WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation for z/OS

Together, WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation for z/OS, V5.1 and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, V5.1 provide:

BPEL support
BPEL defines a model and a grammar for describing the behavior of a business process based on interactions between the process and its partners. Support for BPEL includes:

• Application assembly, deployment, and run-time support for BPEL-based business processes

• Intuitive drag-and-drop tools to visually define the sequence and flow of BPEL business processes

• A visual business process debugger to step through and debug BPEL business processes

• Compensation support to provide transaction "rollback" like support for loosely coupled business processes that cannot be undone automatically by the application server

• Flexibility to develop processes using a top-down, bottom-up, or meet-in-the-middle approach

• A standards-based (XPATH / XSLT) transformation wizard to map data between nodes in a process

• Integrated fault handling to provide an easy and integrated means of performing in-flow exception handling

• A visual condition builder allowing you to easily direct the execution of BPEL processes

• Support for including Java snippets and artifacts as part of a business process

Human workflow support
Human workflow support helps expand the reach of BPEL to include activities that require human interaction as steps in an automated business process. Business processes involving human interaction are interruptible and persistent (a person may take a long time to complete the task) and resume when the person completes the task. Human workflow support includes:

• Staff activity nodes to represent a step in a business process that is performed manually

• Ability to assign people (for example, your direct reports) to specific instances of a process via staff queries that are resolved at runtime using an existing enterprise directory

• Graphical browser-based interface for querying, claiming, working with, completing, and transferring work items to another user

• Advanced work item management support for managing the creation, transfer, and deletion of work items

• Dynamic setting of duration and calendar attributes for staff activities

• Dynamic setting of staff assignment via custom attributes

Back-end system connectivity

WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, V5.1 provides integrated, open and industry standards-based support for building Web applications and BPEL business processes that are designed to integrate with back-end systems including:

• Integrated tool support for using Java Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.0 resource adapters to access back-end systems

• Enhanced tool integration for JCA adapters with tool plug-in extensions (available from IBM and IBM Business Partners)

• Easy to use tools for creating services out of JCA resource adapters and including those services as part of a BPEL business process

• Enhanced JCA 1.0 resource adapters included for CICS®, IBM Host On-Demand and IBM Information Management System (for development use only)

• Sophisticated wizards to manage the low-level data handling requirements for JCA resource adapters

• Wizards to quickly and simply expose CICS or IMS™ programs as enterprise services including the ability to import definitions from COBOL, C structures, CICS basic mapping support (BMS), and IMS Message Format Service (MFS) definitions

• Support for the entire suite of WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

Business rule beans
Business rule beans offer a powerful real-time framework for defining, executing, and managing business rules that encapsulate business policies that vary based on changes in the business environment. For example, a simple business rule might be, "If a customer's shopping cart is greater than $X, then offer a Y% discount." Business rule support includes:

• Easy-to-use tools for defining, executing, and managing business rules

• Update business rules at runtime using a straightforward user interface without the need to bring the application or server down

• Organize business rules into logical categories using the business rules beans framework

• Define a start and end date for when the rule is in effect

Programming model extensions
WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation for z/OS, V5.1 and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, V5.1 can help accelerate large-scale application development by allowing you to leverage some of the latest innovations that build on today's J2EE standards. Programming Model Extensions include:

• Asynchronous beans — Enables J2EE applications to decompose operations into parallel tasks in order to speed performance

• Startup beans — Enables J2EE applications to execute business logic automatically, whenever an application starts or stops normally

• Last participant support — Can provide automated coordination for transactions that include two-phase commit resources and a single one-phase commit resource

• Internationalization service — Can allow customers to build applications that can automatically adjust to handle global audiences

• Work areas — Provides the ability to efficiently share information across a distributed application

• Scheduler service — Enables tasks to be executed at a requested time. When used in conjunction with asynchronous beans, it enables batch processing applications within J2EE

• Activity session services — Provides the ability to extend the scope of and group multiple local transactions

• Dynamic query service — Provides the ability to pass in and execute SQL query statements at runtime

• WSGW Filters — Can allow customer to write filters for the Web Services Gateway such as filters that select a target service and port, capture Web service invocation information, or handle exceptions

• Object pools — Enables an application to avoid creating new Java objects repeatedly

• Container Managed Messaging — Can offer automated support for outbound (as well as inbound) messaging

• Distributed Map — Can offer an interface to enable J2EE applications and system components to cache and share Java objects by storing a reference to the object in the cache in order to help improve performance

• Container Managed Persistence over anything — Can extend the existing J2EE Container Managed Persistence (CMP) framework to support any backend system or service that supports create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) methods

• Application profiling — Designed to allow customers to carefully optimize the performance of their EJB CMP 2.0 applications without impacting application source code by delivering a mechanism for instructing the same component to interact with the runtime infrastructure, such as a database, differently depending on the application that calls it

z/OS Optimization Details

• Tight integration between z/OS connector technology (DB2, MQ, CICS and IMS) and WBI SF infrastructure including process choreographer and scheduler.

• Integration of the Asynchronous Beans Work Manager enables work scheduled using Asynchronous Beans to be subject to and benefit from z/OS Workload Manager.

• Container Managed Messaging (CMM) is integrated with the z/OS Proprietary Scalable messaging, allowing receiver beans to be processed by the best available servant attached to the controller. CMM is built on the underlying WAS for z/OS Message Driven Beans processing, therefore individual messages can be classified and serviced with differing z/OS WLM service classes based on JMS Message Selector predicate matching. The ability to work load classify and service individual messages is unique to WAS z/OS.

• Last Participant Support enables one phase commit Java connectors to be to be included in global transactions with the highly optimized z/OS proprietary (RRS) connectors.

• Activity Session Service - Delivery of ActivitySession coordination of z/OS proprietary RRS Local Transaction enabled connectors to DB2 and MQ. Underlying Activity Service implementation (JSR 95) is carved into the native controller implementation and critical infrastructure objects reside in protected control region storage and are isolated from application failure resulting in a more reliable implementation.

• Stored Procedures Support for CMP - can benefit from use of z/OS proprietary DB2 connectors.

• Process Choreographer - Compensation logs can be configured to reside in z/OS LogStreams on DASD or the zSeries Coupling Facility. LogStreams are a proprietary data structure that allows multiple process logging to the same logical file which should translate into better scalability.

J2EE Application Server
WebSphere Busines Integration Server Foundation for z/OS, V5.1 builds on the WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, V5.1, a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform, providing an application environment for deploying enterprise Web services that includes:

• J2EE 1.3 support

• XML support

• Web services support

• Support for private Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries

• Web Services Gateway

• Database connectivity

• Embedded HTTP server

• Web server plug-ins

• Authentication and authorization for security rich access to Web resources

• Single sign-on and support for LDAP

• Java Message Service (JMS) support

• Dynamic caching

• Tivoli® Performance Viewer

• Capable of integration with third-party performance management tools

• Browser-based administration and workload management

• Intelligent workload distribution across a cluster

• Failure bypass

• Clustering support

• Migration support

For more information, visit WebSphere Application Server for z/OS.

J2EE development environment
WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, V5.1 builds on the WebSphere Studio development environment to provide an integrated development environment for building, testing, integrating, and deploying J2EE applications, Web services, and business processes. WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition for Linux and Windows, V5.1 includes all of the features available in WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5.1 including:

• Eclipse-based user interface

• BPEL development environment

• J2EE development environment

• Java development environment

• Web services development environment

• XML development environment

• Relational database tools

• Web development environment

• Team development

• Server tools for testing and deployment

• Tracing, monitoring, and performance analysis tools

• Debugger

For more information, visit WebSphere Studio Application Developer.