Ibm

Some of the lessons I’ve learned from the Matasano Crypto Challenge has already had unexpected practical application for a common issue I encounter at work. Sometimes, people forget things, don’t document things especially in dev environments (hopefully not so much in production), one of those things is passwords, passwords for database accounts, or for an account that has some authorization the application needs. If a dev forgets a password or can’t find where it was documented, it’s many times better to just recover the password, rather then reset the password, especially if the account is used by the application in local dev environments, etc.

One of the components that I deal with in my work with WebSphere that seems nebulous to some conceptually, is the service integration bus and it’s corresponding message engine. Especially when you’re first beginning to learn about WebSphere and JMS. This concept is not unique to WebSphere and similar implementations can be found in JBoss, but my experience with it rests mostly with WebSphere.

A service integration bus lets applications exchange messages between each other within a cell. Think of it like a transport provider for messages within WebSphere that allows for asynchronous communication between applications. One application can place a message on a bus, and all other applications connected to the bus can retrieve the message and perform some work on them, or there is some mediation done before hand. You can have one application handle a web request and put a message on a bus where a cluster of applications that can handle the request will see it and one of them will grab the message and handle the work needed for the request. This is very useful for spreading the workload among a cluster of application servers while ensuring high availability.