IBM® WebSphere® Application Server is the leading open standards-based application foundation, offering accelerated delivery of innovative applications and unmatched operational efficiency, reliability, administration, security, and control. The Version 8.5 is a major release that offers dramatic run time improvements, plus simpler and easier ways to develop and deploy applications. The new features, functions, and improvements in IBM Websphere Application Server V8.5 addresses the key areas of Developer Experience, Application Resiliency and Operational Control.

One of the significant new features provided by v8.5 is its Intelligent Management function from IBM’s WebSphere Virtual Enterprise that can minimize end-user outages, maximizes operational monitoring and control over the production environment. The biggest news under the theme of Application Resiliency is probably the integration of the features from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise into WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.5. This merge allows single WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment installation to deliver the traditional Network Deployment functions, as well as WebSphere Virtual Enterprise functions.

The former WebSphere Virtual Enterprise functions are now characterized as ‘Intelligent Management’ features in new Network Deployment V8.5 which encompasses:

• Intelligent routing
• Application edition management
• Dynamic clustering
• Health management

All of the above cited features are great and worth talking about, however we would like to focus on Application edition management feature for now and discuss how it helps in achieving application resiliency.

Application Edition Management

Application edition management enables management of interruption-free production application deployments. Using this feature, you can validate a new edition of an application in your production environment without affecting users, and upgrade your applications without incurring user outages. You can also run multiple editions of a single application concurrently, directing different users to different editions, as the ODR maintains not only traditional application state (for example, HTTP session) affinity, but also application version affinity. The ability to queue requests is also employed with the Intelligent Management application edition function if an “atomic” application update that allows pre-provisioning of a new application version, and an “atomic” update of all users from the old application version to the new application version, is desired.

In order to achieve the aforementioned functionality, a tool is also provided known as Application edition manager.

Following images show two screens in which an application ‘App1′ is shown with two editions and further available options to work with the editions. This can be expanded to a big scale depending on the requirement.

Fig.1.

Fig.2.

Application Edition Manager: The application edition manager ensures interruption-free production application deployments. Interruption-free deployment prevents loss of service when you install an application update in your environment.

The application edition manager provides an application versioning model that supports multiple deployments of the same application in the Intelligent Management cell. Each deployment has a unique edition name. The application edition manager allows you to select the edition to activate on an Intelligent Management cluster, so that you can perform a rollout of an application update or revert to a previous level.

The application edition manager is fully integrated with Intelligent Management, interacting with the On Demand Router (ODR), dynamic workload balancing, and the application placement manager. This integration ensures predictable application behavior when you apply application updates, and a smooth transition from one application edition to another while the system continues to manage your application performance goals. You can access application update processes with the administrative console, including edition activation across the application servers. Scripting application programming interfaces enable the integration of edition management functions with automated application deployment.

WebSphere Application Server includes an administrative function called rollout update. Rollout update provides a basic application upgrade, but is not interruption-free. The application edition manager is the preferred way to upgrade applications. The application edition manager supports your overall application life cycle, and enables application updates and seamless, interruption-free application deployments to your production environment.

The Value addition by Application Edition Management

IBM Business Process Manager is an agile centralized process management system that allows organizations to boost performance using its powerful features by integrating different process applications together.  This article will tell you how you can implement order fulfillment process in BPM v8.

In this  process, “Analyst” fills the order fulfillment form, which passes on to “Vendor”. After vendor fills the appropriate data, Business rules are applied on that form and on the basis of Business Rules, form either passes again to “Analyst” or “Manager” for approval. So let’s get started.

Open the Process Designer. Before opening process designer, please make sure that Process Center has started. Click on “Create New Process App”, and enter Process Application Name and Acronym and click on Create.

Figure 1

Click on open in designer and create new Business Process Definition. You require four lanes on the diagram view. One is “System” lane and rest of the lanes are for “Analyst”, “Vendor” and “Manager”.

Figure 2

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Figure 1 

We start by creating a “Web Experience Factory” project and then creating an empty model inside it. To call any Web services, Web Experience Factory provides the Web Service Call builder.

Open the Web service call builder and write your WSDL URL and click on the Fetch WSDL button as shown in Figure 2. This will populate the list of operations supported by your WSDL.

It was another fun filled day 3 in Las Vegas NV at IBM Impact. The general session began at 8:30am Pacific time and the host of the show was Don McMillan who holds a diversified portfolio, he is technology comedian and engineer who engages the audience by telling them about IT terms in the funniest way.

He then invited Rod Smith, VP Emerging technologies at IBM to talk about the next wave of computing and how it’s changing the way we live and work. Smith said that Emerging technologies are enabling new types of applications for multiple channels including mobile, social and cloud. He mentioned that in IBM alone there are 12000 employees using mobile to access different applications

“Every month people send one billion tweets and post 30 billion messages on Facebook. Mobile Application have become fluid and can be adjusted to user context based on device, time and location” said Smith emphasizing on faster applications development saying time to value is the key factor.

Professor John Taplin from University of South California came next on stage and talked about his team collaboration with IBM and LA times. He mentioned Arab Upspring and how an Egyptian student used IBM software to find which words are being tweeted.

Jane Mcgonial, technology expert talked about her research on gaming and its huge impact on our lives. She said that there are over 1 billion gamers on the planet playing at least one hour every day. Mcgonial also shared part of her research saying that games have positive impact on children battling cancers. She also engages participants in multi player thumb wrestling game which broke the record with 8000 participants.

Breth Smith, VP IBM talk about new era of messaging. Smith said that phones have become personal ids and would soon become corporate ids that would tell us where we are and that one device will soon become everything. She emphasized on need for a collaborative lifecycle for faster response time which she says require new processes and business models for a new era.

Jerry Cuomo, CTO Websphere then came on stage to show the principles of SOA and its new capabilities. He mentioned the case of Acme Airlines and how did they have collaborated with IBM for extending APIs to developers and expand mobile apps to be engaging.

Breth Smith VP IBM then made announcements about the latest versions of DataPower, MQ and WAS 8.5. She said that DataPower new version offers extended security exercises over the enterprise level and that the latest version of MQ provides managed file transfer and advanced messaging security. The new WAS 8.5 has built in application management capabilities including, intelligent routing and dynamic clustering. She also said that IBM is 16% faster than Oracle in equivalent hardware.

Kevin Steele, Senior Director Technology at Cars.com introduced his company starting with a short documentary. He said that his company employs 1000 people nationwide including 140 IT professionals. Steele said that his company was facing frequent outages and issues regarding system monitoring capabilities and hence they worked with IBM. Omnibus solution helped Cars.com get data from logs and fix system performance management tools. IBM technology enabled his company to improve scalability, speed and reliability.

In the end IBM Fellow and CTO Jerry Cuomo invited other presenters to play a virtual game with their handheld devices. Later on Don McMillan ended the session with announcements about the coming impact sessions.