Day 9 - Clustering and Integration Patterns

Thursday consisted of two big lectures with corresponding giant labs. We started off with clustering and high availabilty using the cluster features in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) version 6. The WAS is huge, as are all J2EE application servers and I didn't find this lab that interesting not being that interested in application server administration. It did give a good look into some of the advanced features of the WAS though.

After lunch we dug into integration patterns, applied on WAS/WPS, which I found far more interesting. The presentation was based on Gregor Hohpe & Booby Woolf's excellent book Enterprise Integration Patterns. This made the actual presentation pretty repetative for me but the lab and the example scenario used for the lab was really good and provided a great foundation for experimenting and trying out different approaches to sync/async scenarios between different components and modules.