Has been working with a variety of App. servers like Weblogic, JBoss, and JRun, but never got a chance to work with Websphere. Recently, got a chance to work with Websphere suit of products. First the websphere MQ and then the websphere server itself. The experience with MQ was bit adventurous, as the technology predates JMS. With some trial and error, intuition, googling, got the things up and running. Reb books helped a lot in understanding the internals for MQ.
To test the use cases against our design, we decided to develop a vertical slice of the application. One part of the slice was an MDB that listens to a JMS Queue on the websphere, backed by the MQ. The task is broken to two parts - have an MDB listening to the JMS queue on webspshere and once part 1 is in place, configure a MQ as a backend for the JMS queue. Developing an MDB was no much hassle and it got deployed on the websphere(The server had to be bounced everytime after configuring the Listener Ports and registering the Queue with the JMS server, and after deploying the jar file with MDB, duh, it sucks!). The next step was to publish some messages on the queue and see if the onMessage of the MDB is getting called.
I developed a suit of small utilities to help me in server-side testing, which I call as the fixture. The configuration of the fixture is externalized to facilitate portability. The messaging fixture worked without any errors when it was pointing to Weblogic, JBoss, JRun. But with Websphere, a lot of tweaking of the classpath is required. The following is the summary of the tweaking:
1. First of all, use the JDK that comes with the server, located at ${was_home}/java. If you don't, you'll waste a couple of hours like me.
2. Place these jars in the classpath:
com.ibm.mq.jar
com.ibm.mqjms.jar
dhbcore.jar
ecutils.jar
j2cImpl.jar
j2ee.jar
messagingClient.jar
naming.jar
namingClient.jar
namingserver.jar
webcontainer.jar
Properties folder. Place all or you'll repent.
3. Websphere works on iiop. So the JNDI props will be com.ibm.websphere.naming.WsnInitialContextFactory and iiop://localhost:2809.
To figure out what jars go in the classpath, it took me almost 6 hours. Extensive googling and some experimentation made the things work. It seems most of the people had a similar experience. Looks like I'm going to have some more tussles with websphere in the near future. Why can't the Websphere be as developer friendly as Weblogic.
3 comments:
I've had the same problem. After lots of hair-pulling and trying all kinds of unlikely JAR combinations I found your list and it worked (I was missing j2cimpl, apparently). Thanks!
Hi,
u have given very useful information.
Actually I am also going to develop same type of appplication,which involves MQ series,MQJMS,MDB & WAS.
But I am totally new to all these...
So bit confused ....how to start???
ue help will b great:)
Anonymous,
I'm not an expert with the IBM stack of products. I believe you should be using WSAD as it is bundled with lot of goodies to help the developers. To be frank, it has been a while since I worked on any of the IBM suit of products. Anyhow, if you would need some help with the technologies I can definitely try. Send me a mail at ravisk@gmail.com. All the best.
Post a Comment