Tuesday 18 December 2007

Where have I been...

Well, I have neglected this blog for a while. I've been busy on some investigations into WAS 6.1 Internals that I hope to post on this site soon, but they are being published in IBM Systems Magazine. More publications are on their way, but enough of that for now.

One thing I have been doing is trying to create a means of testing a WAS7-like environment. Basically, take an AIX 5.3 environment and upgrade it to AIX 6.1 (adding support for WPARs). Then clone the WAS 6.1 directory structure, replacing the Java 5 JVM by a Java 6 JVM. This allows shared classes to use memory mapped files and to share across WPARs. Then upgrade Eclipse 3.1.2 in the WAS 6.1 plugins directory to Eclipse 3.3 - changing the configuration files and startup as you go. Finally, add the WAS EJB3 feature pack which is based on Apache OpenJPA. This is the starting point for what I believe WAS7 will look like. To do all this the platform specific properties and config files inside com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar have to edited and replaced to support the new command line, but after all it is just a big zip file so it isn't too hard. So far the Eclipse classloaders complain but I am getting closer.....

At work I am dealing with broken applications again.

One is from a lack of understanding from business architects and IT management as to the difference between the logical "ideal" world and the real world. If you have to go to the same system 14 times to get the data you need for a single screen from "logical services" then the latency caused by the infrastructure limitation of the "speed of light" is going to inhibit performance. Most technical people did point out that the real world has these limitations so wrapping services on the same platform to provide application specific services is often needed to achieve usable performance.

The next problem area are a couple of package vendors. The architecture from both is very legacy and still seems to emphasize the legacy rather than coming into the modern JavaEE based age. Poor vendor management and a lack of architecture vision and drive leads to the legacy spinning out of control and getting harder and harder to replace. So, these vendors are going to end up requiring multiple DBMS's to keep their product around as they are replacing the original legacy architectural components on a like-for-like piecemeal basis, rather than looking at the big picture and simplifying. I think this might be a subject for the next conference we host, i.e. "Replacing legacy - the good, the bad, and the ugly", The vendors should know they are in trouble - and so should the customers - when they can't even write an installation document for their own product...... Vendors I am working with will probably look at this and feel victimised, but sadly this description applies to two major products I am working with so there are two sets of vendors at the very least who should be ashamed and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Remember that the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.

So, I finish my time for this year in the office tomorrow. I think we will refer to it as Rome. I had a public run in with Jupiter last week who likes to assure us all that there are no problems. Still, if we can't fix the problems in Rome where deafness reigns then we will try to fix them in the outside world where everyone benefits.

Be happy! I'll update soon with more details on the innards of WAS.

Well, enough for now.