Russian spam comments

Is anyone else getting Russian spam, or is it because I have my name published on Russian websites?

WebSphere Message Broker FixPack 3 – what’s new?

WebSphere Message Broker FixPack 3 is now available, and adds quite a lot of new function and support, including support for WebSphere MQ v7.0, Vista, and extended database support. There are also enhancements to mapping, monitoring, and xpath, plus some new nodes. To see the  full list of what ’s new in FixPack 3 see New function added in Version 6.1 fix packs. Note, for some of these features you need to explicitly enable them.

WebSphere Message Broker Help updated

The information center for WebSphere Message Broker v6.1 was updated last week. Here are the links to the latest information centers:

WebSphere Message Broker v6.0

WebSphere Message Broker v6.1

When you do a search using Google for WMB documentation, you are likely to get hits in the v6.0 message center, ensure the url contains v6r1m0 rather than v6r0m0 like the following if you want v6.1 docs:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmbhelp/v6r1m0/index.jsp

Enqueue/Dequeue and the Test Client

There is a hiccup in the WebSphere Message Broker documentation in the topics that talk about putting and getting test messages from within the WebSphere Message Broker toolkit. The topics that talk about putting and getting test messages in the debugging section haven’t been properly updated for changes in v6.1. The enqueue and dequeue functions are still available, but they are now within the much more powerful Test Client interface. If you are used to using enqueue and dequeue you can get to them by right clicking on a message flow, and clicking Test Message Flow to open the Test Client. In the Test Client editor there is a toolbar of buttons in the top right, these have an Enqueue and a Dequeue button. You can click on these to view the settings you are familiar with.

The Test Client itself has a lot more functionality than the Enqueue and Dequeue editors, and can put and get messages from nodes other than WMQ. See, Testing Messages Using the Test Client.

The current problems are being fixed, but the changes won’t be visible until the next documentation update.

Trial version of WebSphere Message Broker v6.1

You can run a fully featured 90 day trial of WebSphere Message Broker v6.1 from here.

HTML, CSS, Javascript and Ajax

I’ve just spent the last week on a course to learn some skills that should be pretty useful in the fairly near future. The first two days were a course covering HTML, CSS and Javascript. The HTML side was revision really. I’ve been playing with HTML for quite a long time, and even more recently as a technical author. I’ve also dabbled with CSS and JavaScript in this role, although to a much lesser extent. Fortunately I do play a lot with Actionscript in Flash, so the JavaScript stuff at least makes some sense. The final three days covered ‘ajax’ – looking in more depth at javascript, interacting with the server and looking at a couple of toolkits – the prototype toolkit and dojo.

I’ve had lots of people I work with raving about Dojo, but from the little play I had before with it, I wasn’t that impressed. Although to be fair it makes a lot more sense now. Certainly it seems pretty powerful, but then it really should be for a 15MB sized library of javascript files. I’m still not entirely convinced by it though.. I found some of the widget behaviour was rather strange and I was very unimpressed with the documentation. I did like the simplicity of the event handling and xhr request/reply though.

Having a quick look at the other toolsets out there, mootools does look rather interesting. And this is built on the protoptype toolkit which I did actually quite like.

I’ve recently acquired a new domain, so I’m intending to have a play with javascript to build a new website. Although I have to admit, I still haven’t seen anything I can do which wouldn’t be a lot nicer and simpler in Flash. The week has really reinforced for me the fact that Flash really is a very cool and very powerful tool. And I probably need to update my version too.. I bet there is some cool new functionality I’m missing! Yikes, I’m starting to sound like a developer!

WebSphere Message Broker docs update

To coincide with the release of fixpack 2 of WebSphere Message Broker v6.1 there has been an update to the documentation in the fixpack, and also on our online information center website. Alternatively you can download the latest help as a standalone information center or set of PDF books from the ftp site.

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7/WG2 – Plenary in Berlin

I’ve recently got back from the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 Plenary meeting in Berlin. In case you don’t understand the acronym, this is a meeting of the Software and systems engineering sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation. SC7 and it’s working groups meet twice a year, with the Plenary held in May, and working group meetings held in the autumn. Being an international organisation, the meetings are held in different places across the world, to enable members to be able to travel to the meetings.

This year the Plenary was in held in Berlin.

I am part of working group 2 – Software Systems Documentation. This is the longest surviving working group in SC7, and works on developing ISO standards for software and systems engineering documentation. We have active members from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, UK, and the USA. The current main focus of the working group is a suite of standards aimed at different roles in the development and supply of user documentation:

• Requirements for designers and developers of user documentation
• Requirements for testers and assessors of user documentation
• Requirements for suppliers and acquirers of user documentation
• Requirements for managers of user documentation

I am in fact the editor for the standard on requirements for testers and assessors of user documentation. This standard covers the processes involved in testing and validating your user documentation, including documentation review and usability testing. Because of this work, I am also a liaison from working group 2 to working group 26, which is a new working group on software testing. This group is working on a testing standard in three parts, one of which focuses on the documentation which should be produced during testing of a software product such as test plans.

We had a very successful meeting in Berlin, with good progress made on all the projects, and discussion of some future and potential future projects. Here is the team at last year’s Plenary meeting in Moscow:

 

Useful Searches to add to your Help view

As promised in the previous post, here are the instructions on how to add specific search locations to your Help view.

To add new search locations to your Help view, press F1 to display the Help view, and click on the Search tab. Expand the Search Scope section, and click on Advanced Settings to display the Search Scope window.

 To add a web search site you need to work out the URL for the search. The simplest way of doing this is to go the web site you want to search and enter a search. Look at the URL that opens when the results are displayed. You can then take the relevant part of the URL for the search, and add it as a new Search Engine. Lets use MQSeries.net as an example. If you go to the homepage of MQSeries.net there is a Search field. Enter a search term and click the Search button. When you click the Search button the URL that displays the results contains the search query to use. In this case it is a Google search, limited by a search of the domain.

Click New… to open the New Search Engine window, and select Web Search from the list of available options. Click Finish. In the Web Search section for this entry you can now enter a Name, Description and a URL Template for the Web Search. For MQSeries.net, you need to enter the following template for the search:

http://www.google.com/custom?domains=MQSeries.net&q={expression}&sitesearch=MQSeries.net

The {expression} replaces the search terms that you use in your search. The original URL looked something like this:

http://www.google.com/custom?domains=MQSeries.net&q=esql+error&sitesearch=MQSeries.net&sa=Search&client=pub-4459420363100112&forid=1&channel=9781888756&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%230066CC%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23063E3F%3BVLC%3A003366%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC%3A215670%3BALC%3A063E3F%3BLC%3A063E3F%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A3D81EE%3BGIMP%3A3D81EE%3BFORID%3A1&hl=en

 When you have entered the URL template, click Apply. You will not see the name of the search change until you exit and reopen the Search Scope window. The result looks something like the image below:

It can be useful to add an on-line information center to your search in the Help view. One of the reasons for doing this, is that the search on the on-line information center can be better than the local information center. To add an on-line information center to your search scope follow the same process:

Expand the Search Scope section, and click on Advanced Settings to display the Search Scope window. Click New… to open the New Search Engine window, and select Info Center from the list of available options. Click Finish. In the Info Center section add a Name and Description for the information center, and then add the URL of the information center. For WebSphere Message Broker v6.1 for example, this is the information center URL:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmbhelp/v6r1m0/

As shown in the image below, you can select to search all of the topics in the information center or just some of them. In this example, just the main Message Broker information center is selected. The different topics that you can search are displayed automatically when you click Search only the following topics.

You might also want to add information centers for other products to your search view. For example you might want to add the WebSphere MQ information center. The URL for the WMQ information center is:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv6/v6r0/

Using the Help view in Eclipse

 The Help View was a new feature in Eclipse v3.1, and toolkits that are built on this technology. You can access the Help view within Eclipse by pressing F1 (or shift+F1 on Linux), click on the question mark in a wizard, or selecting Dynamic Help from the Help menu. The Help view displays context sensitive help depending on what you have selected in the workbench. For example, if you have a particular editor in focus, then help for that editor is likely to be displayed, if you are using a wizard, then help for the page or the field that you have selected in the wizard will be displayed. The image below shows the default tab of the Help view: 

The top section of the Help view is information that is authored as a part of the GUI components, and usually contains a description of the component, plus links to relevant information in the information center. The Dynamic Help section usually contains links based on search performed on the name of the GUI component and the perspective that you are currently in. These links may therefore vary in their relevance. If you click on a new GUI component in the workbench, such as a different view, you will see the content of the Help view change. You can click on any of the links to open the link to more information. This link will open in the Help view. You might find it easier to view the information if you right-click on the link and select Open in Help Contents as shown below. The link is then opened in a new window in the information center.

 

You can also click on Add Bookmark to add the selected link to the Bookmarks tab in the Help view as shown below:

You can view the contents of the information center itself in the All Topics tab. Click on All Topics at the bottom of the Help view to view the contents of the information center. This displays all the ‘books’ in the information center, and you can expand these to view the table of contents for each ‘book’, and drill down to open individual topics. Again, you can open the individual topics in the Help view, or use Open in Help Contents to open them in the information center.

 

There is also an alphabetical list of topics in the information center in the Index tab. You can type in the first few characters of a word into the search box, and click Display to expand the relevant section of the index. This index includes all the contents of the information center, including the eclipse books, and the books for any other products that might be installed into the same workbench.  

 

The final tab on the Help view is the Search tab. From this tab you can perform a search not only of the information in the local information center, but also web searches and if you are using a Rational based toolkit, a search of the Samples and Tutorial Gallery. Enter your search terms in the search expression field and click Go to perform the search. You can also use a search expression using * for any string, ? for any character, ** for a phrase, and the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. You can limit the search scope, by removing the tick from the check-boxes under Search scope:

The search results are displayed in the Help view, and you can click on the links to local topics or to web pages.

 

You can add additional locations to search, for example on-line information centers and search engines. I’ll provide some specific examples in my next blog post.