A customer case study on Rational HATS

IBM just released a nice video customer case study for one of our customers. This was filmed at the Innovate conference back in June. They are a System Z shop, and are using HATS to transform some of their legacy applications.

Their mainframe background is great testimonial to the everlasting power of the mainframe. Linux on Z is a serious data center footprint saver. IBM invented virtualization with the mainframe, and that leadership continues.  Customers with older applications need not send their cobol apps to the dustbin. Reuse those applications and build on years of business logic investment.

And doesn't the site of the RV's just make you want to go wander the country?

Common Apache CXF Error with WebSphere App server 6.1 and WSFP

Symptom :
After you have installed the web services feature pack for WAS 6.1, you try to install an application running Apache CXF. While the application compiles fine, it simply will not start, and the SystemOut.log (or console) shows the following error message:

[1/10/11 14:45:31:410 EEST] 00000019 WASAxis2Compo E WSWS7007E: The xxxxx.war application module cannot be loaded correctly because of the following error: javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Validation error: This is a Provider that does not specify a valid Provider interface. Implementation class: org.apache.cxf.js.rhino.DOMPayloadProvider
at org.apache.axis2.jaxws.ExceptionFactory.createWebServiceException(ExceptionFactory.java:178)
at org.apache.axis2.jaxws.ExceptionFactory.makeWebServiceException(ExceptionFactory.java:79)
at org.apache.axis2.jaxws.ExceptionFactory.makeWebServiceException(ExceptionFactory.java:125)

First, the cause of the problem: WAS with the Web Services Feature Pack installed tries to scan ALL of the code for JAX-WS annotations, including those jars in your WEB-INF/lib directory. It bombs out on the cxf-rt-frontend-js-2.1.jar. Most of the time this jar is not needed.

Now, the solution:  If you are only using the CXF-2.x.jar, then you need to remove it and add back in ALL the jars in the modules directory of CXF except cxf-rt-frontend-js-2.1.jar. Then, recompile and redeploy to WAS. It should start up fine.

Happy New Year! .. . . . . . . where did everyone go?

Ok, so I'm a bit late saying this, but Happy New Year to all. Guess I missed the party. Yes, its been almost 2 months since our last posting. We've neglected you, and we feel like bad hosts. Last month and the beginning of this month was very hectic for us. Nonetheless, we'll start backup very shortly with some more informative posts to help you make the most of your software investment.

This year we want to provide information that is hard to find elsewhere based on our experience. There are those that say "experience is the best teacher". Well, we think that is half right. Actually someone else's experience is the best teacher... if you are willing to read or listen.
So this year we are focusing on a handful of key topics. Some of the areas we are going to focus on this year include:

• Java EE 6 and WebSphere App Server 8
• Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Domino
• Rational Development tools 8 (including RAD, RSA, RFT, RBD, etc)
• HATS 8.0 (which is currently in closed beta with select partners including us)
• Rational Team Concert
• Virtualization best practices with VMWare and XEN
• Linux administration best practices
• WebSphere Portal 7
• Spring 3.0
• Collaborative Application Lifecycle Mangement
• Lotus Notes/Domino and project Vulcan (version 9 perhaps?)

No, that is not an all inclusive list. Well post information on other topics as we see fit, but these are the areas that we see the most demand for information in.  Stay tuned, and keep the comments coming.