Any experiences with Websphere Integration Developer (WID)?

Question

My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.

Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?

Answer 1

So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.

I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.

Answer 2

WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.

Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.

There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.

If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!

Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.

Answer 3

My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.

I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).

I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.

Answer 4

I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.

That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.

Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.

There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.

Walter

Answer 5

Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".

Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.

Answer 6

We have used WID for a few years now and are still learning how to really use the tool for WESB and WPS. There are pain points for the tooling (as there is for anything), but I do have to say that I am impressed with what the tooling can do (especially as it has evolved over the last few versions).

The real trick is finding documentation on how to do the things IBM tells you you can do with the tooling. The documentation is often buried somewhere, or is lacking.

It is also a complex tool that really requires a long time to learn and become good at.

However, I don't think these are necessarily reasons to shy away from the tools. I like working with and learning the tool. I think it has a LOT of power that would take a lot to develop otherwise.

Of course, you do have to watch out for the IBM sales people. They tell you that Process Server or WESB can do certain things that you really can't do unless you purchase other products in tandem such as WebSphere Business Monitor or WebSphere Service Registry & Repository. So just make sure you invest in what you need.