Per Application Instance

Some IBM products are licensed "per application instance".  It can be hard to find the definition of what that means.  But if you think about it simply,  an application instance refers to the product that uses the adapter, such as WebSphere App Server, IBM BPM, IBM Integration Bus, etc, as opposed to your applications that run on top of those applications.  So in an HA environment you'd need a minimum of 2 adapter licenses, One for each node in the HA cluster, regardless of how many CPU cores were available to each environment or how many or your applications were running on that platform.  Anyway, that's my take...

Google Print work-around when Printer is Offline or Not Available.

I can seldom get Google Print to work.  But I found a work around to get my USB connected, local printer to appear online and available.

1) Open your Chrome browser and enter chrome://devices

2) Click Disconnect Printers

3) Click Add Printers

4) See if your printer is on the list and its checkbox is checked (mine is)

5) Click the Add Printer(s) button at the bottom.

Only decision services can be uploaded in Decision Center

Well what the heck does that mean?  Of course only decision services can be uploaded in Decision Center.  But why won't my project deploy to Decision Center?

Let's take a look.

You've got your new ODM 8.7.1 or maybe you're developing for BlueMix or ODM on Cloud.

It's pretty simple really.  You have a choice when you start a new project in Rule Designer.  You can start a "Main Rule Project" or a "Standard Rule Project".  "Main Rule Projects" provide entry points as Decision Services, whereas "Standard Rule Projects" do not.  So either include your "Standard Rule Project" into a Main, or right click, go to properties, look for Decision Service, and change it there.  Piece o cake!

BP3 Brazos UI Toolkit for IBM BPM

These are a set of self documented controls and widgets for IBM BPM.  Download them from the BP3 site.  There are two basic parts.  The BP3 Brazos UI Examples, which is a BPM Project, and the BP3 Brazos UI Toolkit, which is a toolkit.

In the Examples project, you need to open in Process Designer.  Then click on All, and start typing the words Start Here.  This will bring you to the Brazos Control Demo.  Run that as a process to access the demo/tutorial.

You WILL want the full version.  It doesn't cost that much.  Just do it.  (I don't work for BP3, I just really like their product).

Fun with Technology

This past month has been amazing.  I've gotten to play with so many things that are normally outside of my bailiwick.  Git, MQTT, WebSphere Liberty, Decision Server Inights, Google Maps, Analytics, javascript, JSON, BlueMix,  WebSphere MQ, IBM Integration Bus, NoSQL databases.  The list goes on.

Decision Server Inisghts additional tools

From Neil Kolban
 Book - http://neilkolban.com/ibm/decision-server-insights/
 GitHub - https://hub.jazz.net/project/kolban/DSI%20JavaScript%20TestDriver/overview

Excellent overview of MQTT

This is a great intro article on MQTT.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27024986&aid=1

I'm using MQTT in my demo to collect information from a lot of web clients and process it in Decision Server Insights.  Basically, clients will publish to an MQTT server, where subscribers will pick up that information.  My map clients are also subscribers, so they get messages from all the other map clients.

They pass in this simple marker element, which is JSON text.  It doesn't have to be JSON, it's just easier to work with in a JS environment like a web page.

Next, I need to have a java MDB that subscribes to the same topic, and have it transform the message from JSON to XML.  DSI requires XML messages at the moment.

Once I have that in place I can subscribe to my flag drops and send them to DSI and do interesting analysis on them.  The missing piece in this solution is the part where I send messages back to the clients.  But ... time...



it looks like this...