THE IBM EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES TOOLKIT 0 is a software development kit for designing, developing, and executing emerging autonomic and grid-related technologies and Web services. The ETTK provides an environment in which to run emerging technology examples that showcase recently announced specifications and prototypes from IBM's emerging technology development and research teams. In addition, it provides introductory material to help developers easily get started with development of autonomic technologies, Web services, and grids. The tools can be downloaded from the IBM Web site and contain the following: -
There are two separate downloads: the ETTK Autonomic Computing Track and the ETTK Web Services Track. The ETTK Autonomic Computing Track contains the infrastructure, samples, and documentation for programmers creating their own autonomic programs. The ETTK Web Services Track contains Web services and grid computing infrastructure and samples. Either or both of these technology tracks may be downloaded, depending on one's particular interest. -
Preinstalled environment (Xerces, Xalan, SOAP, Grid, IBM Grid Toolbox, etc.). Also, instructions and configuration utilities for using ETTK with the WebSphere SDK for Web Services, WebSphere Application Server, and Jakarta Tomcat. -
Client-side APIs for interfacing with a WSDL document or a UDDI registry; and APIs for publishing and binding Web services. -
Autonomic Logging demo. -
IBM Grid Toolbox infrastructure and demos. -
Demonstrations that can be used to test ETTK: Publish a service, and then use a client that communicates with the UDDI registry to find the Web service and invoke it. -
A set of utility Web services: User Profile, Metering, Accounting, Contract, and Notification. Provided is a composite demonstration, which makes use of these utility services and of Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA), Web Services Management Middleware, and Service Domain technologies. -
Technology previews of security functions, such as WS-Security, systems management, and SOAP technologies. -
Documentation about the Web Services Architecture, WS-Inspection, and WSDL specifications. The ETTK Autonomic Computing Track contains the infrastructure, samples, and documentation for programmers creating their own autonomic programs. It contains the following technologies: -
Self-Healing/Optimizing Autonomic Computing Demo implements two aspects of autonomic computing: self-healing and self-optimizing. The self-healing behavior detects when a running application stops and takes the appropriate actions to get it to run again. The self-optimizing behavior is demonstrated when the average response time of the running applications falls below a preset threshold: Actions are taken to create additional applications in order to distribute the load appropriately. Also, idle applications holding system resources are removed. -
Autonomic Manager Toolset (AMTS) aids in the creation of autonomic managers that can enable self-managed systems. Autonomic managers are implemented as OGSI-compliant grid services. The AMTS includes a policy engine, the framework necessary to act as a grid service, and a rich set of supporting classes. The AMTS also provides sample autonomic managers and many coding examples. -
AMTS Thermostat Sample is a tutorial example of how to construct a policy-driven autonomic manager. It is a simple, illustrative device-control application that demonstrates use of a large swath of the AMTS, including the grid support, the policy engine, and the sensor/effector framework. -
Generic Log Adapter for autonomic computing is a rule-based tool that transforms software log events into standard situational event formats in autonomic computing. The adapter is an approach to providing a producer proxy for the early participation of software groups in the autonomic computing architecture. The Adapter consists of two main components, a Rule Builder and Configuration tool, which are used to generate parsing rules for a product's log file(s) and configuration of the Adapter. The Adapter runtime environment converts the logs into the standard situation formats for the autonomic computing architecture and forwards them to any consumer/management tools capable of consuming the output. Furthermore, the Adapter provides a plug-in architecture for customization with required functionality external to the users' software. -
Common Base Event (CBE) Data Format is a proposed data open standard for facilitating effective intercommunication among disparate enterprise applications that support logging, management, problem determination, autonomic computing, and e-business functions within an enterprise environment. Through XML-encoded events specified though a well-defined schema, CBE encapsulates properties common to events used by these technologies while allowing several extension mechanisms to support the widest possible range of data. In this release of the toolkit, Version 1.0a of IBM's Java implementation of a CBE API is introduced. This new release includes the first full implementation of the CBE schema, in addition to many new classes and methods for better facilitating the use of CBE. CBEs are used in the Self-healing/Optimizing Autonomic Computing Demo. -
ReGS Autonomic Logging Demo: The Reporting Grid Services (ReGS) specification is a set of core services that provide for logging, tracing, and monitoring of applications. It will be one of the components that the autonomic computing environment will use for providing these services. The ETTK Web Services Track contains the following technologies: -
The WS-Policy demo has been extended to illustrate a typical usage scenario. The demo illustrates how the developer of a service can specify general requirements that are combined with application server configuration to generate WS-Policy documents. WS-Policy documents are intended to be the interoperable format for stating specific service policy requirements. The demo continues to show how policy is obtained and interpreted when invoking a service, and the consequences of following or ignoring policy. -
Web Services Integration demonstrates the ability to easily combine existing Web services into new execution flows that can be run as a single process. It provides a simple Web-based user interface that allows users to create new flows from selected toolkit services and run them immediately. -
Web Services Failure Recovery (WSFR) is a self-healing framework for Web Services Hosting Environments (AXIS). A WSFR environment is composed of multiple nodes (application servers) that host, monitor, and cause persistence of the state of locally deployed Web services. Information about the environment itself and all deployed Web services is maintained in an entity known as DNA (Distributed Network Agreement), which is shared among all nodes participating in the environment and is maintained in a repository. In the event of a Web service failure, the nodes communicate in order to recover the failed service, with its last known state intact, at another node in the environment. An administrative GUI is provided that allows users to configure the environment and to create, load, and view the current DNA. -
The IBM Grid Toolbox is a set of components that can be used together or independently to develop grid applications and programming tools. The IBM Grid Toolbox is based on the Globus ToolkitTM 3.0 (GT3). (Globus Tookit is a trademark held by the University of Chicago.) Grid computing, which usually involves problems requiring large amounts of processing cycles or access to large amounts of data, applies resources from many computers in a network toward a single problem. Grid computing allows devices to be virtually shared, managed, and accessed across an enterprise, industry, or workgroup. In addition to the infrastructure, we have included additional grid samples and demos. -
Managing a grid is a challenging and complicated task. The Grid Software Manager is a standard J2EE-based Web application that can be deployed with the IBM Grid Toolbox, simplifying the management of the toolkit's core OGSA infrastructure. By exploiting the toolkit's built-in management grid services, an administrator is able to use the Grid Software Manager to monitor the grid runtime environment, interact with running grid services, and manage and view the runtime logs. -
WS-Reliable Messaging (WSRM) is a recent specification that defines a protocol for reliably delivering Web service messages between applications. In the WSRM demo, several scenarios illustrating some of the various features of WSRM are included. -
JMX Bridge is a tool that creates a WSDL-defined Web service for managing a class of resources. Current implementation acts as a bridge to JMX MBeans. Either an MBean (MBeanInfo) or XML description of an MBean is read as the description of the managed resource. The tool generates an associated Java class, WSDL, and a deployment descriptor. -
WSDLDoc is a tool that allows developers to generate HTML documentation detailing the structure and operation of Web services from WSDL documents. The tool itself has been rewritten to provide better performance, extended documentation, and flexibility in the manner in which documentation is generated (written either to a disk or to a Java object). In order to provide greater flexibility, WSDLDoc has been so designed that it can be embedded in applications. -
Service Domain previews the middleware technology that enables customers to easily implement "On Demand" Software Access, providing broker and marketplace services to enable robust Service-Oriented Architecture. Since its introduction, it has evolved into two modular and complementary layers: the Service Domain layer and the "On Demand" Service Grid virtualization layer. New features and enhancements have been added in this release to provide interactive configuration of service policy rules, including service definitions and selections, Hosting Environment selection, front-end integration, soft contractual bindings for service consumers and suppliers, third-party Billing and Rating application support, online management, change management, interoperations, simplification of programmatic access capabilities, etc. -
UML-to-BPEL mapping Demo includes a UML Profile that defines the manner in which automated business processes can be modeled using UML tools (such as Rational Rose and Rational XDE), and an Eclipse tool that can translate UML models into BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) documents. The generated BPEL can be executed by the BPWS4J BPEL runtime environment. In this new release of the demo, the translation tool has been much improved and now fully supports the UML profile, which has also been updated. -
eBusiness Demos illustrate technology related to business processing. The demos vary from simple transaction management to orchestration of Web services. Some example eBusiness Demos include the following: -
Reputation Protocol: A "proof-of-concept" implementation that provides third-party assurance to Web services through the use of the ARIES (Assured Reputation Information Exchanged Securely) framework. The demo shows the generation, communication, and verification of reputation and assurance information in online transaction environments. -
Utility Services Demos illustrate how utility services work together; they provide the basis for future utility services that might be shipped in the toolkit. This demo uses several utility services, such as management service, notification service, metering service, and contract service; and it enables them to be used with a real business service (the Stock Quote Service and Address Book Service examples, which are shipped with the toolkit). It is designed to show how to extend a Web service by adding common provisioning services that most business infrastructures will need. -
WS-C/WS-Transaction/BPEL4WS demos: WS-C/Tx defines an extensible infrastructure for managing transaction flow between various business components. Building on this, BPEL4WS simplifies the modeling of businesses interactions through the definition of flows, which describe how these interactions take place and the relationships among the involved partners. -
Web Service Security demos, because security is so critical to the success of Web services, illustrate some of the security-related technologies currently being developed for Web services. Some of the security demos include Digital Signature, Encryption, Federated Identity, and WS-Policy. The ETTK evolved from the package known as the Web Services Toolkit (WSTK). With the renaming of the WSTK package to ETTK, the scope of technologies included within the package has been expanded. The ETTK provides two separate tracks that can be downloaded independently. The new toolkit assembles related technologies from various IBM development and research labs. The demos and functions of the ETTK run on both Linux and Windows operating systems. Version 1.1.1 contains a WS-Policy demo, Self-Healing/Optimizing Autonomic Computing demo, Autonomic Computing Toolset, Common Base Event Data Format, Web Services Integration, Web Services Failure Recovery, and IBM Grid Toolbox infrastructure, along with a Grid Software Manager, WS-Reliable Messaging demo, and a JMX Bridge. How Does It Work? The basic software components needed to experiment with and create Web services and autonomic and grid-related programs are provided with the ETTK. Included is an architectural overview of autonomic technologies, Web services, sample programs, utility services, and some tools (such as ReGS Autonomic Logging demo, XML Parser, and UDDI client APIs) that are helpful in developing and deploying autonomic and grid programs and Web services. The toolkit also includes a fully functioning SOAP and grid infrastructure. ETTK includes a fully functioning SOAP engine (Apache AXIS), and grid (IBM Grid Toolbox) infrastructure. The IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit can be used with any operating system that supports Java SDK 1.3.1 or 1.4; it has been tested on Windows and Linux. |
