New: WebSphere Batch Feature Pack !

Announcing IBM WebSphere Application Server V7 Feature Pack for Modern Batch !

This new feature pack provides support for a Java Batch programming model, offers tools and operational controls for Batch workload execution, enables development and deployment of batch applications, and allows concurrent execution of batch and OLTP workloads.

The Batch Feature Pack is targeted toward developers and basic production deployment. It delivers a subset of the functionality of IBM WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid. Batch applications built using the feature pack are fully upward compatible with the Compute Grid environment.

The Compute Grid product offers advanced features, including support for parallel processing, workload scheduler integration, usage accounting, and more. You can start with the Feature Pack (FeP) for Modern Batch and grow it into a full Compute Grid environment. The Batch Deployment Options Chart outlines the functional continuum among these offerings.

Joint WAS XML Feature Pack and DB2 pureXML Article on FpML Lives

I've mentioned this work a few times on the blog, so I wanted to make sure people saw the final article on DeveloperWorks.

Programming XML across the multiple tiers, Part 2: Write efficient Java EE applications that exploit an XML database server

This article uses the example of Financial Products Markup Language (FpML) to show how to program realistic native XML across the Application Server and DB2 pureXML. It shows how you can use one consistent programming model (XQuery) and one consistent data model (XML) across data access, transformation, and filtering across both the mid tier and database tier. Using this one data model which doesn't require mapping to Java objects should increase the agility of your XML centric applications as no mapping code needs to be generated or maintained across both tiers.

Even though the article is based upon FpML (which is really useful to the financial sector), the concept is applicable to all industries that have substantial amounts of XML data.

The article has code attached (both a Rational Application Developer ear project and Eclipse/ANT builds) and database load scripts, so you can play with the code to see how it works. All you need to do is define the JDBC resources to point to your DB2 instance. I also have a virtual image for this based upon the free of charge WebSphere Application Server For Developers and DB2 Express-C in case you're interested.