Planning and Scheduling SOA/BPM Development - DO NOTS!

Jonathan Machules, Technology Director

As the momentum and understanding of BPM and SOA has increased, the projects have followed. IBM WebSphere Process Server and ESB (WPS/WESB) are common products that organizations start with when moving towards BPM/SOA/Web services. Many organizations are new to this type of SDLC. This discussion is in the context of my experience on WPS/WESB projects and certainly can be applied to other workflow and ESB products/technologies.

DO NOT:

• Delay Data Model and Data Design efforts
• Plan integration validation between systems/apps/services scheduled toward the end of the project
• Assume a Sr. Developer with no experience on WPS/WESB will design/develop a functioning application
  

DO NOT Delay Data Model and Data Design efforts. The reality here is that in development there are more than likely to be changes to the data model. Some will impact your Service Message Interfaces and create a domino effect on the Consumers of that data in design and development. Try to plan as much up front as possible and reduce the costs of changes the must happen later in the SDLC.

DO NOT plan integration validation between systems/apps/services toward the end of the development SDLC. On one recent project the customer was not familiar with WPS/WESB or integration projects in general. They planned all their integration testing toward the end of the SDLC in the Testing Phase. I am not saying integration testing shouldn’t be done in the testing phase but it should NOT be planned at the end of the SDLC. A common project plan will include a ‘Vertical Slice’, ‘Prototype’, ‘Wire-frame’ or whatever term you are familiar with, the has goal to validate the integration of the various systems early on in the SDLC.

DO NOT assume a Sr. Developer with no experience on WPS/WESB will design and develop a functioning platform. WPS/WESB are enterprise platforms that have multiple layers of technologies (e.g. Java, JEE, BPEL, WS, XML, XSLT, etc…). As a proud successful Sr Developer you may very well be able to create an application on these platforms that functions in non-production environment. However, there are number of nuisances that impact performance that should be addressed by design patterns depending on the requirements. Large business is one concern that comes to mind. Acceptable object size is dependent on business transaction volume, CPU Architecture, RAM, HEAP and other dependencies. Design patterns to deal with large business objects can be applied thus giving you better performance.

WPS/WESB is a product I’ve worked with extensively. It has seen major enhancements and improvements on usability/consumability but this doesn’t mean anyone can create a well functioning app.

Jonathan Machules first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently a Technology Director specializing in SOA, BPM, UML and IBM's SOA-related technologies. He has 12 years experience in the IT field — 2 of those years at Oracle as a Support Analyst and 10 years in Consulting. Jon is a certified IBM SOA Solution Designer, Solutions Developer, Systems Administrator and Systems Expert. Recent speaking engagements include IMPACT on SOA End-to-End Integration in 2007 and 2008, and SOA World Conference on SOA and WebSphere Process Server in 2007.

IBM CloudBurst Part 5: IBM CloudBurst Offering in Comparison to other Cloud Offerings

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In the previous blog entries we discussed the IBM offering for establishing private clouds i.e. the CloudBurst device and its configurations. In this final part of the blog series, I will discuss the other cloud computing options, specifically open source and how they compare to the IBM offering.

Besides IBM, the other big players in the cloud computing domain are Amazon, Sun (Oracle), Google, SalesForce, etc. The Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) offers a very flexible cloud computing solution for public clouds; offering both open source as well as vendor specific technologies. Before we start the comparison of the offerings; let’s revisit the architectural service layers of cloud computing. The architectural services model of cloud computing can be viewed as a set of 3 layers viz. applications, services and infrastructure.

Layer 1 – SAAS (Software as a service) e.g. Sales Force CRM application
Layer 2 – PAAS (Platform as a service) e.g. XEN image offered by Amazon
Layer 3 – IAAS (Infrastructure as a service) e.g. e.g. Amazon EC2 and S3 services

The IBM CloudBurst device basically offers all 3 layers of cloud computing in a single device for establishing a private cloud. As far as public cloud is concerned, IBM offers several SAAS services e.g. IBM Lotus Live Notes, Events, Meetings, and Lotus Connections etc.

So how does an open source cloud computing model look like? At the platform layer level, companies like Sun Microsystems are offering solutions built around open source Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP) stack. Open source communities are very actively developing solutions catered for cloud computing, in fact, cloud computing is acting as a catalyst for the development of agile new open source products like lighttpd (an open source web server), Hadoop, the free Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications; and MogileFS, a file system that enables horizontal scaling of storage. However, a cloud computing solution based on open source is yet to be adopted by early adapters of cloud computing. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, and others have pointed out, open source is predicated on software licenses, which in turn are predicated on software distribution — and in cloud computing, software is not distributed; it’s delivered as a service over the Web. So cloud computing infrastructures and the modifications to the open-source technologies that enable them tend not to be available outside the cloud vendors’ datacenters, potentially locking their users in to a specific infrastructure.

Although the software stacks that run on top of these cloud computing infrastructures could be predominantly open source, the APIs used to control them (such as those that enable applications to provision new server instances) are not entirely open, further limiting developer choice. And cloud computing platforms that offer developers higher-level abstractions such as identity, databases, and messaging, as well as automatic scaling capabilities (often referred to as “platform as a service”), are the most likely to lock their customers in. Without open interfaces linking the variety of clouds that will exist — public, private, and hybrid — practical use cases will be difficult or impossible to deliver with open source technologies.

IBM’s offering for setting up private clouds, though completely vendor based, does offer a one stop solution which is scalable and dynamic.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 4: Medium and Large Scale Configurations with Practical Scenarios

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In part 4 of the blog series on IBM CloudBurst device we will discuss basic configurations of the CloudBurst device. Figure 1.0 below shows the CloudBurst device in a medium size configuration. Note that the key interfaces of the device are with the customer storage and Ethernet networks. As we discussed in the previous blog entries, the CloudBurst device is highly modular and can be configured according to customer requirements. The physical configuration showed here serves as an example.

The HS22 blade configuration in the middle is a good representation of the blade center system which starts at 4 blades and can grow to 14 blades to accommodate larger loads. The HS22 blades have embedded flash memory which come pre loaded with ESXi images. Besides that there is no other storage on the HS22 blades. The DS3400 (bottom of the figure) represents storage attached to the blade center and can be grown if required. To connect to their network, the customers can order the device with 1Gb switch module or can opt for 10Gb if its supported on their network. Important to note also is the Fiber connectivity (4 Gbps) offered by the device to connect with the storage blades (DS3400) and to the customer storage network. The x3650 M2 is the management server, which provides management interface to the CloudBurst device administrators.

The CloudBurst device can be easily scaled to accommodate larger practical scenarios. Figure 2.0 below provides a representation of the CloudBurst device in a larger configuration.



Note that it looks essentially the same as the medium configuration. The key difference is another blade center array added for more capacity. Note that because of the availability of high speed modular connectivity the two blade centers are connected both at the network level and storage level. The management server x3650 provides a singular management interface for both blade centers/storage units.

Let’s go into more detail on the storage part of the CloudBurst device, since this serves as the customer image repository (VM ware images) and the management software of the virtual machines. By default the device comes with the DS3400 storage unit which has a capacity of 5.4 terabytes with a 4.5 terabyte of usable space. This come fully configured with RAID 5 and 1 hot swap spare drive (in case of failure of the main storage drive). As shown in both figure 1.0 and 2.0 the storage can be expanded with EXP3000 storage expansion units, each having 5.4 terabyte of capacity. So how is the storage typically used? In practical scenarios, the VM management software takes up to 200 Gb space. A 1.2 Tb space can be taken up by customer supplied VM ware images, assuming 100 images at 12 GB each. Another 1 TB of space can be used to back up the customer supplied VM images. Because of the built in highly modular expansion storage mechanism, it is easy to scale for a larger cloud.

In the next part of this series, we will discuss how IBM offering compares to the other competitive offerings including open source cloud computing solutions…stay tuned.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 3 – Logical Architecture and Physical Topology Scenario

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In part 3 of the CloudBurst blog series, I will discuss the logical architecture of the appliance and a basic physical topology demonstrating a practical scenario. In part 2, I mentioned that the CloudBurst device is modular and actually consists of multiple hardware and software components. Let’s start with the high level logical architecture of the appliance – refer to figure 1.0 below. The end users (cloud users or administrators) interact with a browser-based interface to either request virtual resources or manage the cloud.


Figure 1.0 – Logical Architecture

A quick glance at the logical architecture reveals that the key components come from the Tivoli, WebSphere and VMware stacks. The first block in the overall stack is the IBM HTTP Server which handles the user requests. The HTTP Server forwards the user requests to the Tivoli Provisioning Manager and the WebSphere software stack, which form the heart of the overall architecture and run the IBM cloud-computing software. The HTTP Server requests are handled by the TPM and the stack of Cloud computing software that is running on the WebSphere Application Server. The Tivoli Provisioning Manager makes use of the pre-built automation workflows and set of scripts which actually drive the self-service model which serves the VMs requested by the end user. The Cloud computing software also handles any errors and exceptions. The data of the TPM and the WAS Cloud computing software (blue code) is stored in the DB2, while user info is stored in the LDAP. The TPM deployment engine acts as a broker and fulfills the end user requests. Its running set of automation packages and scripts.

The TPM deployment engine makes automation and web service calls to the VMware virtual center. The VM VC manages all the hypervisors and virtual machines which are running on base hardware. The VM VC interacts with physical machines. The physical machine is running a hypervisor – a light-weight process that runs the actual VMs which the end users will be accessing. The VC also provisions and performs customization on VMs.

ITM provides monitoring of the VMs and a dashboard for Cloud Admins to monitor the VMs and the VMware stack.

Let’s now consider a physical topology demonstrating a practical usage of the CloudBurst device. Figure 2.0 below illustrates how different users interact with the ‘Cloud’ to request resources. The ‘Resource Cloud’ is an abstraction representing the CloudBurst appliance, which can be used to create a private cloud. The resources in this case are VMware images which are provided by the customer and cataloged and stored in the image repository. A typical example would be developers working on WebSphere Portal development requiring VMware images which provide a rational development environment along with a Portal Server test instance.



Figure 2.0 – Logical View/Scenario

The figure also illustrates the CloudBurst browser-based interface, which provides provisioning and management of the Cloud Resources. There are two basic categories of users: end users (software developers and quality assurance engineers) and administrators. The Resource Cloud provides a self-servicing platform for end users to request and use resources. The administrators use the browser-based interface to manage resources and users.

In the next part of this series, we will explore medium and large scale deployment topologies of the CloudBurst appliance, scalability, network interfaces and add-on storage devices.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance Part 2 – What’s inside the Box?

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

In the first blog entry on this topic, I talked about IBM offerings for cloud computing (i.e. the CloudBurst appliance) and discussed its high level overview and capabilities. In this second part I will discuss the value proposition of the device and explore the technical architecture of the device - mainly what it consists of, or what you are buying when you spend more than 200k to buy one.

So again, what is CloudBurst? CloudBurst is a service delivery platform which consists of prepackaged and pre-configured servers, storage, networking, and software needed to set up a private cloud. These resources (hardware and software) can be provisioned and enabled to provide virtual server resources for application development, testing, and other activities that normally have to wait on physical hardware to be procured and deployed.

An important question to ask here is, what value this device is going to provide. In today’s market customers are largely investing in two categories of solutions, one which provides efficiency in the data centers across their IT organizations and secondly, solutions which help them differentiate from their competitors. Typically, IT data centers spend 30% to 50% of resources in developing, testing and configuring environments.

Some time it takes months to establish data center environments and configure them to be consistent with the requirements. With CloudBurst, a developer can log into a self service portal, select resources required and timeframe, select an image to provision from the service catalog, and be ready to go in minutes as opposed to months. So the idea is that if the efficiency of the data centers improve by the use of CloudBurst device, the available resources can focus and spend time on innovating products which differentiate them from competition.

So how does CloudBurst device accomplish this? To answer this, we have to look inside the box. Unlike DataPower devices which are hardware devices built for specific purposes (e.g. xml acceleration, security, integration etc), CloudBurst actually consists of several different hardware devices/components which are pre built and packaged for specific architecture needs and cloud requirements. A typical CloudBurst device (base configuration) consists of:

• 1 42U rack
• 1 3650M2 Systems Management Server
• 1 HS22 cloud management blade
• 1 BladeCenter H chassis with redundant Ethernet and Fibre Channel switch modules
• 3 managed HS22 blades
• DS3400 FC attached storage

Some important things to note here are, the 3650M2 management server hosts the pre packaged software stack (discussed below) and the HS22 blade hosts the IBM Blue Cloud computing software. The 3 managed HS22 blades hosts the client provided VM ware images, which can be cataloged for on demand provisioning. I won’t go into details of each of the individual hardware components (networking, storage etc) here in this blog as their description can be found on IBM website.

The device also comes pre packaged with IBM software, which includes:

• Systems Director 6.1.1 with BOFM, AEM; ToolsCenter 1.0; DS Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
• VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor on all blades
• Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1
• DB2 ESE 9.1; WAS ND 6.1.0.13; TDS 6.1.0.1
• Special purpose customized portal and appliance wizard that enables client portal interaction
• Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1
• OS pack
  

Note that it includes third party software from VMware (virtual center and ESX hypervisor) and IBM cloud computing software which makes use of Tivoli provisioning software components. An interesting point to note is that even though the CloudBurst device consists of several hardware and software components, it is sold, delivered and supported as a single product.

In Part 3 of this blog series, I will discuss the logical architecture of the CloudBurst device and a practical scenario which demonstrates its usage in a real client environment.

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM CloudBurst Appliance – Part I

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director West Coast

Having lived and breathed in the IBM technology world for the last 10 years, I was intrigued when IBM made the announcement a few months ago (June 16th, 2009) about the CloudBurst appliance. The name of the appliance, CloudBurst, was an interesting one and what it could do almost sounded like magical. A device which can bring together hardware, software and services needed to establish a private cloud? Sounded too good to be true. Obviously, the name of the appliance suggested that It had to do something with cloud computing – a concept which is fast gaining popularity.

As part of our technology group initiative, I decided to take a deep dive into understanding the appliance, its capabilities as they relate to cloud computing and IBM technology, and ultimately how we can we position it to our customers.

In this first part of blog series on CloudBurst, I will share the device overview and its general capabilities at high level. The subsequent blogs will go in more depth in describing its practical scenarios, architecture and real world usage.

IBM CloudBurst provides everything you need to start delivering services much faster than you do today, while reducing costs and providing the benefits of a dynamic infrastructure. It is a pre-packaged private cloud offering that integrates the service management system, server, storage and services needed to establish a private cloud. This offering takes the guess work out of establishing a private cloud by pre-installing and configuring the necessary software on the hardware and leveraging services for customization to your environment. All you need to do is install your applications and start leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, like virtualization, scalability and a self server portal for provisioning new services.

Summarizing the capabilities:

• A service delivery platform that is pre-integrated at the factory
• Built-for-purpose based on the architectural requirement of specific workloads
• Delivered and supported as a single product
• Prepackaged, pre-configured servers, storage, networking, software and installation
• services needed to stand up a private cloud

IBM CloudBurst includes everything from a Self-service portal that allows end users to request their own services and improve service delivery, automation to provision the services and virtualization to make system resource available for the new services thus reducing costs significantly. This is all delivered through the integrated pre-packaged IBM CloudBurst offering which includes implementation services and a single support interface to make it easy.

In part II of this series we will go into more depth in exploring individual features of the appliance in more detail. Stay tuned…

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

The Curious Case of Web Services Migration - Part II

Vladimir Serebryany, Senior Consultant

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, the final goal was to develop a Maven-powered environment in which the deployable unit - in our case the EAR file - would be generated by a set of scripts starting from checking out versioned code from PVCS. I would lie if I tell you that I liked Maven at first sight. My initial feelings were anger and frustration as Maven-enabled RAD essentially diminished RAD to be just a fancy code editor - and nothing more. Gone were round-trip interactive development, and my productivity as a developer really suffered. Only by the end of the project I found out how to keep RAD effective and fully engaged and still be able to build using Maven. At the very end of the project I started to really appreciate the effectiveness of Maven as a build tool especially when it comes to building deployable units for different environments in a very uniform and reliable way. Its ability to manage versioned dependencies is just outstanding given the relative simplicity with which this is achieved.

Anyway, for regular Dynamic Web Projects the task would be trivial - Maven already has a plug-in to generate all deployable artifacts. But for Web projects with Web services there was nothing I could use because there were a number of generated artifacts which simply did not fit into Maven’s rigid default directory structure. I faced a task of developing a new Maven plug-in just for the tasks on hand (as long as I am mentioning this, you may guess that plug-in was successfully implemented, but read below to find out at what cost).

To assess the scope of the effort involved, let me just list the tasks accomplished.
Given: set of RAD projects fresh from PVCS each with Maven pom.xml. One specialized project had all WSDL and XSD files. Parent folder had pom.xml with our custom Maven Web services plug-in properties and configurations. Note that only scripts and libraries available with WAS 6.1 run-time are used for code generation. No part of RAD is used for Maven plug-in (in fact our customer uses AIX to run build scripts).

Below is the overview of custom plug-in functionality:

• For each WSDL in parent pom.xml run WSDL2Java script, create temporary folder structure with all Java and XML configuration files.
• For each generated webservices.xml go in and replace generated placeholder with actual servlet class name (this is because WSDL2Java script just does not do that by design).
• Combine all webservices.xml files together and create single webservices.xml to be put in the target project.
• Collect all mapping xml files and put them together in the target project.
• Collect all servlets names and classes names for each WSDL and put them as servlet/servlet-mapping entries in the Web Deployment Descriptor in the target project.
• Copy WSDL and XSD files into the target project WEB-INF/wsdl folder.
• Copy all generated Java sources and put them together with existing source code.
• Pass resulting project to the standard Maven Web project plug-in to be compiled and built.

At the end the Prolifics team had accomplished everything the client asked us to do. and we left the site with application up and running in production with no problems. The only thing they asked with amazement was: "How did you do that, guys?"

Vladimir Serebryany is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with in-depth knowledge and broad hands-on experience with the J2EE environment as well as expertise in EJBs, Servlets, JSP and JSF. Excelling at migrations, Vladimir has over 9 years of experience with a wide range of complementary skills including WebSphere, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, UNIX, C/C++, Java, HTML/ASP, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. He has served as team leader/senior developer roles in large, complex projects and configurations with clients in the financial, insurance and telecommunication industries - among others.

The Curious Case of Web Services Migration - Part I

Vladimir Serebryany, Senior Consultant

During one of my recent BEA WebLogic to IBM WebSphere migration assignments at a major insurance company, I encountered an interesting problem.

The client had a large number of Web services which were running on BEA WebLogic and consumed by a .NET front-end. In the course of migration, our team had to not only migrate code to WebSphere but also help the customer refactor the source code repository and create a set of Maven scripts to provide a fully scripted build/deploy process for all environments - from unit test to production.

We started with the typical set of issues:

• WSDL files and corresponding XSD files had relative namespaces in them - and the spec strongly recommends absolute ones
• Source code was stored in typical WebLogic structures and deployable components were created by running four (!) different Ant scripts
• Code and WSDL files were stored in PVCS and the revision history had to be preserved
• WSDL2Java wizard was invoked every time scripts ran so binding Java code would be generated on the fly and not stored in PVCS - wise decision but binding implementation classes with client's code in them had to be preserved from being overwritten.

The first issue was easy to deal with – a couple sed/awk scripts took care of the namespaces. We gave WSDL files back to client; they validated them against their .NET environment and found no problems with new namespaces.

Item #2 was also relatively easy to solve - we manually rearranged code into a Rational Application Developer (RAD) structure and that was it. RAD is really good at that sort of thing. While doing that we also extracted PVCS archives as files from the central repository and rearranged these archives in the file system according to the new directory structure. We sent back these directories to the client’s PVCS team, and they imported these archives back into a new PVCS project. That way all the previous generations of source code have been preserved. We now were able to work with PVCS and track a file’s revision history right back to Noah's Ark.

Now we had to deal with WSDL to Java files generation. There were three sorts of files: custom code with business logic, binding code and classes generated from data types definitions in XSD files, and binding implementation classes. We did not have to worry about the first two types: the first set was permanent code which we shifted to another utility’s Java project for simplicity of maintenance. Generated Java was what it was - generated code which the wizard took care of, only the binding implementation classes was something we had to take care of. On one hand all the methods stubs are generated by the WSDL2Java wizard - on the other hand these methods already contained the customer's code. If we allowed the wizard to run "freely," this code would be overwritten.

Here we needed a trick and we found one. As it is well-known, RAD may designate one or more folders in the project to be the Source folders - meaning it will compile all Java code in these and only these folders into binary form. It happens that built-in RAD wizards are very sensitive to the order in which Source folders are listed in "Order and Export" tab of "Java Build Path" configuration page. If the WSDL2Java wizard for bottom-down Web services generation is invoked either from the pop-up menu or from the wsgen.xml script, it always places all generated files into the folder listed first in "Order and Export" tab. That "observation" provided us with opportunity to solve the problem. We would define two Source folders: “src/main/java” and “src/main/java2.” “src/main/java” would be listed first in "Order and Export" tab, “src/main/java2” would be the second. The single "target/bin" folder was designed for binary files. We placed all existing binding implementation files into “src/main/java2” folder, and we put WSDL and XSD files into a separate project. (Note that by using “src/main/java” folder structure we were shooting to use Maven.)

From that point on, if a WSDL definition changed, we would clean “src/main/java” folder and run the Web services wizard/script against new WSDL/XSD files. Newly generated binding files would go into “src/main/java” folder. As long as binding implementation files were also on the classpath, WSDL2Java wizard was smart enough to not regenerate *BindingImpl.java files, but rather pick them up from “src/main/java2” folder. IBM provided ws_gen Ant task, script and sample properties files were customized to run the whole task at any time for all 20 WSDL's we had in the service definition (see http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/radhelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.etools.webservice.was.creation.core.doc/ref/rtdwsajava.html). We didn't include “src/main/java” folder into PVCS and never had to check-in transient generated code.

The remaining issue to solve was to reproduce in RAD the style in which WebLogic's WSDL2Java script generated the code. By tweaking WSDL2Java options on Window->Preferences->Web services->Websphere->JAX-RPC Code Generation->WSDL2Java tab in RAD, we matched the style of generated code so that RAD-generated code was almost drop-in replacement for WebLogic-generated code. The problem was solved - but only for development phase so far.

Coming in Part II: “My initial feelings were anger and frustration as Maven-enabled RAD essentially diminished RAD to be just a fancy code editor - and nothing more. Gone were round-trip interactive development, and my productivity as a developer really suffered. Only by the end of the project I found out how to keep RAD effective and fully engaged and still be able to build using Maven…”

Vladimir Serebryany is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics with in-depth knowledge and broad hands-on experience with the J2EE environment as well as expertise in EJBs, Servlets, JSP and JSF. Excelling at migrations, Vladimir has over 9 years of experience with a wide range of complementary skills including WebSphere, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, UNIX, C/C++, Java, HTML/ASP, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. He has served as team leader/senior developer roles in large, complex projects and configurations with clients in the financial, insurance and telecommunication industries - among others.