Thursday, May 27, 2010

BlackTie@JUDCon 2010

Hi guys,

Just a reminder that we will be presenting on the AS6 track at the free JUDCon this year, June 21st.

Our presentation will be focussed on the integration opportunities available by adopting BlackTie. For example, we will present a tutorial on how to integrate C based clients into an existing webapp deployed on JBoss and how to use RHQ for the consistent management and monitoring of the entire application.

Anyway, this was just a brief reminder in case you still needed to register.

More details on the presentation to follow....

Developer Insight 1: Integrating C clients with EJBs

Hello!

A little known feature of BlackTie is that it provides the developer with the ability to easily integrate C/C++ based clients or VB based applications with JBoss.

Essentially, the client is able to utilise a standard API (XATMI) to asynchronously invoke services deployed in the application server. The fist service invoked in the application server must be a user-defined XATMI service (a specialised standard MDB), after this however EJBs may be invoked from there as normal.

We intend to explain a few of these examples in our wiki and on the blog, but here are a few examples to get started with:

1. There already exists a Java back office application deployed onto JBoss and an existing VB application currently running in isolation, perhaps submitting jobs via ftp as a batch overnight. Here the VB application can load our dlls and invoke the application via the XATMI service intermediary.

2. Currently an application is deployed entirely using the C API XATMI of an alternative vendor such as Tuxedo. As the business evolves, it is determined that a migration to Java for the backend systems would be a more suitable match however the client terminals that currently submit jobs for service do not have a JVM available. BlackTie is an ideal replacement here as the terminal clients would ideally just need relinking against the BlackTie libraries, while the backend can be developed in Java at will.

As I mentioned earlier, we will be providing more examples of this hopefully over the coming weeks...

All the best,
Tom

Coming soon! BlackTie 2.0.0.M4

Hi All,

We just wanted to announce that M4 is due to release on the 14th June. This release is intended to be the penultimate release in the 2-zero timeframe and after a short release cycle we hope to release the GA version around JUDCon with further work on the wiki.

In this release we have made a few tweaks to the API where we noticed some inconsistencies between the XATMI specification and our interpretation of it.

We have also added a few more administration GUI capabilities, such as the ability to monitor your services to see the frequency of the failure and error conditions to spot badly-behaved software.

Alongside this we have resolved a couple of other bugs and features in Jira: https://jira.jboss.org/browse/BLACKTIE

Moving forward with version 3, this is where we look to introduce interoperability with other XATMI implementations such as Tuxedo. If anyone is interested in helping us with this endeavour, please get in touch!

All the best,
Tom