Monday, May 15, 2006

Old Tools for Old School - New Product

In the process of attempting to work out my 6.5 broker problem, I cobbled together a compendium of tools from the stone age. Some of you may recall these tools, but those new to craft probably have never seen all of these.

1. Document Tracker. This is a nifty client that allows you to publish or subscribe to documents in a particular broker. It provides a quick and dirty way to determine what is being published to the broker. This is handy for those "null" moments when you don't seem to be able to get what you need from the broker.

2. Monitor. This tool is the broker monitor. It permits a connection again, to only one broker at a time. It displays the broker in the middle and draws lines between the clients and broker. When events trigger, you can follow the document from the publisher, to the broker and then to each receiver if there are multiples. You can specify the speed so you can slow things down. I had a problem with this, but it didn't lock up my machine. You can filter clients so only the ones you need are visible. This is a great way to debug those wonderful workflow RMI/firewall issues.

3. Manager. Let's not confuse this with the several "managers" that webMethods has brought out since. This is the oldie and moldy broker manager tool. This awesome java client permits connection to one broker server and displays multiple brokers within the one server. It also allows for connections to territories. Why would I dust off this old piece of iron you ask?

Simple, I had the problem occur where wonderful webMethods created clones of my documents and killed the rest. So, instead of "MyDocument", it created "MyDocument_1" and nothing worked as planned. Oh, you say, you can use the WmBrokerAdmin??? Of course you can if you have hours to sift through all the rubbish, or, you can crank up the manager, and promptly delete the documents, client subscriptions and other items before recreating. It's a great tool for those on the quick war path.

--- NOTE ---

NONE OF THESE TOOLS ARE SUPPORTED BY WEBMETHODS. If you use them, you do so at your own risk. And please, please, do not contact me for a copy. Ask your technical support rep, with whom, I know you have a great relationship, and perhaps he will give you a copy.

webMethods 6.5 Broker does not work in Winblows 2000

I hate to report back, but the new broker configuration is no longer supported by webMethods on Winblows 2000.

I have tried all of my hat tricks, but it doesn't seem to want to work. A work-around for this, suggested by one of my propeller-frenzied colleagues was to create a dual-boot partition on my laptop so I could boot-up linux whenever it is needed.

The latest webMethods documentation leaves off with Windows XP as the oldest Windows OS supported.