Random thoughts working on Websphere 5
Jul 29, 2003
We want to hand off a first cut of WS5 to some developers for testing. I’ve fought and won making it to fit our deployment scheme (yay!) and then fought and won getting it patched (at least for ptf1 and the cumulatives) and I’m now fighting with the scripted administration (you know, put some lipstick on this pig— I mean some kind of value add on it). This is not pretty because:
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The MBeans for administration are, well, quirky. It’s a complex product and I get the feel that this was pasted together. Some methods return MBean ids, some return object names, others return object paths. Conveniently, these can’t be directly converted between one another and you have to pull them apart, reformat the pieces and use them to query other MBeans in order to act on your target. At least the examples in the RedBooks provide a nice starting point once you invest enough time playing to see how it fits together. Notice, I say "after", the examples don’t hide the slicing and dicing but because they are taken from interactive sessions they don’t clearly show that a fair bit of juggling goes on.
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The only supported language is Jacl (TCL). Jython ships with WS5 and is, in theory, an alternative but I can’t find a single example. I found on WSDD a good intentions mention of a future article but no info and after an hour of fiddling I resigned myself to Jacl. I’m not a big fan of TCL and writing a collection of administrative tools isn’t converting me. As used in the wsadmin shell Jacl is particularly crippled because it doesn’t allow creating native Java objects and calling their methods like it normally would, cutting off another possible route to efficiently working with WS5.
I’m nearly done though, another day or so, and glad for it.