Come talk to me at Impact 2009 next week

I'll be presenting three topics at Impact 2009 next week. For those that don't know, Impact is the premier WebSphere conference - focusing this year on our Smart SOA approach.

I'll be continuing to contribute to a session we've been doing for two years now on SOA performance that includes leads across the WebSphere portfolio in SOA performance. I'll be co-presenting a session with Information Management XML expert Susan Malaika, looking at end to end strategies around XML in the enterprise (including both database and middleware focus). Finally, I'll be covering the XML Feature Pack Beta talking about the value of XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 and how the Beta provides these functions to WebSphere Application Server environments focusing on the new runtime and new API.

Here are the abstracts. If you plan on being at Impact, please sign up for the following sessions and feel free to stop by after a session to talk about performance, SOA or XML. If you aren't going to be at Impact, I'll see what I can do to post the charts/audio recordings (if possible).

1825 - SOA and BPM Performance Update


One of the cornerstones of obtaining good solution performance in an SOA environment is to use technology which is robust, efficient and scalable. The IBM WebSphere® portfolio provides this through its key SOA offerings - IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Business Monitor, IBM WebSphere Business Service Fabric, IBM WebSphere IBM DataPower® Appliances, IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, IBM WebSphere MQ, IBM WebSphere Message Broker, IBM WebSphere Process Server and IBM WebSphere Services Registry and Repository. Collectively these offerings provide a very rich set of functions covering basic Web services, integration, messaging, choreography, business activity monitoring and situation detection, dynamic endpoint selection and governance. Come and join the performance architects of these products as they describe both historical and recent product performance improvements.

1668 - XML in the Enterprise : Defining an XML Strategy


Increasingly, XML plays a critical part in SOA, Web-oriented architecture, mashups and cloud computing. Systems and application architects and designers need a clear vision of the role that XML plays in their system, in order to define an XML strategy for their institution or organization. This session provides an overview of some IBM products and technologies in various IBM portfolios, including WebSphere®, Information Management® and Lotus®, with an XML focus. It goes over frequently asked questions about XML in various areas, including namespaces, versioning, storing, validating, transforming, updating and usage patterns, in order to provide guidance for creating an enterprise-wide XML strategy and to help with managing XML across organizations. The role of industry consortia-defined XML messages will also be covered.

1784 - Building XML Oriented Applications with IBM WebSphere® Application Server V7


XML structured data has become the predominant data format for data interchange. XML data is navigated, queried or transformed in almost every existing the IBM WebSphere® application. Learn how to improve these applications with the IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for XML Beta. Learn specific ease of use, reliability, and performance benefits obtained by using the new XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 Worldwide Web Consortium standards. You will also learn new scenarios only possible with functional enhancements in XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 standards, as well as the new XQuery 1.0 standard. You will learn how to incorporate these capabilities into your new and existing applications along with how to avoid common pitfalls. The session concludes with an overview of how this feature pack is enabled within existing IBM WebSphere Application Server environments.

Cya in Sin City.

WAS XML Feature Pack Open Beta Available (XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0)

I've been relatively quiet on the blog as of late. That tends to happen when you spend a lot of time working on something big.

My team and I have been working very hard to bring the W3C standards of XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 to life. I'm proud to announce, that today, you can download, install, and work with the WebSphere Application Server V7.0 Feature Pack for XML Beta containing these critically important standards.

We have delivered a beta XML runtime that supports these standards as well as offers a new API to interact with these standards. We believe these standards will simplify and increase the reliability of XML oriented WAS applications. The standards will also enable new scenarios never possible before in WAS - like querying large amounts of XML data located outside of databases in parallel with databases with XML support, or making navigation/transformations decisions based upon industry standard XML schema support.

You can download the beta from our open beta website.

You can discuss the beta on our forum.

In order to help you understand the feature pack, I put together a quick demo (in two parts). I hope to put more demos together soon, but let me know what you think of these first.

Demo 1 (Part 1)

Direct Link (ensure you click on watch in HD)

Demo 1 (Part 2)

Direct Link (ensure you click on watch in HD)