is necessary to select the one that better suits your needs.

Web Event Handling
You can provide JPL procedures with the names listed below, and those procedures get executed as events occur in a web application:
web_startup – This procedure is called when a Jserver process is started. The code to open the connection to the database is typically invoked from this JPL function and the database connection is maintained through the whole life of the Jserver process. This procedure can also be used to load public procedures and data used through the application, specify database error handlers, and define global variables.
web_enter – Each screen can have its own implementation of this procedure. It gets called after the screen entry event and before the web browser data is loaded into the Panther screen structure. This is only called once on each request submitted.
web_exit – Each screen can also have its own implementation of this procedure. This is invoked after all other events have been processed and immediately before Panther dynamically generates the HTML output for the request being processed.
web_shutdown – This procedure is invoked when the Jserver process is shutting down. This is where any required application clean up is typically invoked, including the code to close database connections.

Conclusion
Several approaches need to be evaluated when facing the prospect of making an existing Panther GUI application available on the Internet or an intranet.
This document has provided you with a glimpse of the differences between the two environments and has presented aspects of the application that need to be addressed during a conversion. Hopefully this information has piqued your interest about converting GUI applications to the web in general and the Panther Web product in particular.

Eduardo Ramos is a Project Manager at Prolifics. He has over 16 years of experience in the IT field, specializing in the development and migration of multi-tier applications using various technologies including Panther and the IBM WebSphere family of products.

Outsourcing IT

2011-03-10T07:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking recently about the whole “Cloud” thing, “Cloud computing”, “Cloud hosting”, “Identity Management in the Cloud”, cloud-this and cloud-that. In an essence, it all seems be a business telling to its IT department – you are too expensive. We want to get rid of you, without getting rid of the services you provide.

Business knows that an IT department is important. It saves money in many ways, keeps the back-office running and helps in executing business processes. But in many organizations IT costs too much, with all its security, high availability, disaster recovery, compliance and support requirements. Business cringes seeing all the capital job proposals and budgets for IT spendings. This is why they are looking for an alternative. Say, an alternative, that gives the back-office support without having to worry about all the high-ticket items, like HA, DR and GRC. Items that IT seems to stick every year on the annual budget proposals. An this is exactly what the “cloud” tries to provide. The cloud is an abstracted business function, where all high-ticket IT items are spread over multiple clients and thus are cheaper to have for any particular client. The IT department, after all, is just a business paid expense, that has no real, intrinsic value all by itself.

The business, of course, wants the high level of service, the good “Service Level Agreement” to cover the needs of the business. This is where we enter the world of ITIL. The SLA’s the ITIL are a step in getting IT outsourced. An SLA’s without a extra value is a way to make IT separable, commoditizable. I am not saying they are bad. I am saying if you exceed at delivering the services on the SLA’s without bringing benefits to a business, you are no different than a third party outlet selling server time for a monthly fee.

So, before you dismiss the “cloud” business as yet another popular, but short lived word in the IT vernacular, think of the implications that this model has for the future of IT. There is a trend of businesses cutting back on the IT departments. I really see only one way for the IT department to survive this transition. IT can live on by becoming a cloud integration department. On the low level, someone needs to integrate in-house systems with the clouds during and after the transition to could based services. On the high level, someone needs to understand the business and to know how to map it to the services different clouds provide.

Granted, it may take a decade before the onslaught of the clouds, depending on how much push the business is doing toward cost-cutting, but start training up now for one of these roles, if you are working in an IT department.

PS. Yes, the cloud providers will need the IT skills to develop and maintain the cloud offerings, but the number of jobs will be much smaller compared to the in-house IT staff.

To see the original blog entry, please click here.

Alex Ivkin is a senior IT Security Architect with a focus in Identity and Access Management at Prolifics. Mr. Ivkin has worked with executive stakeholders in large and small organizations to help drive security initiatives. He has helped companies succeed in attaining regulatory compliance, improving business operations and securing enterprise infrastructure. Mr. Ivkin has achieved the highest levels of certification with several major Identity Management vendors and holds the CISSP designation. He is also a speaker at various conferences and an active member of several user communities.

Enterprise Single Sign-On Tug of War

2011-03-08T11:03:00.000-08:00

A desktop based Single Sign-On solution is a joy to have, if you are a desktop user. Equally, it is a pain to have if you work for an IT department and have to support it. It looks like the middle line is very thin in many organizations and the way it moved often determines success of an Enterprise Single Sign-On implementation. Here is a quick list of the typical gripes and the responses one can provide to pull the rope to the ESSO favor.

Desktop support team: Man, it replaces the Microsoft Gina. We need to provision it to all of the existing desktops, test it on our gold build, communicate with all the user population affected…It’ll take more than you think to implement it.
Business: Ok, so let’s see how well you manage your assets. If you know them, can provision them and keep them homogeneous you should not have too many problems. If not, let’s work on the asset management first.

Infrastructure: Users want to be automatically logged in to an enterprise app that is not covered by ESSO yet. Now we’ve got to develop another profile. This is not easy. The development, testing and support will take a lot of time.
Business: Yes, it is the on-going cost of the ESSO. Either engage the vendors, get the training and do it in-house, or outsource it.

Infrastructure: Now we have to have staff to support another server, another database and a bunch of desktops.
Security: Hey, but no more sticky notes under keyboards with passwords.

Help desk: We are getting more calls about desktop apps incompatible with the ESSO.
Business: The incompatible apps will have to be worked through with the desktop support and the vendors.

Security: We do not want to accept the responsibility for accidentally exposing all personal logins people may store in ESSO, like passwords for web-mail, Internet banking, shopping, forums, you name it.
Consultant: Set ESSO up with a personal, per-user key encryption. The downside though is if a user changes their passwords and then forgets their response to a challenge question, they will loose their stored passwords.

Help desk: Everybody is forgetting their responses to the challenge questions. People are unhappy about having to lose their stored passwords.
Consultant: Set ESSO up with a global key, and let the Security department worry about an appropriate use policy and the privacy policy.

Security: We do not want to send people their on-boarding passwords plain-text in an e-mail or print them out.
Consultant: Integrate your ESSO with an identity management solution and have it automatically distribute passwords to people’s wallets.

Infrastructure: All the setup, configuration and support takes so much time!
Business and End Users: Hey, it is nice not to have to type enterprise passwords every time. Helpdesk is getting less calls about recovery of forgotten passwords. It saves so much time!

The end of the story is that for every gripe, there is a good response demonstrating the value and the benefit of having an ESSO solution.

To see the original blog entry, please click here.

The Not-So-Secret, Secret MQ Script

2011-02-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

For those of us who work with IBM products, we all know the power of the Information Center, or better known as the Info Center. At a client in lovely Tampa, Florida, myself and Infrastructure Practice Director, AJ Aronoff, were tasked with installing WebSphere MQ v7 and WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition v7.0.2 onto a SUSE Enterprise Linux v11 system.

Now for those who have not installed WebSphere MQ on Linux and Unix systems, certain kernel parameters pertaining to semaphores and shared memory must be set above a certain minimal level. If these are not set, MQ may not operate correctly, which on a production system, only spells disaster. The WebSphere MQ Info Center has a “Quick Beginnings for Linux” section, which walks users through pre-installation tasks that need to be completed. Naturally, there is a section about setting the kernel parameters.

This section tells users to run the command “ipcs –l”, which displays the kernel parameters and their current settings, and provides an example of the minimal settings that MQ Server requires. The “ipcs –l” command will display the parameters in the format shown below:

One would think this format would allow an admin to check the parameter settings that MQ requires, make the changes, and move onto the install. The problem is that the Info Center page doesn’t provide this format. It provides the requirement like so:

Now examining these two formats for long enough, you can determine some of the possible correlations. But others, such as the kernel.sem setting, can be interpreted in many ways, as some of the values could be set for multiple parameters. Research provides more hints about the other settings, such as their short name, but no solid evidence for the kernel.sem parameter. There is, however, an IBM support page devoted purely to this little problem, but also doesn’t provide a concrete translation of the kernel.sem parameter. This page would probably be ignored by an amateur user, as the title states “Unix IPC resources” instead of ‘kernel parameters’ and ‘Linux’, but by looking back at the “Quick Beginnings” page, one notices the first sentence reads “System V IPC resources”. IBM hid our now not-so-secret script, mqconfig, on this page, as long as you don’t scroll right past it. The script reads kernel and software information about the system you are running it on, compares them to the IBM standards for MQ, and prints out if the system passes or fails each of the necessary parameters.

Once the failed settings have been changed, by copying the proper settings into the sysctl.conf file, and the script is run again, the output looks like this:

So for those of you other than AJ and myself who will be installing MQ on Linux or Unix, save yourself some time and a headache, and use this handy script. It can be found here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=171&context=SSFKSJ&dc=DB520&dc=DB560&uid=swg21271236&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct171websphere

Patrick Brady is a Consultant at Prolifics based out of New York City. He has 3 years of consulting experience based around the WebSphere family of products, focusing on the administration side of customer implementations. He specializes in High Availability solutions for WebSphere MQ and Message Broker.

City of Largo, FL Wins With Panther Again

2010-09-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

The City of Largos’ Recreation Department received rave reviews from users when they went live in mid August 2010. The Recreation application, which was built with Panther5.20/Oracle/Linux, is an accounting, management and tracking system, allowing the department employees to manage their daily duties in an effective way.

For the past 12 years, the city has utilized Prolifics’ legacy tools to build applications for their Police and Recreation Department, starting with JAM7 on SCO. With the release of Panther 5.0 for Linux several years ago, the city migrated most of their applications off their SCO platform. A reason for staying with Panther was its portability; i.e. ability to run on most platforms and to connect to heterogeneous databases with minimal changes.

In recent months, the city’s development team has been thrilled at enhancements made to the Panther Linux product, which include support for anti-aliased fonts, image and text support for tab cards and enhancements to tooltips.

The city’s next project is to web-enable the Recreation app, allowing citizens to register for classes being offered by the department.

According to their Developer/Administrator, “... I cannot over emphasize the effect that the upgraded Panther features have had with both the Recreation Department and City as a whole. We've been able to provide tools with a modern look and feel and in many cases, better than what we could buy at comparative costs.”

Sample screen shots from the Recreation Application

To see the customer's take on this solution, read Dave Richards' entry about Panther on the City of Largo Work Blog

Amrith Kaur-Maldonado, first joined Prolifics as a Consultant and then moved into the Prolifics Education Dept as a JAM/Panther trainer. She has experience in conducting WebSphere Developer Training at IBM training facilities. Amrith then transitioned back into the Technical Support Team 7 years ago and she now managers the Support Team.

TAM ESSO in the wild: A look at ISO-NE's implementation

2010-09-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

Christopher Ehrsam, Senior Security Consultant

I recently was involved in a unique implementation of IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign On (TAM ESSO), working with ISO-NE, a major utility company, towards increased security and monitoring performance. Operating in a 24/7 environment, ISO machines must be highly available and employees monitor the health of the power grids in control room using a number of shared workstations. The company is required to track which users log into each workstation and must lock machines that were not being worked on. Doing so complies with Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) government standards and enables system notifications for user activity on any workstation. The new system integrates the existing building badges and unique user IDs making two- factor authentication possible.

As we were planning this project, we knew how significant time would be with ISO. Summer is considered a “high risk season” in this industry because of the increased utility usage during these months and the company’s infrastructure must be prepared to handle the activity. We realized the importance of preparing the company’s infrastructure as quickly and efficiently as possible. Prolifics focused this implementation around ISO’s specific security and monitoring desires, which puts them at an advantage with the badge reader and centralized auditing capabilities.

For those of you who are interested in hearing more, I will be speaking at Prolifics’ TAM ESSO live Webinar on September 15 to discuss the solution’s implementation and success. The webinar will include a demonstration showing how TAM ESSO can increase enterprise security, provide application access tracking, and increase your ROI.

Christopher Ehrsam is a Senior Security Consultant with Prolifics. Chris has been in the Identity Management field for over 10 years, getting his experience working with the Tivoli product family at IBM.

Integrating with Salesforce.com

2010-08-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

Salesforce.com (aka Salesforce) is the most commonly used cloud-based Software as a Service platform for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Recently, we have been involved with a lot of customers who are planning to start migrating to or have made a strategic decision to use Salesforce to manage their customer contacts, track sales orders, streamline their sales processes, etc. In fact, Prolifics itself is a Salesforce customer.

Our own experiences, and those with our customers who use Salesforce, have given us an in-depth understanding of what it takes to ensure that this CRM solution is made universally available within the enterprise – to business processes that require customer information or to portal applications that mash up customer information with data from other systems. This blog entry details three patterns that we have commonly used when integrating with Salesforce and that we believe can be reused – entirely at the design level and to a good extent at the implementation level.

1. Enterprise CRM Services – Every enterprise has defined standards when it comes to their enterprise services and data formats. The reusable enterprise services are exposed via the ESB and all the end applications use these enterprise services to communicate with end systems so that the ESB can provide the common functionality and the governance needed when performing system integration. Using this same concept when working with Salesforce allows enterprises to centralize the Salesforce integration at the ESB layer (the ESB communicates with Salesforce using SOAP/HTTP web services), do transformation, security, etc. at one common place and provide clients – processes, portals or mashups, etc. – with the consistent enterprise-wide data representation to which they are accustomed. The enterprise services provide the generic CRM interface to the clients, so that if the CRM system has to be changed, the hundreds of clients that use the CRM system in the enterprise do not have to change. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus is commonly used for implementing this pattern.

2. Publish CRM Data – Another common requirement is to ensure that CRM data is passed from Salesforce to back end systems based upon changes that happen within Salesforce to this information. The ESB provides a service (SOAP/HTTP web service) that gets invoked by Salesforce (with all the relevant information from Salesforce) when data of interest changes in Salesforce. This data is then transformed and passed to the back end systems. The benefits of this approach include a centralized service definition on the ESB, transformation of data, centralized security management, supporting legacy applications that are not web service enabled [but still need CRM data], etc. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus or IBM WebSphere Message Broker is commonly used for implementing this pattern. [Note: the reverse flow from end systems to Salesforce is handled similarly, instead of being invoked by Salesforce; the ESB invokes a service on Salesforce.]

3. Bulk Load of CRM data – It is very typical for customers to need the ability to bulk load customer data from their existing homegrown systems into Salesforce. These kinds of requirements are also common when mergers and acquisitions happen and new customer data needs to be loaded. During the bulk load of CRM data, there may also be a need to cleanse the information before loading it into Salesforce. The IBM InfoSphere DataStage, IBM InfoSphere QualityStage, and the IBM InfoSphere Information Server Pack for Salesforce.com together support this pattern that involves the definition of ETL jobs that extract data from different sources, cleanse, map the data to Salesforce format, and load it into Salesforce.

I want to conclude by saying that we at Prolifics believe in “eating our own dog food.” Prolifics has a production implementation of IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus that was built using the pattern described above (Publish CRM Data) that enables the data we have in our Salesforce instance to be published to IBM’s Global Partner Portal based on Siebel.

In my next set of blog entries, I will focus on couple of related topics:

IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems and how the solution supports these patterns of integrating with Salesforce

A set of assets that we are currently working on at Prolifics to help customers jump start their own Salesforce integration initiatives.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

Mobile Portal – Creating A Simple Mobile Portlet - Part III

2010-08-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

Part 3 of this blog series takes you through series of steps to demonstrate the creation, development and deployment of a simple Mobile Portlet using Rational Application Developer. While working on this blog I found out that this could be a long one with all the images/screenshots. So this first entry just focuses on pre requisites, creating a Mobile Portlet project and exploring the project artifacts.

Before you get started, please download and install the following software images on your machine:

Rational Application Developer 7.5.1
WebSphere Portal 6.1.x
Mobile Portal Toolkit 6.1

Step – 1 Create a new Project
Start Rational application developer, hereafter called RAD, you can use either an existing workspace, or create a new workspace.

Create a new Portlet Project and name it MobilePortlet, set runtime to WebSphere Portal 6.1. Set the Portlet Type to JSR 286. Set the Portlet type to Mobile Portlet and click Next.

Once the project is created, the workspace looks like the figure below:

Note that a new Portlet has been created in the com.ibm.mobileportlet package in the Java Resource:src directory. Lets review the WebContent folder, the key folders under that directory are:

_MobilePortlet and mcs-policies
Within _MobilePortlet there are two folders called html and xdime. These two folders contain JSP files with the same names (MobilePortletView.jsp)

Note that if the request comes from the web browser, the MobilePortletView.jsp under the html folder gets rendered; however, if the request is from the mobile device MobilePortletView.jsp under the xdime folder gets rendered.

The mcs-policies will hold the device-dependent aspects of the mobile portal e.g. policies for various layouts, themes, components and assets etc. A sample layout file has been created by RAD.

In the next part of this blog series, we will start creating the code artifacts.

Stay tuned…

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

2010 Portal Excellence Conference

2010-08-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

This year the IBM Portal Excellence conference was held in Hilton Chicago. I was there with one of our key clients (American Express Corporate Travel) to co-present on the solution Prolifics developed. For those of you who are familiar with the IBM world, there is a conference every year for each of the five main brands. For me, this one was nearest and dearest to my heart as I have been involved with IBM Portal technology for several years.

So let’s go over some of the key highlights of the conference…

Portal and LWCM 7.0 will be officially released around mid September time frame this year
IBM acquired Coremetrics (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/announcement061510.html)
The plan is to integrate Coremetrics with the WebSphere platform and exposed the web metrics through out of box Portlets so that organizations can make intelligent business decisions.
Project NorthStar was announced, which reflects IBM’s vision and multi-year roadmap for how organizations can create next-generation online experiences. (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/northstar/)

Since I am intimately involved on daily basis interacting with the clients, the announcement of Portal 7.0 coming out soon was big news. Besides supporting JSR 286 and Web 2.0, Lotus Web Content Management will finally be fully integrated with the WebSphere Portal and will take advantage of Web 2.0 features for authoring and presentation templates. Also, the integration of Coremetrics with the WebSphere platform and the ability for the companies using Portal internally/externally to perform web trending will be huge.

I might sound biased; however, my presentation with American Express was received very well by the attendees. The session was full and we had lot of live interaction via Q&A with the attendees. The presentation was divided into two main parts. Chris, from American Express, talked about the business case and how the solution brought overall value to their business, while I focused on how the Prolifics team helped designed the overall solution and implement it. What drew attendee’s interest was the fact that the solution is scalable to millions of end users and has been rolled out in 22 different languages; and people in all 5 continents are actively using it to book their travel. If you are interested in learning more about the solution we developed for American Express Corporate Travel, our marketing department has done a great job in providing an overview. (http://www.prolifics.com/travel-portal.htm)

Overall I found the conference very informative and hey – where else could you meet the co-author of JSR 168 and JSR 286 (Stefan Hepper) and some key IBM architects one on one?

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM Mashup Center

2010-07-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Niral Jhaveri, User Experience Practice Manager

The Web 2.0 world has evolved, and has evolved considerably. It’s no longer about getting data from the universe of information -- but collaborating, publishing, sharing and deriving business intelligence from the data. The landscape of information now consists of smaller fragments of relevant data commonly known as mashups.

So when a bank searches its database for a customer, it no longer expects to get the name of the customer. But instead expects to get back a data grid of all the accounts linked to the customer, a pie chart showing all the different asset holdings (equities, loans etc), a Google map showing the address of the customer and any relevant alerts on the customer account. And that’s not it -- all the information should be seen on a single unified page! Think it’s difficult? With IBM® Mashup Center, you can access the components that you need to create Web 2.0 mashup and application solutions.

What is a Mashup?
Mashups are situational applications which aggregate disparate data. Mashups add a lot of value by associating data elements that are relevant for the users.

With Mashup Center, you can

Create situational apps which are reusable assets
Facilitate rapid development of dynamic web applications (widgets)
Create feeds from numerable data sources
Empower business users to create and share mashup applications, widgets, feeds, and services
Provide business intelligence by associating the data elements.

The Architecture

Key Components

Catalog: The catalog is a repository. All feed, feed mashup, and widget information is kept in the catalog.

Widget: A widget is a miniature application that is embedded within an HTML page. With a widget, dynamic content is displayed on the page.

Feed: A feed contains XML data. RSS, Atom and XML feeds are available on the Internet. An example of an RSS feed is the top news stories from Yahoo!, available at http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories. Feeds in MashupHub can be created using different data sources and then accessed via a URL.

Page: A page is a collection of widgets and other HTML markup that can be displayed in a Web browser. A page can be a mashup application or a regular Web page.

Why should your business use Mashup Center?

Mashup Center is a great tool for rapid assembly of dynamic web applications. The Mashup pages provide a lightweight web solution that combine application and information to solve many different business needs. Around the inter-web there is a fair amount of interest in mashups and many perceive it as better medium.

Mashups provide a user interface to data from variable sources (or feeds) like Web services, enterprise databases, spreadsheets, even BI warehouses like Cognos. Portability is a valuable add-on provided by Mashup Center. Development and product teams can build mashup pages/widgets and easily expose it to any intranet, internet or enterprise portals (even to Microsoft Share point).

With IBM Mashup Center business stakeholders get the freedom to assemble applications that cater to their requirements. Business users can combine, transform and reuse the mashups to create visualizations and provide real-time collaboration.

Mashup wiring enables you to collaborate data for a more unique, dynamic interface. So let’s say for example, a map widget can be wired to several feeds like real estate listing, company address, customer listing, hotels and restaurants. You can also wire the customer listing to its stock prices, relevant market news for the customer etc. You get the idea. Wiring widgets is extremely intuitive and easy to use.

Mashups and WebSphere Portal
Mashups are usually meant for creating applications which are developed in a very short time to target a very specific business problem. It is generally recommended to develop mashups when flexibility and time-to-develop applications is more important than governance and traditional development model provided by WebSphere Portal.

Pre built widgets (like graphs, reports, Google Gadgets) make Mashups more suitable for visualization and aggregation of data from different data sources on a single screen. However for a more transactional based enterprise system, WebSphere Portal is much better suited.

Style of development for portlets and mashups is also different. Widgets can be developed using different tools and have a relatively small and a generic code base. Feeds can be developed visually or by writing native SQL. Developing portlets require a more structured model by incorporating one or more design patterns and/or frameworks (Struts, JSF etc).

WebSphere Portal provides a much broader set of features like Virtual Portal, SSO, Content Management, Collaboration, advanced security model on Pages, Portlets and resources, Portal search, impersonation. These set of features are key differentiators between the WebSphere Portal and Mashup Center.

Mashup applications can run along side or within the portal framework, it all depends on the solution designed. WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 provides the ability to render Mashup Pages and widgets within the portal container. At the same time, Mashup Center can render any Portal page by providing the appropriate URL for that page.

An Example of a Customer Dashboard Mashup

Niral Jhaveri was most recently a Senior Consultant at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM Lotus, WebSphere and Rational family of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Niral has an extensive background in the design and development of IBM WebSphere Portal, SOA and Web 2.0 applications with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Finance, Retail, Insurance and Technology.

Mobile Portal – Overview, Architecture and Development - Part II

2010-07-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

In the first part of this blog series we covered the high level overview of the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator offering. In this part, we will review the architecture of the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator, hereafter, called MPA; and explore its key components, their functionality and how the individual components interact in servicing a typical mobile device request.

Let’s dive right into the architecture: figure 1.0 illustrates the key components of MPA. Note that since MPA installs and runs on top of the IBM Websphere Portal Server, I have illustrated MPA components in conjunction with Portal Server key components.

Figure 1.0 – Simplified MPA Architecture

At the heart of MPA architecture is the Multi-Channel Server, hereafter referred to as MCS. The MCS is the runtime component that transforms XML-based Device Independent Markup Extensions (XDIME) into native markup languages for individual devices. MCS uses the built-in MCS Policy Repository to manage a large number of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, smart phones, and other devices.

The MCS Policy Repository is not a single database or a single file; rather, it is a set of policy files managed by MCS. These MCS policy files define the presentation characteristics (layout, component and theme, and so on) of a device. There are a number of policies defined in MCS. Device, layout, theme, and component policies are the most commonly used.
With the combination of these policy sets defined in MCS repository, MPA can support displaying Portlets in varied types of devices, with flexibility to adapt to various layouts and present with different looks and feels, etc.

If you think about it, it’s a very powerful feature. MPA enables you to write once and use these policy sets to display your Portlets in various mobile devices. Compare it to writing mobile specific applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia etc. Time to market for mobile enabling your Portal application is amazingly short.

Another key component of MPA is XDIME aggregator, which extends the existing portal aggregation support to XDIME/XDIME 2. In Part 1, we discussed that XDIME (XML device independent markup extensions) is an extension of XML for mobile devices and is of course device independent.

Having discussed the key architectural components of MPA let’s switch to the run time interaction model, illustrating how these components interact to service a mobile device request.

Figure 2.0 below illustrates MPA run time interaction model:

Figure 2.0 – Run time interaction Model
The numbers in the figure correspond to key steps in a typical MPA scenario:

1. Write the XDIME Portlet or add XDIME JSPs to an existing Portlet.

2. The resulting navigation hierarchy defines nodes (pages, labels, URLs, and Portlets) and extended attributes that specify required device capabilities and type for each node. Navigation nodes and attributes are stored in the Portal Model.

3. When the Portal receives a request from a mobile device, the appropriate markup is determined by comparing the User-Agent string to configured Portal clients. MPA clients are configured with XDIME support, so the portal passes the request to the XDIME Portal Filter. The filter then invokes the XDIME Aggregator to process the request.

4. The XDIME Aggregator queries the Portal model to determine navigation and Portlet availability based on the user and the extended attributes of each node. If the request is for a Portlet node, a PortletRequest object, containing request-specific data, is passed to the Portlet.

5. The Portlet Container invokes the Portlet with the PortletRequest. XDIME Portlets render their content in XDIME and return the content to the aggregator via a PortletResponse object.

6. Aggregated XDIME markup for the requested navigation or Portlet is returned to the Portal Filter, which passes it to the Multi-Channel Server. MCS transforms the XDIME content to device-specific markup by matching it with policies in the repository of Mobile Device Profiles.

7. The Portal Filter inserts the device-specific content in the ServletResponse object for delivery to the mobile device.

The above defined interaction model is simplified and doesn’t go into intricate details. If you would like to read more about it, please refer to the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator info center (http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/mpadoc/v6r1m0/index.jsp).

In the next part of this blog series, we will use the MPA toolkit to create a simple Portlet. Get ready to put your developer’s hat on!

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

Mobile Portal – Overview, Architecture and Development

2010-06-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

This is a three part blog series on IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator. The blog series is targeted toward architects and engineers who are looking to get an overview of the Mobile Portal accelerator offering and want to get a simplified understanding of how they can architect and develop Mobile Portal solutions.

Mobile Portal Overview
We live in a world where the usage of Mobile applications is growing exponentially. People need access to information and services wherever they are using whatever devices they have. This can include someone using an iPhone at an Internet café, a BlackBerry at the airport, or a Droid to find the nearest restaurant while on a business trip. The possibilities are almost limitless.

IBM being a key player in the middleware market realized this upward mobility trend and started offering IBM WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal framework for developing mobile-enabled applications. This framework evolved in the last few years to support development of Mobile applications for a broad range of mobile devices and providing customized mobile access to Portal solutions. This framework solution is now offered as IBM Portal Accelerator and works in conjunction with the IBM WebSphere Portal software offering. In part 2 of this blog series we will go into details of the overall architecture.

In this part we will focus on the key capabilities and functionalities of the IBM Mobile Portal accelerator framework. So what’s a simple definition of Mobile Portal Accelerator? Put simply, Mobile Portal Accelerator, as an extension of WebSphere Portal, provides a delivery platform that supports aggregation of content and services from both internal and outsourced providers. Architecturally, it provides a framework that can be used to create device independent Portlet applications (XDIME Portlets).

Portal Accelerator provides supports for building XDIME Portlets which stands for xHTML device independent markup extensions, and is a device independent language.

So one can argue that there are other XDIME based frameworks available for designing and developing Mobile enabled Portlets and what value does IBM Mobile Portal accelerator provide? I believe the key benefit is that the Mobile Portal accelerator runs on top of a robust WebSphere Portal middleware platform which provides security (single sign-on), customization, personalization, navigation etc. out of box along with scalability and performance.

In summary, using Mobile Portal Accelerator, you can provide Web Content, services and applications to mobile devices while maintaining the benefits and advantages of a Portal Website; these benefits include:

Multi device support (per IBM, it supports 6000 devices)

Creation of content using device independent markup to create mobile applications

Separation of logic, layout and branding

Delivery of new network services, applications and content quickly

In the next part of this blog series, we will go into the discussion of technical architecture of Mobile Accelerator and what key components the framework offers and how they all fit together with WebSphere Portal.

Stay tuned…

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

Why we love using Rational Team Concert to automate the build, deploy and test of WebSphere applications

2010-05-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

Greg Hodgkinson, Methodology Practice Leader

Team Concert continuous integration for WAS, WESB, WPS, Portal and WMB?

So you love what you’ve heard about the benefits of Rational Team Concert for improving the development performance of Java development teams, but you’re wondering if it works just as well for your WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Portal Server or WebSphere Message Broker applications?

Well wonder no more – it does!

Being better at delivering better solutions

First some background.

Here at Prolifics we specialize in helping our customers deliver business solutions running on the various WebSphere runtime platforms. In fact we’ve delivered so many that I don’t even think marketing keeps count anymore! And as we have such a focus on software development, we are especially interested in any solution that allow us to do a better job, more efficiently, and greater ease.

This explains why we love Team Concert so much.

• From the point of view of a project manager – the always-up-to-date visibility of exactly what is going on at any point in time, what issues the team is facing, the current progress trend, what has been delivered most recently, what tasks are overdue, what the current status of the build is – all combine to allow a greater level of control over the project. They say control is an illusion, but an informed project manager is more likely to make the right choices for the project.

• From the point of view of the developers – the powerful but easy to use source control with private back-up space on the server from where changes can be shared with others and accepted from others, the ability to easily pause changes and switch over to another piece of work, the feed of information of what the rest of the team is up to, the prioritizable to-do list of work items, and the powerful build automation engine that allows the build/deploy/test process to be automated and provides automated feedback on the quality of code being delivered to source control – these features allow developers to be far more productive and to operate as a team with far greater confidence that they are on the right track.

• From the point of view of testers – the ability to interact directly with the developers using the same collaboration platform that they do, with a tightly integrated round-trip from defect, to code fix, to build, to release – increasing the efficiency of not only reporting and fixing the defects, but getting fixes back out to the testers to be re-tested.

• From the point of view of the business (our customers) – they see an improved predictability in project delivery dates, increased quality in the solution delivered, reduced times to fix defects, improved visibility into the activities of the project team, and insight into what it is that is being delivered – all which mean that project budgets will be signed off with a high certainty of success.

Simply put, the tool has been revolutionary in helping us being better at delivering better solutions for our customers.

Continuous integration is vital

An important factor in our success with Team Concert is its build engine. Continuous builds are well known to be a highly effective way to improve the coordination and efficiency of a team of developers and Team Concert’s build engine does this brilliantly – along with the change sets (source control component) and work items (work item tracking component) that it traces to and from, and the dashboard that exposes its results and outputs to the team and beyond.

The process is simply and yet the effects are powerful.

1. Developers deliver their code changes, along with suitable unit tests that verify the correct operation of their code.

2. The Team Concert build engine will trigger the build either based on a continuous interval or a defined schedule.

3. The build engine fetches the code changes, the unit tests, and the automation script that will drive the build.

4. The build engine sets up a build area containing the code, the tests and the automation script, and then executes the script. Depending on the script used, it can automate a number of steps involved in creating a candidate release of the code, for example:

a. Compile the code and unit tests

b. Deploy the code to an application server (normally a dedicated continuous integration testing server)

c. Run the tests to ensure that the deployed code works correctly.

5. The build engine then publishes a build output record which has immense value to the team. This record contains the deployable unit(s) produced by the build, the logs that were produced as a result of the build activities, the results of running the unit tests, a snapshot of the exact configuration of code, tests and automation script that the build engine used, and the contents of the build both in terms of the work items and code changes that went into it.

6. The team is notified of the results of the build via a number of mechanisms: the build will appear as a notification in each team members IDE, an entry in the project feed on the dashboard, a new build in the builds section of the dashboard, a new entry in the team central view. If there has been a failure, then everyone will know about it, and the team can get straight to work on correcting the issue.

Permanent point of reference for releases

This build record forms a permanent record of the build that is immensely valuable to any future developers or release engineers that need to understand that particular build. They can very quickly determine what went into the build and what was produced by the build.

Neutralization of integration errors

A key step in the automated process steps described earlier is the “Notify team of completed build” step.

This is important for two reasons: Firstly, any further steps required to take place such as smoke tests can now take place, so notification is important.

Secondly, and most significantly, if the build failed it is important that the team is aware so they can take steps to correct the causes of this failure. Having a broken build is a bad situation because it means that the quality of any new changes that are delivered cannot be verified, so it is important that steps are taken immediately to rectify the problem.

Normally the responsibility falls with the developer whose delivery broke the build to correct things, but it is important that the whole team is aware of the situation. It doesn’t take long for developers to learn how important it is for the broken build to be fixed, and we’ve found that this detect-notify-correct process becomes very efficient at neutralizing integration errors that could otherwise require far more effort to correct once they are compounded and confused by further changes.

Zero “wait time” to produce a release

Every build is a candidate release! Or at least every build that succeeds . No more delays having to request a release engineer to create a release of the code, waiting while they gather the correct source and scripts to produce the release, and then manually deploying the release for smoke tests. Essentially every time a successful build has run you have a potential release ready for smoke tests. The “wait time” has gone down to zero.

Prolifics “project-proven” on all WebSphere platforms

To get back to the original question: Continuous integration with Team Concert is all very good and well for Java projects, but what about more advanced applications built on WAS, WESB, WPS, Portal or WMB?

Well you will be glad to know that it is exactly these kinds of projects where we have seen the most benefit out of using Team Concert’s build engines – especially those projects where there is a combination of technologies involved. We have successfully used the Team Concert build engine along with our own automation scripts to realize the benefits discussed above (permanent point of reference for releases, neutralization of integration errors, and zero “wait time” to produce a release) and many further benefits in building applications across all of the WebSphere platforms.

New starter scripts solution available on IBM Global Solutions Directory

Would you like to use your Team Concert build engine to automate the build, test and deployment of WAS, WESB, WPS, WMB or Portal applications? If so then our starter automation scripts are ideal to get you up and running quickly.

Contact us to arrange a no-obligation demonstration where one of our build engineers can show you how the solution can be used to speed up deliver on your target platform.

See the new listing in the IBM Global Solutions Directory for further information and also watch this video!

Greg Hodgkinson is the Methodology Practice Leader at Prolifics. He has worked in software architecture since 1996, initially in the field of component-based development (CBD), then seamlessly on to service-oriented architecture (SOA). His extended area of expertise is the software development process, and he assists Prolifics and IBM customers in adopting agile software development processes and SOA methods. Complementing this is his expertise in software development environment architecture. He is still very much a practitioner, and has been responsible for service architectures for a number of FTSE 100 companies. He presents on agile SOA process and methods, has co-authored a Redbook on SOA solutions, and regularly writes for DeveloperWorks.

Lotusphere 2010 and Mobile Portals

2010-02-24T05:46:00.000-08:00

Don Sheppard, Solution Director

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at Lotusphere 2010 was not about a new version with enhanced features, nor about a new product that will revolutionize the industry. It was a simple session on taking existing portals and making the content display better on mobile devices using the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator.

Viewing web content on phones and PDAs has been around for a number of years, but in the last year it has really caught on. During 2009, we saw a large increase in the amount of smartphones in use. Apple shipped the new iPhone 3GS, Google Android-based phones like the Nexus One and Droid gained traction, and companies added more types of Windows Mobile-based phones.

As the popularity of interacting with the web using a phone continues to grow, more companies will want to make access to existing content easier on mobile devices. Some companies will build custom applications targeted to devices like Androids or iPhones, but others will not have the time or resources to build device-specific applications. For those companies who want to optimize the mobile user experience of an existing Websphere Portal application, the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator provides them with the tools and a runtime engine that can optimize the display of a portal page for over 7000 devices.

Historically, creating a site accessible to mobile devices meant stripping out all visually appealing elements and presenting a bare-bones, text only version. This was because every device would render the content differently and few supported advanced technologies like Flash or Javascript. Also, the way a user interacts with a website on a desktop machine is very different than how a user interacts with a site on a mobile device. Desktop or laptops screens tend to be wider than they are tall, so most sites use navigation elements on the top and left sides of the screens. This type of navigation doesn’t work well on mobile devices where the screens are narrow. To deal with these issues, companies could create a mobile page and format the page to support the lowest common device, but this sacrifices the robust experience possible on new devices. Today’s mobile devices still have vast differences; for example an Apple iPhone has a 320 x 480 pixel screen, Rim Blackberry has 320 x 240 pixels, and Google’s Nexus One has a whopping 800 x 480 pixel display.

Mobile Portal Accelerator solves the problem of supporting different types of mobile devices by maintaining a database of device specifications where the attributes of over 7000 mobile devices are mapped. By abstracting the page layout, items can be formatted and converted to provide an exceptional web experience on each device.

Mobile Portal Accelerator uses XML Device Independent Mark-up Extensions (XDIME) to describe the content. One set of XDIME is created to map UI elements and Layout Policies are used to determine where content is shown on mobile devices.

Using XDIME reduces the time to deliver content, because one set of markup is created and can support all devices in the database. As new devices are introduced, a subscription service is available to provide updates. This means a developer no longer has to be concerned with updating the application as new devices are introduced.

Mobile Portal Accelerator is currently available for the IBM Websphere Portal 6.1 platform, supports the publishing of Lotus Web Content Management content, and widgets. It also features eclipse-based plugins called the Mobile Portal Toolkit which works with RAD and RSA to develop and test portlets.

Don Sheppard is a Solutions Director at Prolifics and Master Certified IT Architect. Don spent 13 years at IBM and was former CTO of their National Portal Services practice before working for Prolifics.

Integrating MQ FTE with WebSphere Process Server/WESB

2009-12-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

Ivan Smirnov, Senior Consultant

WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition (known simply as MQ FTE) is a robust managed file transfer solution built on WebSphere MQ transport backbone. Product page is here: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/wmq/filetransfer/index.html

This product is a recent addition to the storied and extremely stable WebSphere MQ – it came out after MQ version 7. I was excited to hear about its release because it creates new possibilities in file transfer that FTP, SCP and the like never delivered – like reliability and tolerance of transient network failures. Immediately a question arose: how can we take advantage of these new capabilities in IBM’s middleware. What is the best way to integrate IBM’s premier integration platform, WebSphere ESB (and by extension, WebSphere Process Server) with MQ FTE?

Integration between WESB and MQ FTE will occur on 2 ESB boundaries: module exports that receive files from MQ FTE and module imports that send files to a remote destination via MQ FTE. I argue that the simplest integration approach is also often the best.

On the SCA export (send files via MQ FTE) side, we will configure MQ FTE file transfer using the tool’s native interface (command line or GUI). We then will use Flat File adapter in outbound mode to create a file on local file system where it will be picked up by MQ FTE. Protection from incomplete file pickup is provided by using staging directory, which is built into Flat File adapter.

The following alternatives are possible:

1) Construct the whole MQ FTE messages on the fly in WESB (for instance, by engineering an MQ FTE import binding)

2) Put file on file system the same way, using Flat File adapter, but initiate transfer by putting a request message on MQ FTE agent queue.

The first alternative approach requires duplicating a lot of code that is already in MQ FTE while providing minimal savings in terms of disk I/O. It is not a worthy alternative.

The second alternative approach is close to the original design. However, there is no need to predefine file transfer – this will be done by sending an XML message to administrative queue of MQ FTE. Its benefit is zero administration effort, but it requires some upfront custom development.

On the SCA import (receive from MQ FTE) side, we can configure MQ FTE to transfer files to a local WESB file system. Files will be picked up by Flat File Adapter in inbound mode. MQ FTE has built in protection against picking up incomplete files.

As an alternative, it is certainly possible to receive MQ messages in WESB instead of letting MQ FTE create files on file system. This alternate solution will require complex code largely duplicating existing MQ FTE functionality to extract file payload from MQ messages and handle file-level acknowledgement and auditing. The only upside would be avoiding disk I/O by skipping writing file to file system by MQ FTE and reading it in by Flat File adapter. There is not much value in this, since at such high volume WESB will reach capacity much sooner then disk I/O becomes a bottleneck. This alternate solution is all cost and no benefit.

Conclusion: when integrating MQ FTE and WPS (WESB), simplest solution is very reasonable and will work best in many situations.

Ivan Smirnov is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with extensive hands-on experience with the WebSphere family of products (including WebSphere Application Server and Process Server, WebSphere Studio/Rational and WebSphere MQ), Tivoli security offerings (including Tivoli Identity Manager and Tivoli Access Manager for e-business), DB2, XML and Web Services. With strong technical skills both in development and administration, as well as deep troubleshooting skills, Ivan handles aspects of implementation installation, configuration, securing and tuning/troubleshooting to development and architecture within a J2EE environment. He also possesses key Application Server migration skills and has helped several customers’ transition to the WebSphere platform from other J2EE platforms.

Good design and usability principles

2009-12-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

Alex Ivkin, Senior IT Security Architect

I am a big proponent of usability. After all, regardless of how good something is, or how many cool features it has, if it is unusable – it is worthless. A hard to use application, website or in fact anything that interacts with a human, will not be popular, will lose out to competition or be ignored altogether. There are many articles on the web with examples and lists of usability principles, so I would not go into that here.

It seems, however, that many sites, like ss64.com or useit.com, suffer from a common pitfall in usability design, sacrificing design by going too far. They subscribe to the lowest common denominator in an effort to make it usable to the biggest possible crowd. This makes them very plain and downright ugly. Sure, they cover the 99% of the crowd out there, not the 95% a good design would cover, but in the push for these extra 4% they lose much in the beauty and attractiveness.

Ever wondered how Apple design wins praises so much? It’s not only created with usability in mind, it is also very attractive. Good, usable design after all has clues that are beyond simply making it readable or understandable. The clues are like little streaks of color on a bland background that make it come alive, make it stand out and win over a more “usable” background for most of people out there. Combining a creative effort with a usability agenda is the winning combination.

With that in mind here are the good usability design principles:

Start with a use-case. Run through how you think the users will approach the tasks and navigate through. You will be wrong, but that’s a start.
Think how it could be simplified. In many cases the simpler is the better. Many designs, like a single hand faucet handle, start off designed for the ease of use with simplicity and then they win over. Assume you are designing for people who are resource constrained: “the less brain I can devote to this task the better”
Be creative. Think how you can make it more attractive.
Consider performance. Yes it is a big usability factor.
Implement and fix bugs (another big usability factor).
Rinse and repeat.

What you can do to improve it if you have run out of ideas:

Think about HTTP/XHTML validation and CSS compliance
Focus on making it understandable by all kinds of colorblind people
Sprinkle with metadata, image tags and SEOs

An interesting twist to the discussion above was mentioned in a recent Wired article on ‘good enough tech’. The usability principles break down on the economics level somewhat. In other words if something is cheap enough, and usable enough, it will work for the most of us. So, think of where your design fits economically and how would it compete in that niche. If your stuff is cheap, it may work with a cheap design and being somewhat ok to use (think IKEA). If your stuff is free, it may limp by being somewhat unusable. Like this blog.

Human Centric Processes: A Fresh Perspective

2009-11-17T05:38:00.000-08:00

Anant Gupta, SOA Practice Director

With BPM gaining so much attention, any workflow product worth its salt provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to definition and execution of processes specifically when it comes to human centric processes, both structured and unstructured. This flexibility however comes at a cost, cost both in terms complexity and clarity of definition of processes and performance in runtime. Also, making changes to workflows always remains a challenge. Simple changes like making steps execute in parallel instead of sequentially are a nightmare to implement and are most often simply not taken up.

It does not really need to be that complex if we take a somewhat hybrid approach to structured and unstructured processes. There are certain steps that have to happen in a particular order and then there are others that can be done at any time if certain pre-requisites are met. We have to start thinking of processes as steps where each step has a set of pre-requisites. These pre-requisites could be related to the steps in the workflow or can be content / context related. Instead of workflows, human centric processes can be defined as a set of steps with pre-requisites. For eg, a step X can be executed only when Step A and Step D are completed, when the status of a document is accepted and if the flow was initiated by a gold client.

This approach should be extended with user experience simulation to come up with the typical paths the workflow will take and this should be visually depicted. This will provide both clarity in terms of the definition and flexibility to change the workflows in an extremely simplified fashion.

Call it pre-requisites or workflow rules, the idea is to provide extreme dynamicity to human centric processes, an area that has not been addressed by most of the so called dynamic BPM products which cater almost always to system centric processes.

Anant Gupta was recently named the SOA Practice Director at Prolifics after serving as a Senior Business Integration and J2EE architect Anant has with extensive experience in IBM's SOA software portfolio and specializes in delivering business integration and business process management solutions. He has worked for major clients in the banking, insurance, telecommunications and technology industries.

Service Versioning in WSRR

2009-11-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

We had heard the word “Change” used a lot in the recent months and I have to agree that “There is nothing more permanent than change”. In the services world, “Change” brings about a unique challenge – “Versioning”. As I enhance my service to add new functionality or update existing logic, I need to create a new version of the service. The reason - Most often, I need to support multiple versions of the same service in my environment as I might have different clients who would like to use different versions of the service.

WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) is the place where I store all my service definitions. WSRR allows me to define a version number for a service, i.e. I could have multiple versions of the same service in WSRR.

However what is missing in WSRR is the ability to connect multiple versions of the service. However what WSRR does provide is the flexibility to add metadata to service definitions. I have created two such relationship attributes called – nextVersion and previousVersion and have used them to build a custom way to link multiple versions of a service.

Such a custom relationship allows me to do an impact analysis in my registry to see the following results:

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

Why Move to Portal 6.1?

2009-11-03T06:36:00.000-08:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

We recently proposed a WebSphere Portal 6.1 upgrade to one of our very important customers. Their environment is currently running on Portal 6.0.x. The customer’s first question was, “What value does Portal 6.1 provides over version 6.0? And how it would benefit us?” To answer their question, we developed a simple table which lists the features available in the latest version of Portal and a brief description of these features.

These two columns, in table 1.0 below, can be used as basis for developing an ROI model for a customer who wants to upgrade to Portal 6.1. For example, most likely, a customer has developed custom AJAX functionality to enhance the user experience. Yet with any custom code, there is cost associated with code maintenance and enhancements. With Portal 6.1’s Web 2.0 support, most of the Portlets have built in AJAX support.The customer was happy to see how these new features in Portal 6.1 can help reduce the on going code maintenance and administrative costs and help improve the overall site and user experience.

WebSphere Portal 6.1 Features and Descriptions

UI Improvements

Themes and Skins Wizard
Themes and skins no longer part of wps.ear. Updates are applied without restarting Portal

Web 2.0

AJAX enabled Portlets
Supports JSR 268 which provides for improved inter-Portlet communication
Portal REST services and integration with Collaboration Services

Administering Portal/Web Content Management

Portlet Resource monitoring (out of box)
Simplified administration of sites
Greatly improved security configuration

Web Content Management Improvements

Security:

Inherited security support
User and contributor roles
Active content filtering

Performance:

Changes to WCM node structure for better authoring experience/performance

Presentation:

Improved UI tags for content rendering

Authoring/templating:

In line editing, Authoring tool enhancements, EditLive RTE 5

API:

JSR286 Portlets to enable Web content pages and directing links to right WCM Page

OpenID Vulnerabilities

2009-10-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

Alex Ivkin, Senior IT Security Architect

OpenID is an identity sharing and a single sign on protocol, that is becoming more and more popular on the net. OpenID allows us to use a single authenticating source (aka an identity provider) to login into any site that accepts OpenIDs (aka a service provider) without the need to create an account on that site. Yahoo!, Google, AOL, SourceForge, Facebook and many others now support it now. A great idea, but unfortunately it comes with some big holes.

What OpenID means, in an essence, is that you are entrusting all your account accesses to a single source. You trust your identity provider to safeguard your personal information until you decide to use it. So, to no surprise, most of the attack vectors are targeting this trust relationship.

Spoofing an identity provider
If you use one of the common identity providers, say myopenid.com, you need to be aware of identity phishers. An attacker could devise a site, that, after asking you to login with an OpenID, sends you to a myopenid-look-a-like.com. You, trustingly, enter your OpenID login information, and, boom, your id and your password that opens access to all you OpenID accounts are in the wrong hands.

The switch user attack
If you are one of the paranoid types and host your own identity provider, say via a Wordpress OpenID plugin, you may succumb to a URL hijacking technique. If attackers gain an ability to modify pages on your site (PHP is great at that), they then could modify the headers on your pages to redirect openid validation requests to their own identity provider. With the redirect configured, when they log in into a service provider with your OpenID URL, the service provider will authenticate against attackers’ own identity provider, thus making them appear as you, anywhere they go. We’ve proven this scenario on our host, and it is very viable and very scary.

OpenID URL hijacking
Another set of attacks targets the OpenID URL. An Open ID URL is your unique identifier on the net to the service providers. If someone gains control over the URL, either due to DNS manipulation (google DNS attacks) or site hacking, they have a key to all your accounts. An example would be to trick a service provider into resolving your OpenID URL to an attacker’s site that uses attacker’s identity provider, thus making the service provider trust an attacker, posing under the URL of the victim. The use of i-Numbers in lieu of URL’s is supposed to help with this issue, but they are not yet widely supported.

Cross site request forgeries
OpenID does not validate all of the traffic going between the identity provider and service provider in a user browser via hidden i-frames. A malicious site could supply your browser could with a page that, knowing your openid from the cookies, could determine your identity provider name and automate actions to any number of service providers, acting on your behalf. The actions could range from creating accounts under your name to divulging details of your existing accounts on these sites. Secunia provided detailed research on this type of the XSS.

Automation attacks
OpenID sign on process makes it really easy for automated processes to login or create accounts on the fly. A spammer could create an identity provider validating its own id’s at a rate of hundreds a second and then supply them to the service providers. This could be mitigated by pairing an openid field with a captcha field, but it is not supported by most OpenID service providers right now.

Security holes
Yes, there are bugs, both in the specifications and the technical implementations. I would not go in to details here, since these are typically short lived and are addressed by the vendors in an on-going basis. The holes are exploited by the hackers and are expected for any new technology appearing on the web. The problem is that the stake with OpenID is a lot higher. Loosing an OpenID means not only losing your ID but also losing a multitude of accounts and associated personal information.

OpenID keeps your ID off your hands and on the net, the place that you have no control over. I am sure, current OpenID providers will work hard to make sure they are well protected to retain your trust, but rest assured, there will be breaches. Identity provides are very attractive targets to hackers, since they act as gateways to a wide array of accounts. And when this happens all your accounts are potentially lost, not just one. Thus, OpenID should be treated as a convenience, not a way to increase security of your accounts. From another perspective, assuming Linus’ law holds, I do not see OpenID going the Microsoft Passport way. OpenID has its advantage in being open and freely available.

Nonetheless, until OpenID is mature from the security prospective, like SSL and GPG, I am sticking with managing my accounts in an encrypted web browser’s password store. It’s almost as convenient and a lot better protected. After all, you keep your driver’s license in your own wallet, not posted on the web.

Alex Ivkin is a senior IT Security Architect with a focus in Identity and Access Management at Prolifics. Mr. Ivkin has worked with executive stakeholders in large and small organizations to help drive security initiatives. He has helped companies succeed in attaining regulatory compliance, improving business operations and securing enterprise infrastructure. Mr. Ivkin has achieved the highest levels of certification with several major Identity Management vendors and holds the CISSP designation. He is also a speaker at various conferences and an active member of several user communities.

Planning and Scheduling SOA/BPM Development - DO NOTS!

2009-10-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Machules, Technology Director

As the momentum and understanding of BPM and SOA has increased, the projects have followed. IBM WebSphere Process Server and ESB (WPS/WESB) are common products that organizations start with when moving towards BPM/SOA/Web services. Many organizations are new to this type of SDLC. This discussion is in the context of my experience on WPS/WESB projects and certainly can be applied to other workflow and ESB products/technologies.

DO NOT:

Delay Data Model and Data Design efforts
Plan integration validation between systems/apps/services scheduled toward the end of the project
Assume a Sr. Developer with no experience on WPS/WESB will design/develop a functioning application

DO NOT Delay Data Model and Data Design efforts. The reality here is that in development there are more than likely to be changes to the data model. Some will impact your Service Message Interfaces and create a domino effect on the Consumers of that data in design and development. Try to plan as much up front as possible and reduce the costs of changes the must happen later in the SDLC.

DO NOT plan integration validation between systems/apps/services toward the end of the development SDLC. On one recent project the customer was not familiar with WPS/WESB or integration projects in general. They planned all their integration testing toward the end of the SDLC in the Testing Phase. I am not saying integration testing shouldn’t be done in the testing phase but it should NOT be planned at the end of the SDLC. A common project plan will include a ‘Vertical Slice’, ‘Prototype’, ‘Wire-frame’ or whatever term you are familiar with, the has goal to validate the integration of the various systems early on in the SDLC.

DO NOT assume a Sr. Developer with no experience on WPS/WESB will design and develop a functioning platform. WPS/WESB are enterprise platforms that have multiple layers of technologies (e.g. Java, JEE, BPEL, WS, XML, XSLT, etc…). As a proud successful Sr Developer you may very well be able to create an application on these platforms that functions in non-production environment. However, there are number of nuisances that impact performance that should be addressed by design patterns depending on the requirements. Large business is one concern that comes to mind. Acceptable object size is dependent on business transaction volume, CPU Architecture, RAM, HEAP and other dependencies. Design patterns to deal with large business objects can be applied thus giving you better performance.

WPS/WESB is a product I’ve worked with extensively. It has seen major enhancements and improvements on usability/consumability but this doesn’t mean anyone can create a well functioning app.

Jonathan Machules first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently a Technology Director specializing in SOA, BPM, UML and IBM's SOA-related technologies. He has 12 years experience in the IT field — 2 of those years at Oracle as a Support Analyst and 10 years in Consulting. Jon is a certified IBM SOA Solution Designer, Solutions Developer, Systems Administrator and Systems Expert. Recent speaking engagements include IMPACT on SOA End-to-End Integration in 2007 and 2008, and SOA World Conference on SOA and WebSphere Process Server in 2007.

Building an Enterprise Application Integration Solution

2009-10-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

Having an integration infrastructure that connects all enterprise systems to one another and provides seamless and secure access to customers, partners, and employees is the foundation of a successful enterprise. I have been involved with a lot of customers discussing their EAI architectures. More often than not, I have noticed that the approaches considered to implement such an architecture are not complete and do not provide the benefits that may be achieved with a well connected enterprise. In this blog entry, I would like to highlight aspects that need to be considered to build an end-to-end integration solution. (Note: This blog entry will not get into the details on how to implement each of these areas, which would result in me writing a book J.)

Connectivity – Avoiding point-to-point connectivity and ensuring that you have loosely coupled systems is key to ensuring that your EAI architecture is flexible and can scale.Use an ESB as the heart of you EAI architecture and ensure that your ESB has support for all major protocols (HTTP, SOAP, JMS, JCA, JDBC, FTP, etc.) and comes with adapters for common enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.
Patterns - Build a pattern based integration solution. The following is an excellent paper that outlines some of the common patterns used in the integration space:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-enterpriseconnectivitypatterns/index.html
Data - Data is of great significance when it comes to integration. Different systems have different data formats and there are common items to consider that can help you deal with these differences:

Define canonical data formats and ensure that you have mapping from application specific formats to canonical formats. Understand the various data formats that exist in your enterprise today and evaluate what it will take to map and manage complex data formats.

EDI data is common in many enterprises and will require special handling.

Define a strategy for handling reference data, how lookups can be done against this data and how reference data can be maintained.

Define rules around both syntactic and semantic validation of messages. Do not over do validation as you will pay a price when it comes to performance. Be judicious in what you want to validate and where.

Monitoring - An aspect that is often overlooked when building integration solutions is monitoring. Ensure that you have the right framework(s) in place to monitor your integrations and service components. You will need the ability to monitor every protocol the ESB supports. You also need to couple monitoring with notifications and error handling. You will need a strategy for auditing your messages. Again, as in the case with validations, be judicious in what you want to audit and when. There is a price to pay. Define a centralized service for auditing requirements and ensure that all integration components make use of this service.

Security - Security is the most critical part of implementing an integration solution. I have to say that most customers realize that security is important but sometimes, because of a lack of expertise in how to correctly secure their solution, the end result is a solution that is way more costly and in fact less secure than desired. Some considerations are:

Define your security requirements – authentication, authorization, encryption, non-repudiation, etc.

Decide what aspect(s) can be supported by transport level security and when you need message level security.

Decide where hardware components can be used to better implement security than software components.

Use open standard protocols so that you can easily integrate with different systems – both internal and external.

Service Oriented Integration – With the adoption of SOA, one of the key architectural models used for integration is to connect to service interfaces that are exposed by various systems. With this architecture, it is also now possible to choose what service / functionality you use dynamically at runtime. Another aspect that SOA has brought to the integration world is a policy-driven approach to integration – that is, data that is being passed to a system or between systems is used to check what policy needs to be applied at runtime to determine what service to use and what actions to perform (auditing, validation, encryption etc.). Integration coupled with SOA introduces another component into the EAI architecture – a registry and repository where services and policies are cataloged and can be used to bring about dynamic, policy-driven behavior.

This confluence of pattern based connectivity, data handling, monitoring, security, and service-oriented integration can provide you with a well-connected enterprise that can respond quickly to changing business needs.

Why SOA Governance?

2009-10-06T06:05:00.000-07:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

One of the buzzwords that followed the introduction of SOA was “Governance”. It was interesting to see how every aspect of a new project initiative now began to be tagged with this word. All of a sudden there were - project governance, architectural governance, infrastructure governance and so on. The real essence of what “SOA Governance” was or why “Governance” was important in the context of an SOA was lost.

I am not denying that governance is essential in every aspect of business and IT. But what I want to focus on this blog is about SOA Governance.

Services have been there all along in the technology space but the advancement in SOA and its adoption started when both customers and vendors came together to define a standard way to describe a service. It then became possible to implement this description in a programming language of choice, be able to deploy the service across diverse platforms and still be able to communicate across platform and language boundaries. With this form an SOA revolution, reusing services became much easier and with reuse came a unique set of challenges.

My business depends on service that I

Did not write,
Do not own,
Cannot control who will make changes to it and when,
Don’t know whether it will provide me with the qualities of service that I desire

And if do get to own the service, now I had to pay to get the service built and others get it for free.

What a SOA Governance model does, is bring uniformity and maturity in defining Service Ownership, Service Lifecycle, Service Identification & Definition, Service Funding, Service Publication & Sharing, Service Level Agreement etc. and thus provide a solution to otherwise what would have become a Service Oriented Chaos.

So next time when you talk about SOA Governance think about some of the above defined areas that pertain to an SOA and how you can align – Process, People and Products to achieve an SOA Governance solution that ensures that your SOA provides real business value

In the next set of blog entries I will focus on how IBM WebSphere Registry & Repository product helps with SOA Governance.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

IBM CloudBurst Part 5: IBM CloudBurst Offering in Comparison to other Cloud Offerings

2009-09-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In the previous blog entries we discussed the IBM offering for establishing private clouds i.e. the CloudBurst device and its configurations. In this final part of the blog series, I will discuss the other cloud computing options, specifically open source and how they compare to the IBM offering.

Besides IBM, the other big players in the cloud computing domain are Amazon, Sun (Oracle), Google, SalesForce, etc. The Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) offers a very flexible cloud computing solution for public clouds; offering both open source as well as vendor specific technologies. Before we start the comparison of the offerings; let’s revisit the architectural service layers of cloud computing. The architectural services model of cloud computing can be viewed as a set of 3 layers viz. applications, services and infrastructure.

Layer 1 – SAAS (Software as a service) e.g. Sales Force CRM application
Layer 2 – PAAS (Platform as a service) e.g. XEN image offered by Amazon
Layer 3 – IAAS (Infrastructure as a service) e.g. e.g. Amazon EC2 and S3 services

The IBM CloudBurst device basically offers all 3 layers of cloud computing in a single device for establishing a private cloud. As far as public cloud is concerned, IBM offers several SAAS services e.g. IBM Lotus Live Notes, Events, Meetings, and Lotus Connections etc.

So how does an open source cloud computing model look like? At the platform layer level, companies like Sun Microsystems are offering solutions built around open source Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP) stack. Open source communities are very actively developing solutions catered for cloud computing, in fact, cloud computing is acting as a catalyst for the development of agile new open source products like lighttpd (an open source web server), Hadoop, the free Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications; and MogileFS, a file system that enables horizontal scaling of storage. However, a cloud computing solution based on open source is yet to be adopted by early adapters of cloud computing. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, and others have pointed out, open source is predicated on software licenses, which in turn are predicated on software distribution — and in cloud computing, software is not distributed; it’s delivered as a service over the Web. So cloud computing infrastructures and the modifications to the open-source technologies that enable them tend not to be available outside the cloud vendors’ datacenters, potentially locking their users in to a specific infrastructure.

Although the software stacks that run on top of these cloud computing infrastructures could be predominantly open source, the APIs used to control them (such as those that enable applications to provision new server instances) are not entirely open, further limiting developer choice. And cloud computing platforms that offer developers higher-level abstractions such as identity, databases, and messaging, as well as automatic scaling capabilities (often referred to as “platform as a service”), are the most likely to lock their customers in. Without open interfaces linking the variety of clouds that will exist — public, private, and hybrid — practical use cases will be difficult or impossible to deliver with open source technologies.

IBM’s offering for setting up private clouds, though completely vendor based, does offer a one stop solution which is scalable and dynamic.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

Integrating WSRR (WebSphere Registry and Repository) and RAM (Rational Asset Manager)

2009-09-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

One of the challenges we are facing as part of a current project that we are working on is to demonstrate the integration of WSRR (WebSphere Registry and Repository) and RAM (Rational Asset Manager).

First and foremost there are a lot of questions on the roles and responsibilities of both these products.

Do we need both products?
If so, what do we use RAM for and what do we use WSRR for?
What is an asset?
Is a service an asset? Can there be other assets other than services? Does that mean only service assets go into WSRR?
What is a service? Is it just a WSDL? What about the service code? Should that also go into WSRR?
How do these products work with one another?
When I make a change in RAM does it reflect in WSRR and vice versa?

There are more questions than answers. I don't have answers to all these questions and as we work on this project, I am sure we will learn more. The team will post more answers here on this BLOG.

Today we took the first step. How can we get WSRR and RAM connected? I should tell you to my surprise I found that it was not difficult to accomplish this.

We had a RAM instance (v7.1) running on a VM Image.

I installed WSRR v6.2 on the same image and since it was for a POC, I used the Derby DB for WSRR. (I had installed WSRR with a DB2 backend and it had worked fine.)

There were just 2 things I needed to do to get the connectivity working

RAM runs on a WAS instance. WSRR was running on a separate WAS instance. The communication between the two was over HTTPS. So I had to ensure that WSRR server certs were part of the trust store of the WAS server running RAM. Nothing RAM / WSRR specific here, pure WebSphere stuff.
Log into the RAM WAS console using the following URL (https://localhost:13043/ibm/console/logon.jsp)
Go to Security -> SSL certificate and key management > Trust managers > Key stores and certificates > NodeDefaultTrustStore > Signer certificates
Do Retrieve from Port, Provide the following values: Host -> localhost, Port 9443, Alias WSRR
Log out

We needed to set the configuration in the RAM Admin Console to connect to WSRR.

Log into the RAM UI as admin
Go to the admin tab, click on 'Community Name'
Go to Connections
Add a WSRR Connection
Call in LOCAL WSRR
- The URL to provide is https://localhost:9443/
- User id and password is admin / admin
- Do 'Test Connection' and that should be successful
- Click on Synchronize and you should see the message -> WSRR-Asset Manager synchronization started

That’s it. Now I was able to search in RAM and have visibility into assets that were in WSRR. This was a simple test. These were stand alone instances . I assume when we do have clustered configurations we may have some challenges but it was a pleasant surprise to see something work the first time you try it.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

Wading Through Requirements on SOA/BPM/BAM Projects!

2009-09-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Machules, Technology Director

On a recent project I was heavily involved in the requirements phase of SOA/BPM/BAM project. Requirements elicitation in its own right can be a challenge. On large projects with large teams and un-clear methodologies, approaches and tools/technologies, the issue is exacerbated.

Now throw in this whole BAM concept and things really get confusing. What I found is that BAM requires a customized approach for requirements elicitation. BAM requirements are all about the performance metrics of the business. But it is very easy for the Business Analysts and Business Owners to confuse the high level and low level requirements with design. It seems this is more of an issue with BAM due to the nature of the requirements. However, the Business Analysts and Business Owners need to focus on the scope of the requirements and the dimensions, NOT the design. When the business side elaborates on how they want to measure their business, there is a delicate balance between the calculations used to create the metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) themselves and the calculations, measures and metrics used to fulfill the requirement. Many times the business side not only gives you a description of the KPIs that they want to track, they also start to tell you where to gather data and how to calculate. This often imposes restrictions on the design that is the responsibility of the S/A and Designer.

In the end, we found that we had created a specialized approach for this project. We incorporated some specific BAM Specification and Design documents to help everyone understand the process and supply the necessary information for the BAM design team.

Some Definitions:

BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) - Gives insight into the performance and operation of your business processes real-time.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) - Significant measurements used to track performance against business objectives.

Monitor Dimensions - Data categories that are used to organize and select instances for reporting and analysis.

Requirements Dimensional Decomposition – The narrowing of requirements to the point of being clear, concise and unambiguous.

Metric - A holder for information, usually a business performance measurement. A metric can be used to define the calculation for a KPI, which measures performance against a business objective.

Jonathan Machules first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently a Technology Director specializing in SOA, BPM, UML and IBM's SOA-related technologies. He has 12 years experience in the IT field — 2 of those years at Oracle as a Support Analyst and 10 years in Consulting. Jon is a certified IBM SOA Solution Designer, Solutions Developer, Systems Administrator and Systems Expert. Recent speaking engagements include IMPACT on SOA End-to-End Integration in 2007 and 2008, and SOA World Conference on SOA and WebSphere Process Server in 2007.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 4: Medium and Large Scale Configurations with Practical Scenarios

2009-09-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In part 4 of the blog series on IBM CloudBurst device we will discuss basic configurations of the CloudBurst device. Figure 1.0 below shows the CloudBurst device in a medium size configuration. Note that the key interfaces of the device are with the customer storage and Ethernet networks. As we discussed in the previous blog entries, the CloudBurst device is highly modular and can be configured according to customer requirements. The physical configuration showed here serves as an example.

The HS22 blade configuration in the middle is a good representation of the blade center system which starts at 4 blades and can grow to 14 blades to accommodate larger loads. The HS22 blades have embedded flash memory which come pre loaded with ESXi images. Besides that there is no other storage on the HS22 blades. The DS3400 (bottom of the figure) represents storage attached to the blade center and can be grown if required. To connect to their network, the customers can order the device with 1Gb switch module or can opt for 10Gb if its supported on their network. Important to note also is the Fiber connectivity (4 Gbps) offered by the device to connect with the storage blades (DS3400) and to the customer storage network. The x3650 M2 is the management server, which provides management interface to the CloudBurst device administrators.

The CloudBurst device can be easily scaled to accommodate larger practical scenarios. Figure 2.0 below provides a representation of the CloudBurst device in a larger configuration.

Note that it looks essentially the same as the medium configuration. The key difference is another blade center array added for more capacity. Note that because of the availability of high speed modular connectivity the two blade centers are connected both at the network level and storage level. The management server x3650 provides a singular management interface for both blade centers/storage units.

Let’s go into more detail on the storage part of the CloudBurst device, since this serves as the customer image repository (VM ware images) and the management software of the virtual machines. By default the device comes with the DS3400 storage unit which has a capacity of 5.4 terabytes with a 4.5 terabyte of usable space. This come fully configured with RAID 5 and 1 hot swap spare drive (in case of failure of the main storage drive). As shown in both figure 1.0 and 2.0 the storage can be expanded with EXP3000 storage expansion units, each having 5.4 terabyte of capacity. So how is the storage typically used? In practical scenarios, the VM management software takes up to 200 Gb space. A 1.2 Tb space can be taken up by customer supplied VM ware images, assuming 100 images at 12 GB each. Another 1 TB of space can be used to back up the customer supplied VM images. Because of the built in highly modular expansion storage mechanism, it is easy to scale for a larger cloud.

In the next part of this series, we will discuss how IBM offering compares to the other competitive offerings including open source cloud computing solutions…stay tuned.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

BPM Blueworks - Collaborating in the Cloud

2009-09-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

Devi Gupta, VP of Marketing

I saw a demo of IBM’s new offering called BPM BlueWorks and was really impressed. It has many capabilities, but I was most excited by the ability to collaborate within the cloud using BPM tools.

As a systems integrator we often help our customers to assess the benefits of a BPM initiative for their organization. We pride ourselves on being able to help the business users within an organization to "simulate and visualize" their end results, dashboards, metrics, etc. before the IT team even begins implementation. A powerful and important step in the process that correctly sets expectations. With BPM BlueWorks I think we will be able to collaborate with the business analysts and users even more effectively… so to conduct workshops where we can create strategy maps, process maps and capability maps together, all within the cloud. We can import information in from, for instance, PowerPoint, modify within the cloud and export artifacts to Modeler.

I look forward to learning more as this rolls out.

Ms. Devi Gupta directs the market positioning for Prolifics and helps manage the company’s strategic alliance with IBM. Under her guidance, Prolifics has made the critical transition from a product and services company to becoming a highly reputable WebSphere service provider and winner of several awards at IBM including the Business Partner Leadership Award, Best Portal Solution, IMPACT Best SOA Solution, Rational Outstanding Solution and Overall Technical Excellence Award.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 3 – Logical Architecture and Physical Topology Scenario

2009-08-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In part 3 of the CloudBurst blog series, I will discuss the logical architecture of the appliance and a basic physical topology demonstrating a practical scenario. In part 2, I mentioned that the CloudBurst device is modular and actually consists of multiple hardware and software components. Let’s start with the high level logical architecture of the appliance – refer to figure 1.0 below. The end users (cloud users or administrators) interact with a browser-based interface to either request virtual resources or manage the cloud.

Figure 1.0 – Logical Architecture

A quick glance at the logical architecture reveals that the key components come from the Tivoli, WebSphere and VMware stacks. The first block in the overall stack is the IBM HTTP Server which handles the user requests. The HTTP Server forwards the user requests to the Tivoli Provisioning Manager and the WebSphere software stack, which form the heart of the overall architecture and run the IBM cloud-computing software. The HTTP Server requests are handled by the TPM and the stack of Cloud computing software that is running on the WebSphere Application Server. The Tivoli Provisioning Manager makes use of the pre-built automation workflows and set of scripts which actually drive the self-service model which serves the VMs requested by the end user. The Cloud computing software also handles any errors and exceptions. The data of the TPM and the WAS Cloud computing software (blue code) is stored in the DB2, while user info is stored in the LDAP. The TPM deployment engine acts as a broker and fulfills the end user requests. Its running set of automation packages and scripts.

The TPM deployment engine makes automation and web service calls to the VMware virtual center. The VM VC manages all the hypervisors and virtual machines which are running on base hardware. The VM VC interacts with physical machines. The physical machine is running a hypervisor – a light-weight process that runs the actual VMs which the end users will be accessing. The VC also provisions and performs customization on VMs.

ITM provides monitoring of the VMs and a dashboard for Cloud Admins to monitor the VMs and the VMware stack.

Let’s now consider a physical topology demonstrating a practical usage of the CloudBurst device. Figure 2.0 below illustrates how different users interact with the ‘Cloud’ to request resources. The ‘Resource Cloud’ is an abstraction representing the CloudBurst appliance, which can be used to create a private cloud. The resources in this case are VMware images which are provided by the customer and cataloged and stored in the image repository. A typical example would be developers working on WebSphere Portal development requiring VMware images which provide a rational development environment along with a Portal Server test instance.

Figure 2.0 – Logical View/Scenario

The figure also illustrates the CloudBurst browser-based interface, which provides provisioning and management of the Cloud Resources. There are two basic categories of users: end users (software developers and quality assurance engineers) and administrators. The Resource Cloud provides a self-servicing platform for end users to request and use resources. The administrators use the browser-based interface to manage resources and users.

In the next part of this series, we will explore medium and large scale deployment topologies of the CloudBurst appliance, scalability, network interfaces and add-on storage devices.

Service Gateway Pattern in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) 6.2

2009-08-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

On of the new patterns that have been introduced in v6.2 of WESB is the Service Gateway Pattern. There are two implementations of this pattern – A Static Gateway and A Dynamic Gateway. In this blog entry I will focus on my experiences on using the Dynamic Service Gateway pattern.

One of the basic requirements that I expect in an ESB is the ability to introduce an ESB in the middle between a client and a service (without impacting either the client or the service) and be able to do provide value added services like logging, monitoring, auditing etc. This is exactly what we are able to accomplish with the Dynamic Service Gateway pattern. This gateway pattern is implemented as a mediation component. The interface for this mediation component has 2 operations, a request operation and a request response operation. Both these operations accept xsd:anyType (they are not bound to the type definitions exposed by any particular service). The reference partner for this mediation also maps to the same interface. The reason this pattern is dynamic, is because there is no coupling to services at compile time. You can dynamically set the service endpoint at runtime and invoke that service.

However what needs to be understood is that this pattern implementation works only for SOAP 1.2 based JAX WS Web Services. The reason why this restriction exists is because in JAX-RPC the invocation was RPC based -> a particular web service operation had to be specifically invoked. In JAX-WS the invocation is more messaging based. There is no specific operation invocation required. The following article series provide an in depth analysis of the differences between JAX-RPC and JAX-WS.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-tip-jaxwsrpc4/index.html

The following diagrams show a sample implementation of this pattern for monitoring and auditing service invocations.

Assembly Diagram

Mediation Flow

Look up Table

Audit Table

Dynamic Routing using WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB)

2009-08-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

One of the most common requirements I have heard from customers who are using an ESB is to say that I want to dynamically route information to several of my end systems. I don't want to change my code when i introduce a new system to the mix that requires the same data.

Careful analysis is required to implement a solution to this requirement as there are two parts to this.

1. The ability to invoke an end point dynamically (the requirement statement is crystal clear about that).
2. The second part is how do I define my routing logic? How do i describe it? How can i change it at runtime?

Setting the endpoint header dynamically on the endpoint is supported by the Service Component Architecture (SCA) framework and therefore we do have an easy solution to the first part of the requirement. However there is no standard primitive or a defined approach in the WESB product to achieve the second aspect of the dynamicity requirement.

There are multiple solutions to this

1. We can use WebSphere Business Fabric (WBSF) to provide this capability.
2. Or we can build custom solutions to achieve this goal.

One such solution approach that we have used is to use Business Rules component in WebSphere Process Server (WPS) to be a 'Routing Controller' and define business rules to describe the routing logic. The out of the box capability of business rules in WPS provides us with an editor to edit to these rules and dynamically update them at runtime. The pros of this approach are that we don't have to custom code any of the logic and we are able to use the out of the box rules component. However, since the business rules components are part of WPS, this solution is not applicable for pure WESB customers.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 2 – What’s inside the Box?

2009-07-28T07:48:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In the first blog entry on this topic, I talked about IBM offerings for cloud computing (i.e. the CloudBurst appliance) and discussed its high level overview and capabilities. In this second part I will discuss the value proposition of the device and explore the technical architecture of the device - mainly what it consists of, or what you are buying when you spend more than 200k to buy one.

So again, what is CloudBurst? CloudBurst is a service delivery platform which consists of prepackaged and pre-configured servers, storage, networking, and software needed to set up a private cloud. These resources (hardware and software) can be provisioned and enabled to provide virtual server resources for application development, testing, and other activities that normally have to wait on physical hardware to be procured and deployed.

An important question to ask here is, what value this device is going to provide. In today’s market customers are largely investing in two categories of solutions, one which provides efficiency in the data centers across their IT organizations and secondly, solutions which help them differentiate from their competitors. Typically, IT data centers spend 30% to 50% of resources in developing, testing and configuring environments.

Some time it takes months to establish data center environments and configure them to be consistent with the requirements. With CloudBurst, a developer can log into a self service portal, select resources required and timeframe, select an image to provision from the service catalog, and be ready to go in minutes as opposed to months. So the idea is that if the efficiency of the data centers improve by the use of CloudBurst device, the available resources can focus and spend time on innovating products which differentiate them from competition.

So how does CloudBurst device accomplish this? To answer this, we have to look inside the box. Unlike DataPower devices which are hardware devices built for specific purposes (e.g. xml acceleration, security, integration etc), CloudBurst actually consists of several different hardware devices/components which are pre built and packaged for specific architecture needs and cloud requirements. A typical CloudBurst device (base configuration) consists of:

1 42U rack
1 3650M2 Systems Management Server
1 HS22 cloud management blade
1 BladeCenter H chassis with redundant Ethernet and Fibre Channel switch modules
3 managed HS22 blades
DS3400 FC attached storage

Some important things to note here are, the 3650M2 management server hosts the pre packaged software stack (discussed below) and the HS22 blade hosts the IBM Blue Cloud computing software. The 3 managed HS22 blades hosts the client provided VM ware images, which can be cataloged for on demand provisioning. I won’t go into details of each of the individual hardware components (networking, storage etc) here in this blog as their description can be found on IBM website.

The device also comes pre packaged with IBM software, which includes:

Systems Director 6.1.1 with BOFM, AEM; ToolsCenter 1.0; DS Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor on all blades
Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1

DB2 ESE 9.1; WAS ND 6.1.0.13; TDS 6.1.0.1
Special purpose customized portal and appliance wizard that enables client portal interaction

Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1

OS pack

Note that it includes third party software from VMware (virtual center and ESX hypervisor) and IBM cloud computing software which makes use of Tivoli provisioning software components. An interesting point to note is that even though the CloudBurst device consists of several hardware and software components, it is sold, delivered and supported as a single product.

In Part 3 of this blog series, I will discuss the logical architecture of the CloudBurst device and a practical scenario which demonstrates its usage in a real client environment.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance – Part I

2009-07-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

Having lived and breathed in the IBM technology world for the last 10 years, I was intrigued when IBM made the announcement a few months ago (June 16th, 2009) about the CloudBurst appliance. The name of the appliance, CloudBurst, was an interesting one and what it could do almost sounded like magical. A device which can bring together hardware, software and services needed to establish a private cloud? Sounded too good to be true. Obviously, the name of the appliance suggested that It had to do something with cloud computing – a concept which is fast gaining popularity.

As part of our technology group initiative, I decided to take a deep dive into understanding the appliance, its capabilities as they relate to cloud computing and IBM technology, and ultimately how we can we position it to our customers.

In this first part of blog series on CloudBurst, I will share the device overview and its general capabilities at high level. The subsequent blogs will go in more depth in describing its practical scenarios, architecture and real world usage.

IBM CloudBurst provides everything you need to start delivering services much faster than you do today, while reducing costs and providing the benefits of a dynamic infrastructure. It is a pre-packaged private cloud offering that integrates the service management system, server, storage and services needed to establish a private cloud. This offering takes the guess work out of establishing a private cloud by pre-installing and configuring the necessary software on the hardware and leveraging services for customization to your environment. All you need to do is install your applications and start leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, like virtualization, scalability and a self server portal for provisioning new services.

Summarizing the capabilities:

A service delivery platform that is pre-integrated at the factory
Built-for-purpose based on the architectural requirement of specific workloads
Delivered and supported as a single product
Prepackaged, pre-configured servers, storage, networking, software and installation
services needed to stand up a private cloud

IBM CloudBurst includes everything from a Self-service portal that allows end users to request their own services and improve service delivery, automation to provision the services and virtualization to make system resource available for the new services thus reducing costs significantly. This is all delivered through the integrated pre-packaged IBM CloudBurst offering which includes implementation services and a single support interface to make it easy.

In part II of this series we will go into more depth in exploring individual features of the appliance in more detail. Stay tuned…

Portals: The Next Generation

2009-07-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

Devi Gupta, Vice President of Marketing

We’ve been building Portal applications for years…with over 230 implementations under our belt. The obvious “first implementation” done by most organizations is to create a Content Portal, otherwise known as Employee Portal, Intranet Portal, etc. We can get a typical content portal up and running in 3 weeks and can obviously do more extensive custom implementations. Today we are seeing the “next generation” trend for these portals to be adding in Dashboards and adding in Social Networking capabilities.

For Social Networking we are starting to introduce Lotus Connections and Quickr into a Portal environment to benefit from communities, blogs, wikis, etc. We’ve done this internally at Prolifics as well for our own Intranet and its really improving our ability to collaborate and share information.

For Dashboards, portals have been accessing dashboards, reports, and scorecards already, and you can also start to make those items actionable, such as drilling down for quicker problem resolution and associating reports with different applications. But many dashboard solutions require programming. If you already own Cognos for your Business Intelligence data and have reports, then you can start to make these available within a portal and can start to make these have actionable qualities as well. Generally gaining a richer overall environment. And in this case you don’t require portal programming capabilities.

When will you start exploiting your portal to capitalize on the information available to you? These little changes can make a big difference to the value of your existing portal.

Devi Gupta directs the market positioning for Prolifics and helps manage the company’s strategic alliance with IBM. Under her guidance, Prolifics has made the critical transition from a product and services company to becoming a highly reputable WebSphere service provider and winner of several awards at IBM including the Business Partner Leadership Award, Best Portal Solution, IMPACT Best SOA Solution, and Overall Technical Excellence Award. Ms. Gupta has been key to Prolifics and has fulfilled a variety of principal functions since joining Prolifics in 1991, from Product Manager to VP of Marketing. Her computer science background has allowed Ms. Gupta to move freely between the engineering and the business development/marketing sides of the technology industry, which gives her a unique ability to apply the client’s perspective to the on-going evolution of Prolifics’ technology and solutions.

Collaboration and Rational Tooling

2009-06-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

Greg Hodgkinson, Methodology Pratice Leader

Running effective software development projects requires a certain level of tool support. For most organizations, the tools they have come from multiple vendors, and may also include a mix of both licensed and open-source tooling. As tools tend to be acquired to meet point problems, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture – how your team and tools fit together to deliver the business solutions needed. Integration (SOA) projects bring with them a new set of challenges which may require tooling of a type that you don’t currently have. Do you find yourself asking any of the following?

How do I drive my team’s work in a way that allows me to track progress?
How do I figure out what work and changes went into a build of the code created 6 months ago?
How do I keep my distributed team aware of each other’s actions and progress?
How do I ensure that my best practices are being adhered to?

These are questions we hear on a regular basis from our customers. Having tested and used various tooling, we have had great success with Rational Team Concert which is highly effective for team collaboration. Below are some slides I've put together which illustrate what I'm referring to...

Think Fast! Rational AppScan using a SaaS Model

2009-06-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

A quick thought for you...

With all the buzz around SaaS these days there's a cool application of Rational AppScan for Web Application Security that may be of interest. You can now purchase Rational AppScan using a SaaS model. It basically is an outsourced version that is hosted and managed by security experts at IBM. You buy a subscription service so there is no infrastructure cost and setup time. Could be a good way to get started...

Dynamically Loading Java Modules

2009-06-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

Mike Hastie, Solutions Director

Did you ever feel there should be a way to modularize your Java modules and dynamically load and unload them as needed? In fact, move away from the whole classpath headache altogether? Well, you’re not alone. The OSGi Alliance (http://www.osgi.org/Main/HomePage) - Open Services Gateway initiative, a name that is now obsolete - is a non-profit corporation founded in March 1999 with the mission to develop a standard Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed.

In case you think OSGi is new, there are OSGi frameworks in many of the systems we use, examples include:

Eclipse – Integrated Development Environment Plug-ins are OSGi modules

Eclipse Equinox – Server Framework

WebSphere Application Server v6.1

Lotus Expeditor

Jonas v5

JBoss is replacing JMX with OSGi

Spring Dynamics is an OSGi implementation

The OSGi framework started out as a Dynamic Module and Class Loader framework for cell phones and mobile devices, but is now widely accepted as one of the leading standards. In fact, it is detailed in the JSR291 specification. OSGi is a mature standard and is in its 4th release and the 5th release is in the works. Sun is working on the JSR277 specification as a Java Modularity standard planned for Java 7, but it is thought to include compatibility with JSR291. More information is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi.

So if you have a server side development project where you have to reload classes and modules without a server restart, then take a little closer into OSGi or maybe just build a Java application for your cell phone.

Mike Hastie is an experienced solutions architect and implementation manager with a strong background in business driven and improvement focused IT solutions. He has over 20 years of IT experience covering project management, enterprise architecture, IT governance, SDLC methodologies, and design/programming in a client/server and Web-based context. Prior to joining Prolifics, Mike was a co-founder and Director of Promenix, a successful systems integrator focused on IBM software implementations. Mike also has significant large-scale systems implementation experience using SAP ERP, data warehouses, and portals during employment with Deloitte Consulting and Ernst & Young where he specialized in messaging and integration technologies using the WebSphere brand family.

The Curious Case of Web Services Migration - Part II

2009-06-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Serebryany, Senior Consultant

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, the final goal was to develop a Maven-powered environment in which the deployable unit - in our case the EAR file - would be generated by a set of scripts starting from checking out versioned code from PVCS. I would lie if I tell you that I liked Maven at first sight. My initial feelings were anger and frustration as Maven-enabled RAD essentially diminished RAD to be just a fancy code editor - and nothing more. Gone were round-trip interactive development, and my productivity as a developer really suffered. Only by the end of the project I found out how to keep RAD effective and fully engaged and still be able to build using Maven. At the very end of the project I started to really appreciate the effectiveness of Maven as a build tool especially when it comes to building deployable units for different environments in a very uniform and reliable way. Its ability to manage versioned dependencies is just outstanding given the relative simplicity with which this is achieved.

Anyway, for regular Dynamic Web Projects the task would be trivial - Maven already has a plug-in to generate all deployable artifacts. But for Web projects with Web services there was nothing I could use because there were a number of generated artifacts which simply did not fit into Maven’s rigid default directory structure. I faced a task of developing a new Maven plug-in just for the tasks on hand (as long as I am mentioning this, you may guess that plug-in was successfully implemented, but read below to find out at what cost).

To assess the scope of the effort involved, let me just list the tasks accomplished.
Given: set of RAD projects fresh from PVCS each with Maven pom.xml. One specialized project had all WSDL and XSD files. Parent folder had pom.xml with our custom Maven Web services plug-in properties and configurations. Note that only scripts and libraries available with WAS 6.1 run-time are used for code generation. No part of RAD is used for Maven plug-in (in fact our customer uses AIX to run build scripts).

Below is the overview of custom plug-in functionality:

For each WSDL in parent pom.xml run WSDL2Java script, create temporary folder structure with all Java and XML configuration files.
For each generated webservices.xml go in and replace generated placeholder with actual servlet class name (this is because WSDL2Java script just does not do that by design).
Combine all webservices.xml files together and create single webservices.xml to be put in the target project.
Collect all mapping xml files and put them together in the target project.
Collect all servlets names and classes names for each WSDL and put them as servlet/servlet-mapping entries in the Web Deployment Descriptor in the target project.
Copy WSDL and XSD files into the target project WEB-INF/wsdl folder.
Copy all generated Java sources and put them together with existing source code.
Pass resulting project to the standard Maven Web project plug-in to be compiled and built.

At the end the Prolifics team had accomplished everything the client asked us to do. and we left the site with application up and running in production with no problems. The only thing they asked with amazement was: "How did you do that, guys?"

Vladimir Serebryany is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with in-depth knowledge and broad hands-on experience with the J2EE environment as well as expertise in EJBs, Servlets, JSP and JSF. Excelling at migrations, Vladimir has over 9 years of experience with a wide range of complementary skills including WebSphere, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, UNIX, C/C++, Java, HTML/ASP, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. He has served as team leader/senior developer roles in large, complex projects and configurations with clients in the financial, insurance and telecommunication industries - among others.

The Curious Case of Web Services Migration - Part I

2009-05-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Serebryany, Senior Consultant

During one of my recent BEA WebLogic to IBM WebSphere migration assignments at a major insurance company, I encountered an interesting problem.

The client had a large number of Web services which were running on BEA WebLogic and consumed by a .NET front-end. In the course of migration, our team had to not only migrate code to WebSphere but also help the customer refactor the source code repository and create a set of Maven scripts to provide a fully scripted build/deploy process for all environments - from unit test to production.

We started with the typical set of issues:

WSDL files and corresponding XSD files had relative namespaces in them - and the spec strongly recommends absolute ones
Source code was stored in typical WebLogic structures and deployable components were created by running four (!) different Ant scripts
Code and WSDL files were stored in PVCS and the revision history had to be preserved
WSDL2Java wizard was invoked every time scripts ran so binding Java code would be generated on the fly and not stored in PVCS - wise decision but binding implementation classes with client's code in them had to be preserved from being overwritten.

The first issue was easy to deal with – a couple sed/awk scripts took care of the namespaces. We gave WSDL files back to client; they validated them against their .NET environment and found no problems with new namespaces.

Item #2 was also relatively easy to solve - we manually rearranged code into a Rational Application Developer (RAD) structure and that was it. RAD is really good at that sort of thing. While doing that we also extracted PVCS archives as files from the central repository and rearranged these archives in the file system according to the new directory structure. We sent back these directories to the client’s PVCS team, and they imported these archives back into a new PVCS project. That way all the previous generations of source code have been preserved. We now were able to work with PVCS and track a file’s revision history right back to Noah's Ark.

Now we had to deal with WSDL to Java files generation. There were three sorts of files: custom code with business logic, binding code and classes generated from data types definitions in XSD files, and binding implementation classes. We did not have to worry about the first two types: the first set was permanent code which we shifted to another utility’s Java project for simplicity of maintenance. Generated Java was what it was - generated code which the wizard took care of, only the binding implementation classes was something we had to take care of. On one hand all the methods stubs are generated by the WSDL2Java wizard - on the other hand these methods already contained the customer's code. If we allowed the wizard to run "freely," this code would be overwritten.

Here we needed a trick and we found one. As it is well-known, RAD may designate one or more folders in the project to be the Source folders - meaning it will compile all Java code in these and only these folders into binary form. It happens that built-in RAD wizards are very sensitive to the order in which Source folders are listed in "Order and Export" tab of "Java Build Path" configuration page. If the WSDL2Java wizard for bottom-down Web services generation is invoked either from the pop-up menu or from the wsgen.xml script, it always places all generated files into the folder listed first in "Order and Export" tab. That "observation" provided us with opportunity to solve the problem. We would define two Source folders: “src/main/java” and “src/main/java2.” “src/main/java” would be listed first in "Order and Export" tab, “src/main/java2” would be the second. The single "target/bin" folder was designed for binary files. We placed all existing binding implementation files into “src/main/java2” folder, and we put WSDL and XSD files into a separate project. (Note that by using “src/main/java” folder structure we were shooting to use Maven.)

From that point on, if a WSDL definition changed, we would clean “src/main/java” folder and run the Web services wizard/script against new WSDL/XSD files. Newly generated binding files would go into “src/main/java” folder. As long as binding implementation files were also on the classpath, WSDL2Java wizard was smart enough to not regenerate *BindingImpl.java files, but rather pick them up from “src/main/java2” folder. IBM provided ws_gen Ant task, script and sample properties files were customized to run the whole task at any time for all 20 WSDL's we had in the service definition (see http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/radhelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.etools.webservice.was.creation.core.doc/ref/rtdwsajava.html). We didn't include “src/main/java” folder into PVCS and never had to check-in transient generated code.

The remaining issue to solve was to reproduce in RAD the style in which WebLogic's WSDL2Java script generated the code. By tweaking WSDL2Java options on Window->Preferences->Web services->Websphere->JAX-RPC Code Generation->WSDL2Java tab in RAD, we matched the style of generated code so that RAD-generated code was almost drop-in replacement for WebLogic-generated code. The problem was solved - but only for development phase so far.

Coming in Part II: “My initial feelings were anger and frustration as Maven-enabled RAD essentially diminished RAD to be just a fancy code editor - and nothing more. Gone were round-trip interactive development, and my productivity as a developer really suffered. Only by the end of the project I found out how to keep RAD effective and fully engaged and still be able to build using Maven…”

Vladimir Serebryany is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with in-depth knowledge and broad hands-on experience with the J2EE environment as well as expertise in EJBs, Servlets, JSP and JSF. Excelling at migrations, Vladimir has over 9 years of experience with a wide range of complementary skills including WebSphere, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, UNIX, C/C++, Java, HTML/ASP, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. He has served as team leader/senior developer roles in large, complex projects and configurations with clients in the financial, insurance and telecommunication industries - among others.

Database Design and the Demands of Operational Business Intelligence

2009-05-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Anant Gupta, SOA Practice Director

When hearing the term Business Intelligence the first thought that springs to mind is that of reporting and trend analysis based on historical data. So what exactly is Operational Business Intelligence (BI)? It almost seems to be an oxymoron. In one sentence, it is the mechanism of enabling everyone, and not just the strategy team as in the case of BI, to make decisions that improve the top-line, bottom-line or enhance customer satisfaction. These decisions are not made quarterly or yearly but on a transactional basis. A very simple example of operational intelligence is your GPS system telling you to take a different route to work because of a bad traffic condition on your regular route. To make this more interesting, let’s assume that your system not only understands the traffic conditions, but also gas prices, your schedule, tolls, etc., and needs to present you the most effective option based on all of these factors. To do this, it needs to perform a lot of analysis in real-time. Similarly, systems need to look at the product / promotion info and customer purchase history / status and determine cross-sell, up-sell opportunities.

So far we have been talking about transactional databases or data warehouses / data marts, one for OLTP and the other designed strictly for post-facto reporting and analysis. The new trend will be a middle path where we will be designing data marts that will have the capability to be queried and performing analysis in real time. There will also be a trend that will emerge to update the operational data stores with updates from the data warehouse. Essentially, data warehouses will be able to continuously analyze data, recognize and send events that operations will subscribe to. For example, I might be interested in subscribing to an event if merchandise returns for one of my product lines exceed 5% of normal returns. So, databases will need to start understanding events and perform continuous analysis to determine the occurrence of any of those events.

All of this imposes challenges to the database design as both the depth of analysis and performance will have to be delivered simultaneously.

Anant Gupta was recently named the SOA Practice Director at Prolifics after serving as a Senior Business Integration and J2EE architect Anant has with extensive experience in IBM's SOA software portfolio and specializes in delivering business integration and business process management solutions. He has worked for major clients in the banking, insurance, telecommunications and technology industries.

Web Application Security Considerations

2009-05-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

Andy Blank, Security Practice Solution Director

Should you consider doing anything about Web Application Security? Here’s a quick self assessment test for all the many application developers and infrastructure specialists out there. Answer the following questions as honestly as possible.

While building customer web applications (Portals, UI front ends to business processes, SOAInfrastructure, message flows, Web services, etc.), I think of security:

First, foremost in priority, and continuously throughout!
As one step in my development process.
As a separate set of tools (identity management, access management, etc.) handled by a security team.
Security? Isn’t that the job of the imposing looking person in the elevator lobby?

I would guess that the applications I develop/deploy have significant security holes:

Never! I am a gift to modern development perfection!
Half the time.
Three quarters of the time.
I really have no way of knowing.

Unless you honestly answered ‘a’ to both questions, you should take a hard look hard look at Web Application Security -- including coding practices, vulnerability testing, managing system access, and system configurations. 75% of all current internet based attacks are made against the application layer. In addition, security companies such as Symantec surmise that up to 80% of existing web applications have at least one significant exploitable vulnerability.

Since joining Prolifics in 1994, Andrew Blank has held key positions such as Senior Technical Support Engineer, Manager of Training Services, Senior Consultant, and Migrations Practice Manager. Currently, as one of Prolifics’ Solution Directors and as leader of the Security Practice, Andrew takes part in the design, development and delivery of Prolifics’ projects for such clients as Marsh & McLennan, MetLife and UPS. His expertise in J2EE architectures, portal solutions, IT security, and systems monitoring is integral to the company’s strategic planning for adoption and use of new product technologies.

Messaging: JMS vs SCA

2009-05-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Ivan Smirnov, Senior Consultant

In SCA, bindings are the means of transporting data (messages) to and from modules. One specific application I’d like to discuss is messages between SCA modules: that is, when one SCA module calls another SCA module. There are several types of bindings that can be used in that scenario. The easiest is, I kid you not, the SCA binding. At runtime, it becomes an EJB call. SCA binding was designed specifically for inter-module calls and it is so good at this, it makes you wonder: why use any other binding type at all? Well, if you need more flexibility, JMS binding may be handy.

SCA binding is best suited for simple synchronous calls between modules. It is possible to use SCA binding for an asynchronous invocation, but it will be implemented on auto-generated JMS queues on a SCA SYSTEM bus. With little control over queues, this option does not provide all the benefits of JMS binding.

Advantages of SCA bindings over JMS bindings:

They do not require any external configuration and thus are maintenance-free.
Interfaces are early bound. Interface types are checked when binding is established, and the Export interface must match the Import interface. This eliminates a possibility of errors not discovered until runtime.

Advantages of JMS bindings compared to SCA:

More flexibility: target module can be relocated (even to a different cell).
You don’t have to use the same interface on both sides of binding. Even method names may be different on caller (module Import) and target (module Export), so long as payload type is correct.
There is an easily accessible checkpoint between modules(a JMS destination) where messages may be inspected for troubleshooting/debugging purposes.

In addition to this theoretical analysis, let me share my experience. I experimented with inserting JMS binding between modules where SCA was a natural fit, just for error handling purposes. My idea was that it would be much easier to control message flow and retry logic if there was a JMS queue between modules that I could configure to my liking. As intriguing as it sounds, there was too little real benefit in that specific ESB solution. So my conclusion was that error handling is not sufficient justification for using JMS binding where SCA binding is a more natural fit.

Ivan Smirnov is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with extensive hands-on experience with the WebSphere family of products (including WebSphere Application Server and Process Server, WebSphere Studio/Rational and WebSphere MQ), Tivoli security offerings (including Tivoli Identity Manager and Tivoli Access Manager for e-business), DB2, XML and Web Services. With strong technical skills both in development and administration, as well as deep troubleshooting skills, Ivan handles aspects of implementation installation, configuration, securing and tuning/troubleshooting to development and architecture within a J2EE environment. He also possesses key Application Server migration skills and has helped several customers’ transition to the WebSphere platform from other J2EE platforms.

SOA and Off-Shore Project Models

2009-04-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Machules, Technology Director

SOA is, as it was hyped by the marketing machines years ago, the next maturity level in Architecture. Service Orientation adds another level of design, development and maintenance considerations to projects. Another trend in the industry is the off-shore model of development of these projects. You can see why project success with these maturing trends is largely dependent on the personnel involved.

At Prolifics we are leaders in both these areas. We have expertise in SOA Methodology, Design and Architecture across all functional and non-functional domains complimented by a proven off-shore methodology that delivers.

On a recent SOA project using off-shore resources I had 2 months to Architect and Design an Enterprise Integration Platform for a large financial company seeking to use a combination on-shore/off-shore model for the Design and Development of Enterprise Integration system based on SOA.

This combined model works well with the right pieces in personnel in place. Capable developers with the ability to learn new technologies, strong project management and architectural leadership. Couple this with proven communication strategies and process for corresponding tactical direction and deliverables and there is a model that can work in the face of new technologies and regionally separated personnel.

The pay-off for this model combination is reduced cost and time to market. Given the economic times I foresee we will see a fair amount of interest and subsequent implementations with such models.

-Jon

Jonathan Machules first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently a Technology Director specializing in SOA, BPM, UML and IBM's SOA-related technologies. He has 12 years experience in the IT field — 2 of those years at Oracle as a Support Analyst and 10 years in Consulting. Jon is a certified IBM SOA Solution Designer, Solutions Developer, Systems Administrator and Systems Expert. Recent speaking engagements include IMPACT on SOA End-to-End Integration in 2007 and 2008, and SOA World Conference on SOA and WebSphere Process Server in 2007.