JBridge: Resources for Course AS14GB

I will add more to this page each time I teach the course. Please advise me of anything you have found helpful in connection with your work with WebSphere Application Server on the iSeries, and I will very happily include it here.

Books

I have found the book Professional IBM WebSphere 5.0 Application Server (Francis et al, published by APress) useful, if expensive. It's about WebSphere in general, not about running WebSphere on the iSeries platform - but then WebSphere on the iSeries is like WebSphere on any other platform in most respects. Only about the last one hundred pages of the book are dedicated to WebSphere Administration - but these pages form a useful primer and overview. Very densely packed! The remainder of the book is mainly for programmers who have a specific need to deploy to the WebSphere platform. That said, you can read many parts of the book ignoring the code aspects for useful overviews on security, transactions and J2EE in general.

There are many IBM redbooks on WebSphere, downloadable as PDF files. The redbook most relevant to Systems Administration on the iSeries is WebSphere Application Server V5 for iSeries: Installation, Configuration and Administration. This is good, and full of iSeries specifics. The general handbook on WebSphere (IBM WebSphere Application Server v 5.0 System Management and Configuration) has the code SG24-6195-00; search for this code number on the IBM Redbooks Site (the URL to this looked as if it might change, hence no link directly from my page - sorry).

iSeries InfoCenter

Indispensable help on iSeries WebSphere, some of it very good and detailed (some less so). Find the InfoCenter through this link here; someone has also made an easy-to-remember link if you are working on a machine without your "favourites" set up (http://tinyurl.com/mzar).

Performance Tool PTDV

As I state on the course, I am something of an evangelist for PTDV, being as it helped so dramatically in the diagnosis of a performance problem for an iSeries Java application I once worked with. The link here takes you to an article I wrote for e-Promag (an ezine on all things WebSphere). The article doesn't just explain how to obtain and use PTDV, but also gives suggestions on how best to use the iSeries Performance Explorer (PEX) tool in conjunction with PTDV.

Patterns

Very early on in the course, we talked about patterns - a kind of architectural view on how to build a system. Here's a link to the home page for the IBM Patterns Site. You start with a very high level view of what your intended system will do, and drill down to quite detailed topology.