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.
