WebSphere Integration User Group / Hursley Conference - 13th July 2011

The WebSphere Integration User Group (UK) committee invites you to their next UK User Group Meeting, which will be held on Wednesday, 13th July 2011 at IBM Hursley Laboratories, near Winchester, the home of IBM’s Messaging and ESB technologies.  Help us celebrate 100 years of IBM and 15 years of our User Group.
   
The WebSphere Integration UK User Group is an independent body made up of a governing committee of WebSphere Integration users. Our aim is to offer a forum for users to meet and learn from one another's experience as well as meet and learn from the WebSphere Integration product experts.
   
The formal part of the day starts at 10:00 with a keynote presentation on using WebSphere technologies for a Smarter and More Agile Business by Gerry Reilly, Director of IBM Messaging and Integration, at IBM Hursley Laboratories. This is followed by a case study of the use of WebSphere Integration to improve effeciency and reduce costs for Fire Services.
   
A short session to ask questions of the Hursley experts, and arrange contact sessions between attendees leads into lunch, where discussions can continue and you can continue to network.
 
This will be followed by a choice of four parallel streams, with the ability to mix and match between them.
    - Advanced WebSphere MQ stream
    - ESB stream  
    - Cloud
    - Business Process Management
   
Full Agenda:  http://www.mqug.org.uk/next_event/HursleyAgenda2011.pdf
   
The event is free, and includes a buffet lunch. To register for the meeting, visit the WebSphere Integration User Group web site and click on "Next Event", or use the quick link below. Registration is via email, with full instructions on the web page below.
   
Agenda, and conference registration:  http://www.mqug.org.uk/next_event/index.html

A bit like buses, you wait for one IBM Web Experience Factory item, and two ( or three ) come along at once ...

So, following my earlier post, I've just seen this nice and short video on YouTube

What's new in IBM Web Experience Factory V7.0.1 (in less than 3 mins)

with the lovely Adam Ginsburg. Definitely worth three minutes of your time ...

Announcing IBM Web Experience Factory 7.0.1

I saw this and thought of everyone who ever needs to develop a web / portal / mobile / rich-client / widget application ....

IBM Web Experience Factory 7.0.1, formerly IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, delivers the fastest and easiest way to develop multichannel exceptional web experiences across desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms.

Key new features in Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 include:
    • Mobile and multi-channel support, with new builders, wizards, themes, and more
    • New IBM Web Content Manager builder allows easy integration of content and development of custom authoring interfaces
    • Improved end-user experiences with new builders such as Data Layout, Lazy Load, and Page Navigation
    • Improved development experience with new editing features and usability enhancements

The formal announcement is here and the Wiki article also has a link to a PDF document containing lots of shiny details about the new release.

The new product name is a little different but, to be fair, WebSphere Portlet Factory always undersold the tool, from the moment IBM acquired Bowstreet, as one could use it to develop non-portal web applications. Added to this, IBM then introduced the capabilities to develop rich-client applications ( to be run in Eclipse, Notes, Sametime etc. etc. etc. ) and widgets ....

So the name is different, but I'll get used to it :-)

Me, behind the curve again, congratulating the new IBM Champions for Lotus and IBM Collaboration Solutions

For various reasons, I've been off the net for much of this week, so haven't had the opportunity to pick up on this properly.

However, having had lunch with Sharon "Social Shazza" Bellamy yesterday, I wanted to write and add my, albeit belated, congratulations to Sharon and the rest of the newly minted IBM Champions.

Taking the list directly from Ed's blog, here we go:-

As has been oft-stated, one of the benefits of the social world is that one's network is much broader now, but I still don't yet know all of the people on this list - I'm working on it :-)

To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, "...I don't know half of you half as well as I should like...".

Regardless, congratulations to you all, it's acclaim well deserved, and shows the real power of the IBM Lotus community.

*UPDATE* Here's a far better version of the list, with links to the Champions' profiles, which is nice :-)

Lotus Symphony 3 - Fixpack 2 Released - That's SO last two months

Somehow this passed me by completely back in April, but I noticed - this morning (!) - that IBM had released a fix pack for Lotus Symphony 3 back on April 20.

The announcement is here, and the code itself is available ( for Mac, Linux and Doze ) here.

It's applied on my Macbook Pro, so I'll see what, if any, difference it makes to my symphonious performance :-)

Aide Memoire - remembering how to identify which process is hogging which port

For some reason, I always forget this so am hoping that, by writing it down here in my blog, I'll actually remember.

Having run a command such as: -

$ netstat aon

or: -

$ netstat -nlp

to see that something is listening on port 80, it's then useful to see what the process actually is: -

$ lsof -i :80

or: -

$ lsof -i tcp:80

will show you the way to go.

lsof is an immensely useful command, as blogged here.

Perhaps I should use this as a future tip if I'm ever invited back to @ThisWeekInLotus.

IBM Connections 3 and WebSphere Portal 7 together

I haven't yet had a chance to try this, but I've been pointed at a particular WebSphere Portal fix, PM37733, which may help improve the performance of the portlets that are available in the Catalog which provide integration from IBM Connections to WebSphere Portal.

This fix is available via Fix Central, and is included with Cumulative Fix 004 ( CF004 ), as per this link.

Released - WebSphere Application Server Version 8.0

As per an earlier blog post, IBM released WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 8 a few days back.

I'm looking at the Network Deployment package: -

IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.0 for Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly (CRCG3ML)

but many other bundles are also available.

Coincidentally, I am also reviewing a book, from Packt Publishing, that covers WAS 8, and will talk more about it here when it's released in the not-too-distant future.

Meanwhile, enjoy WAS 8, especially the "Drag and drop" application deployment and the High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL).

IBM Web Application Bridge - The Story Continues

Following an earlier blog post, I'm delighted to note that IBM has released an update to the Web Application Bridge (WAB) portlet earlier this month: -

The IBM Web Application Bridge (or WAB) is a feature that uses reverse proxy technology to integrate different web applications natively inside WebSphere Portal pages so that WebSphere Portal becomes the single window of access to users.

Release 2.0 of this component has been enhanced exclusively for supporting integration with Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 by bringing in native Sharepoint 2007 Web UI into Portal through this component and displaying it inside an iFrame within a portlet.

This is supported on IBM WebSphere Portal version 7.0x

More details about its usage and deployment instructions are available here:

The download contains a vwat.zip package. Please unzip that after downloading and use the vwat.paa package extracted from it for installation and deployment using the Solution Installer.

The Solution Installer for WebSphere Portal Server can be downloaded from here.

This new WAB release 2.0 portlet is in the Greenhouse here.

WebSphere Portal - Theming for Performance

Whilst rapping with some of our development gurus who're working on the project on which I'm currently engaged, a discussion around the AJAX Proxy came up, with specific regard to adding rich file types to it.

Specifically, there was a need to add the OFT file type to the proxy's list of accepted file types/extensions.

I'd pointed one of the developers at Sunil Patel's blog, which says: -

The proxy-config.xml file has three main elements

• policy: The policy element defines an access policy for specific URL pattern. Value of the url attribute of proxy element defines what URL pattern this policy is addressing. . In our sample configuration you can make GET and POST request to ibm.com, if you try to make either PUT or DELETE that it will deny access

• actions:Required subelement defines defines the list of HTTP methods that can be used to access resource in the target domain

• headers: Optional element that defines the list of header names that you want the proxy to forward to the target domain. By default it will forward Cache-Control, Pragma, User-Agent, Accept*, and Content*

• cookies: Optional element that defines the list of cookies that you want to forward in the target request. If no cookie names are specified then proxy wont forward any cookies

• mime-types:This element is optional. Use it to specify the list of accepted mime types.If no mime type is specified, the proxy accepts all responses

• user: Optional element that defines the user roles that are allowed to make the request. If you set AllAuthenticatedUsers here then proxy will only allow requests from authenticated users.

I'd also recommend that he talk to Konrad Wulf, who wrote the excellent Troubleshooting the Ajax Proxy in Portal.

In the end, it was also necessary to ensure that the front-end web server, IBM HTTP Server (IHS), also needed to have the OFT MIMEtype configured via the AddType directive.

As a final step, we also looked at Alex Lang's excellent blog here which has a lot of good stuff on portal performance, caching, hosting widgets on IHS rather than on WAS etc.

Shiny, shiny, oh so shiny - Mobile Portal theme and WebSphere Portal 7

Reading Jonathan Distad's blog post about the upcoming Mobile Portal theme for IBM WebSphere Portal 7

<snip>

In Q3, IBM will be shipping their Portal 7 Mobile theme (insert applause).  This powerful theme takes advantage of the almost-ubiquitous used mobile web-kit.  This compliments IBM's Mobile Portal Accelerator (MPA) which provides a much broader solution for multiple mobile device support.  The Mobile Theme provides a lightweight toolkit for extending portals to Android, iPhone and Blackberry (web-kit enabled) phones.

When to use Mobile Theme vs MPA?  It is pretty simple in my mind: when you have to support a very broad range of phones from your basic feature phone to the most complex web-kit smartphones and pads – MPA is your choice.  The downfall of MPA is that you have very little customization/modification abilities.  Otherwise, if your business drivers are to get acceptance with the iPhone/Android/Blackberry market (75-80% of all phones) the Mobile Theme is a pretty good choice.  I should note that there are a few more options such as native app development and rich-web apps.

</snip>

Am now looking to download a VMware image ( internal use only, I'm afraid ) in order to take a wee lookie-see.

Social Connections - 4 July 2011 - Your event needs YOU :-)

Following my earlier blog post, I have finally pulled my finger out, thanks to Social Shazza nagging reminding me, and have registered for the upcoming Social Connections event.

Have you done the same ?

If not, why not ?

Shame on you :-)

Meantime, my profile is here.

PS Kudos to the site authors for using Domino :-)

Aide Memoire - Adding the date/time stamp to a filename in a script

I'll be making further use of this later this week, as I look to automate an IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator Assembly Line via a Unix cron job.

I've still got a lot of learning about cron to do, including the use of the crontab command ( for user-specific jobs ) and the /etc/crontab file, and it's associated pals: -

/etc/cron.hourly

/etc/cron.daily

/etc/cron.weekly

/etc/cron.monthly

However, as part of my uber cool bash script, I wanted to be able to automatically backup and then copy out a log file. Here we go: -

#! /bin/sh

cd /opt/IBM/TDI/V7.0/tdisol/TDI 
mv logs/ibmdi.log logs/ibmdi.log-$(date +%F-%T) 
/opt/IBM/TDI/V7.0/ibmdisrv -c /opt/IBM/TDI/V7.0/tdisol/TDI/PwdExpire.xml -r pwdExpiry 
cp logs/ibmdi.log /tmp/ibmdi_execution-$(date +%F-%T)

The use of the -$(date +%F-%T) element of the filename appends the date and time, which is just what I wanted.

Sweet, cool and neat

IBM Tivoli Directory Server - It's the ulimit, man

During a piece of planned work last week, we suffered an outage on one of our two LDAP servers, running IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.1.0.37.

After a fair bit of PD, we identified the problem, but the logs - ibmslapd.log to be precise only provided part of the answer: -
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL113I Largest core file size creation limit for the process (in bytes): '0'(Soft limit) and '-1'(Hard limit).
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL119I Maximum Data Segment(Kbytes) soft ulimit for the process is -1 and the prescribed minimum is 262144.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL119I Maximum File Size(512 bytes block) soft ulimit for the process is -1 and the prescribed minimum is 2097152.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL122I Maximum Open Files soft ulimit for the process is 1024 and the prescribed minimum is 500.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL120I Maximum Stack Size(Kbytes) soft ulimit for the process is 2048; the attempt to modify to the prescribed minimum 10240 failed.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV151E Prescribed soft limit is out of range or greater than hard limit value for Stack Size(Kbytes) ulimit option.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL119I Maximum Virtual Memory(Kbytes) soft ulimit for the process is -1 and the prescribed minimum is 1048576.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV040E Server starting in configuration only mode due to errors.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libevent.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV155I The DIGEST-MD5 SASL Bind mechanism is enabled in the configuration file.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM021I The preoperation plugin is successfully loaded from libDigest.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libevent.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libtranext.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM023I The postoperation plugin is successfully loaded from libpsearch.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libpsearch.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM025I The audit plugin is successfully loaded from libldapaudit.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libevent.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM023I The postoperation plugin is successfully loaded from libpsearch.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libpsearch.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM022I The database plugin is successfully loaded from libback-config.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV017I Server configured for secure connections only.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV015I Server configured to use 636 as the secure port.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libloga.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM024I The extended Operation plugin is successfully loaded from libidsfget.so.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV180I Pass-through authentication is disabled.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCOM004I SSL port initialized to 636.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV098I Directory server audit logging started.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV009I 6.1.0.37 server started.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV036E Errors were encountered while starting the server; started in configuration only mode.
07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPSRV048I Started 15 worker threads to handle client requests.
07/06/11 21:27:54 GLPSSL019E The SSL layer has reported an unidentified internal error.
  As you can see from the highlight, the problem APPEARED to be with SSL.

Whilst LDAP was starting, it was only coming up in so-called "Configuration Mode" meaning that it won't access user authentication requests.

This led to an interesting problem - we have a load balancer sitting in front of a pair of replicated ITDS boxes. The load balancer "saw" the failing server coming up on port 636, even though it was in configuration mode, and started directing traffic to it :-(

In fact, that was the symptom. The actual problem was much earlier in the logs: -

07/06/11 21:27:18 GLPCTL120I Maximum Stack Size(Kbytes) soft ulimit for the process is 2048; the attempt to modify to the prescribed minimum 10240 failed.

It turned out that the user that was being used to start LDAP - idsinst - albeit via a sudo command, was unable to correctly set the Stack Size user limit ( ulimit -s ).

This was partly due to the method that is used to access the server via command-line ( rather than using the more traditional SSH route ), but the lesson that we learned is that some errors are more important than others.

The moral of the story ? Check ALL of the log file, not just the bits that look interesting.

Welcome to Social Connections - the IBM Connections User Group

Saw this on Twitter earlier, thanks to the lovely Sharon "Social Shazza" Bellamy.

Looks like the Social Connections user group will be holding their inaugural meeting at the HQ of the Salvation Army here in London on July 4 ( giving us TWO reasons to celebrate that date now !! )

HOT OFF THE PRESS!!  The inaugural Social Connections event has been scheduled
Social Connections 1 will be coming to London in July 2011!  Join us at The Salvation Army international HQ on 4th July 2011 for the start of something big!

Want to know more ?

I'm in :-)

Check out the Social Connections site here.

IBM does get YouTube - Previews of IBM Web Content Management v8 Beta

Three rather neat little videos here.

Beta Preview: Authoring Home Page

New Authoring UI Features in IBM Web Content Manager 7.0

Using HTML to plan an IBM Web Content Manager system

Nice :-)

W00t - IBM Lotus Quickr Connectors now support 64-bit Windows and Office 2010

As per Mac's blog post here: -

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Quickr Connectors now support Microsoft Windows 64bit and Office 2010. As promised at this year's Lotusphere, our development teams were hard at work on this one and I thank them for their great work and earlier than expected release.

The updated installers are available on Fix Central as Quickr Connectors 8.5.0.1_HF7.

This is good news, especially to one of my UK customers who has been waiting a loooooooooooong time for this support.

Nice job, Quickr Connectors team :-)

SOLVED - Accessing CUPS printer from Mac OSX Snow Leopard

Having spent a frustrating few hours trying, and failing, to access a Kodak ESP3250 USB printer via CUPS from my Mac, I was really really pleased to find this: -

The defaults for shared printers in Mac OS X changed in Leopard (10.5). To re-enable CUPS browsing run the

following command in a Terminal window:

$ cupsctl BrowseRemoteProtocols=CUPS

here.

Host OS

Ubuntu Linux 10.10 ( Maverick Meerkat )

Guest OS

Apple Mac OSX 10.6.7 ( Snow Leopard )

Once I made the cupsctl change, I was able to see the Ubuntu printer, shared via Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) as shared from the Ubuntu machine, using OSX' Print and Scan preferences tool.

On the journey, I also found the CUPS web UI to be of use: -

Normal

http://localhost:631

Uber Admin

https://localhost:631/admin

Enjoy :-)

WebSphere Portal - How the portal implements the Remote PUMA SPI REST Service

This to be filed in the "I'm sure this'll be useful someday" pile 

...

describe the general part of the Remote PUMA SPI REST Service Interface. This interface can be implemented by different providers that can be based on different backend systems or user repositories and provide their own input and output formats. The implementation of the interface described here is the one based on WebSphere Portal Beta. 

The implementation described here uses ATOM (refer to RFC 4287) and the ATOM Publishing Protocol as basic input and output format to wrap the resource representations described by the schema in the general part. Additionally, using the portal Remote PUMA SPI REST Service requires that you consider some special aspects described in this section: -

URL path segment for virtual portals

WebSphere Portal provides the concept of virtual portals that allows you to manage several separate portals within one portal installation. You can associate each of these virtual portals with a user realm and thereby limit the scope of users or groups that can access it to one realm of the underlying user repository.

Identifiers used in the Portal Implementation

For the unique identifier in the URLs, the portal uses a string representation of the internal identifier that is considered to be opaque to the client. The identifier that is used for retrieval of users or groups, that is by either the identifier or the memberOf request parameters, is the unique security name that is associated to the security context in the WebSphere Application Server. The exact matching of the unique security name is part of the security configuration, but in most scenarios it matches the distinguished name (DN). The same identifier is of course also used for the identifier attribute in the profile element. 

Access Control Checks

The portal does not allow you to set permissions for attribute definitions. Therefore the Remote PUMA SPI REST Service allows requests to some operations only for authenticated users.

Using ATOM/APP as input and output format

The portal Remote PUMA SPI REST Service uses the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) as the primary input and output format. It wraps the elements described by the schema document in the Remote PUMA SPI REST Service in appropriate ATOM feed or entry documents. Although this is the default input and output format, the client should specify the mime type application/atom+xml either in the mime-type request parameter or in the accept header. A more detailed description of how the APP maps to the RESTful interface and some examples are given here.

Switch for tunneling of HTTP methods

The portal implementation allows you to simulate PUT and DELETE requests by tunneling, that is by using POST requests instead. 

HTTP caching

The Remote PUMA SPI REST Service sets the Cache-Control HTTP header in the response to public for resources that are served without authentication, and to private for URIs that require authentication.

Context Root and Authentication Mechanism

The Remote PUMA SPI REST Service is implemented as a servlet that runs as a separate enterprise application on the WebSphere Portal server.

Lookup Facility in the portal

For both convenience and alignment to other portal REST services, the portal Remote PUMA SPI REST Service offers a lookup facility. This is done by plugging a provider into a reusable lookup facility in the portal. This functionality allows you to retrieve particular URLs of the service by specifying an absolute URI as a parameter to the so-called lookup servlet addressed by /wps/poc.

...

Taken from the WebSphere Portal Beta wiki here.

New portlets for IBM Connections 3.0.1

As blogged here by Luis Benitez :-

Today we made available new portlets for Connections 3.0.1. As I mentioned earlier, we had 9 portlets for: Wikis, Activities, Profiles, Bookmarks, Tag Cloud, and Blogs.
Today, we've released new portlets that support Ideation blogs and add support for 3rd party authentication providers (TAM / Siteminder).
Even though the portlets are called Connections 3.0.1 Portlets, they support:

• IBM Lotus Connections 2.5
• IBM Lotus Connections 3.0
• IBM Connections 3.0.1
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1.5.2*
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 7.0.0.1*
• Microsoft Windows XP SP3
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (32-bit, 64-bit toleration)
• Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5, 3.6
• Apple Safari 4

You can download the portlets, for free as usual, from the Lotus App Catalog here: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/plugins/plugincatalog.nsf/assetDetails.xsp?action=editDocument&documentId=511C128045FCD5D1852577B60055AD81
Thanks to the plugin team for making this available!

UK Lotus User Group - Presentations now available online

I'm still way behind the curve, thanks to a most excellent two weeks of vacation holiday, therefore am still playing catch-up.

Despite missing the UK Lotus User Group ( #UKLUG ) due to the aforementioned ( but very well deserved ) holiday, I note that the presentations are available to download from here.

Be aware that the download is a 62 MB ZIP file, so be careful if you're downloading via a broadband connection where you pay per MB, or have a capped limit :-)

W00t - Updated Web Application Integrator portlet - works with WebSphere Portal v7

Following many previous blog posts, including this one, I'm now pleased to report that IBM has finally released a version of the Web Application Integrator (WAI) portlet that works with WebSphere Portal v7.


Web Application Integrator for IBM WebSphere Portal is a solution which allows external web applications to be integrated with IBM WebSphere Portal version 6.0.x, 6.1, 6.1.0.3+ or 7.0.x, and IBM WebSphere Portal Express 6.0.x, 6.1, 6.1.0.3+ or 7.0.x.

It allows Portal customers to further leverage their investment in Portal by using it to centralize access to external web applications within the enterprise. Examples of such external web applications include home grown, in-house web apps, as well as our own IBM web based products like Lotus Connections, Lotus DWA, and Lotus Quickr.

Web Application Integrator for IBM WebSphere Portal 7.0.x requires a minimal level of 7.0.0.1 with cumulative fix 4 and maintains functionality from previous versions.

Check it out here on the Catalog.

New on the IBM Catalog - IBM Portal for OpenID Authentication

Getting back on-line after a most excellent holiday, and spotted a new addition to the Portal Solutions Catalog at http://catalog.lotus.com

The solution provides support for integration with OpenID Authentication an OpenID Attribute Exchange. Users will be able to authenticate and manage their profiles using an external Identity Provider.

Available to download here.

"Meddling with Middleware" at the British Computer Society in Southampton on Thursday 9 June 2011

This popped into my inbox a few days ago, and I thought it was something that merited a repost.

What

Meddling with Middleware 

Who

Matt White, IBM

When

1800 for 1830 on Thursday 9 June 2011

Where

HC 005

Herbert Collins Building

Ground Floor

Southampton Solent University

SO14 0RD

Directions and maps at www.solent.ac.uk

Cost

Free of charge

 

Joint with the BCS Hampshire Branch, and Southampton Solent University

This event is free, open to all, but please book through the BCS website, www.bcs.org/events/registration both for BCS members and non-members for arranging refreshments, and particularly as the numbers are limited.

Middleware - the systems and software that plug together the IT of your  high street bank, insurance companies, large shops, manufacturing  plants, virtual or otherwise, (other terms include SCA,ESB, Application Servers).
With features including development cycles lasting years; cross-platform  source code; so many lines of code we don't count; very demanding customers wanting no risk or downtime, meddling is perhaps something you don't want to do.
 

Since joining IBM about 12 years ago, meddling with middleware is what Matthew has been doing. First working with IBM's JVM implementation, and with WebSphere MQ JMS.
Matthew hopes to cover topics from the challenge of designing, developing, and managing middleware codebases, through to testing, servicing and managing these codebase. Outlining some of the challenges that we face in large scale software engineering.

Currently Matthew is one of the Technical Leads of the WMQ Platform Integration Team. They work to ensure that the WMQ product is fully integrated into the WebSphere Platform. Looking at the WMQ product as part of a stack solution ensures their customers truly get an integrated IBM WebSphere Plaform.
Previous to that Matthew was the Technical Lead of the team that produce the WebSphere MQ v7 classes for JMS and Java. Previously working as Team Lead of that team.Experience in Java and Java EE Development, code base servicing and customer relationships.Matthew has presented at a number of customer events, including JavaOne and the  WebSphere User Group.
 

In addition, following the need to help those members under-employed or expecting to be so, there will be a series of 3 free daytime technical session between  the end of June and August, in Southampton, subject to interest - booking and  confirmation of dates for each of these directly with Nick Whitelegg

1.Web Development for programmers. Aims to bring programmers non-au-fait with web development technologies up to speed with the fundamentals of web development. Will look at database driven web applications using PHP and MySQL, including maintaining state and an introduction to AJAX. (Note this is "DFTI-in-a-day" effectively)

2. "Web 2.0" Technologies. Aimed at people who know some web development already but not au-fait with the newer technologies used to build highly interactive web applications such as AJAX and HTML5. Will cover XML and the concept of web services and the data driven web. (effectively "EWT-in-a-day")

3.A third one would be Object-Orientated Programming for procedural programmers (using Java), this could also run in August - was there interest in that too? This would be "OOAD-in-a-day"

Nick Whitelegg is a senior lecturer in Computing (Web Development) at Southampton Solent University and teaches on a range of undergraduate software development courses including Java and web development. He has contributed software and data to the OpenStreetMap mapping project and has developed an open source mapping site and associated tools for walkers.