Last week’s announcement letter means that my current project at work is coming to an end.
I’ve been working for that last 6 months on the WebSphere ESB 6.2 release with a particular focus on web services and policy. So the bullet points most relevant to me are:
- New policy-driven ESB mediation, including integration with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
- Support for the WebSphere Application Server Web Services Feature Pack and SOAP 2.1 (sic)
The policy driven mediation is one answer to Katy’s recent question “What’s so great about WS-Policy?”. WS-Policy provides a standard format to describe requirements, and with the policy driven mediation we exploit this standard to describe requirements on a mediation flow (or more precisely the primitivies within one). Using WS-Policy means we can use the existing support for WS-Policy in WSRR to author an attach policies, and allows users to use their existing WS-Policy expertise (or more likely for the moment – develop expertise which they can use later in other areas).
The policy driven mediation support is also an example of componentisation in action. We’ve spent a chunk of the last few months extracting the WS-Policy engine from WAS 7 to use it in WESB 6.2. WESB uses it in a very different manner than WAS, so we’ve made some changes on the way, but I think what we’ve ended up with will be useful in both products (and more) for a long time.
I’ve been less involved in the Web Services Feature Pack support. I’ve mainly been helping colleagues understand all the great new technologies, how to use them, and how we can best exploit them in WESB and WPS. It’s always eye-opening talking about something you’re so familiar with because so much that’s just background knowledge to you is advanced and complex to people with a focus elsewhere. I’m looking forward to seeing this second (or is it third because of WAS 7?) phase of customers working with JAX-WS, WS-RM and more.
With development for this release winding down I’ll be spending a bit of time out of the office talking to customers about what they can do with the current and coming releases – I look forward to hearing a bit about what they’re up to.
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