IBM Impact 2008: Day 4

Written by Chintan Rajyaguru

Friday, 11 April 2008 04:34

Today was the last day of Impact, at least for me, because I am not attending tomorrow. I continued attending sessions today - as always, some good, some not so much.

Kim Clark of IBM talked about WebSphere Process Server design best practices. He rather focused on problems you need to think about than how to solve them. The presentation lacked specific guidance around designing with process server.

A technical overview on Project Zero was one of the best sessions I attended at Impact. It had less marketing and more substance. I learned the following about Project Zero:

It's a community driven commercial project to create a development and execution platform for web 2.0 applications. It's available at projectzero.org

You can use PHP or Groovy to develop in project zero, both of them will run on JVM. The PHP implementation has been ported to run on JVM and IBM believes most of the existing assets should run on JVM but some extensions might not

The solution uses REST style services and all web 2.0 technologies to present the content to the user

There is no server runtime, you just develop, zip and run

IBM is coming up a product called WebSphere sMash (the speaker didn't give the date), which will run on top of Project Zero. Unlike other products, this will be free to download, develop and use in production. There may be some support structure but I didn't understand it quite well

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to show a cool demo or an application created in project zero.

The next session I attended was SOMA: The methodology for SOA. Again, this was one of the best sessions at Impact. The speaker answered all the questions well and took the audience through a scenario that used SOMA technique to identify services. SOMA has been around for some time now and I have been using it in bits and pieces at my clients but I did learn a few new things:

SOMA is packaged as SOMA Foundation and SOMA Complete with SOMA Agile soon to be added. Foundation is basic SOMA and Complete version is more comprehensive, useful for larger organizations and larger projects

What I don't like about SOMA from the beginning is that you have to purchase it separately as part of Rational Method Composer. As a methodology, SOMA (and RUP for that matter) should be free. A freely available methodology makes it easy for organizations to see how something that made sense on the white board can actually be done

The third session on using WebSphere MQ and WAS together was unimpressive. The speaker didn't speak loud enough and even though I was sitting way up front, I could barely hear anything.

In any case, the conference has ended for me. Tomorrow I will post my overall impression of the conference.

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