We’re pleased to announce that IBM Integration Bus 10.0.0.14 is now available.
IBM Integration Bus v10 Fix Pack 14 includes a few enhanced features in addition to the standard maintenance fixes.
- FTPS Support for the FileInput, FileRead and FileOutput Node: The File Nodes have supported FTP and SFTP for a long time … since WebSphere Message Broker version 6.1, however in response to one of our more popular requests for enhancement, we have now added support for using the FTPS protocol for transfers as well. Functional APAR IT25158 introduces FTPS as Transport Protocol option for all 3 file nodes and also allows the protocol property of an ftpServer configurable service to be set to FTPS. In order to work with IIB the FTP server must support explicit FTP over TLS and the use of passive (“PASV”) data sockets. In order to successfully establish an SSL connection the Integration Server must be configured with a trust store which contains a certificate for the FTPS server which you are connecting with as described in the Knowledge Center.
- JMS Shared Subscription:The JMS 2.0 specification introduced Shared Subscriptions to the JMS specification in order to make it easier for multiple applications to collaborate processing JMS Publish Subscribe workloads. IIB 10.0.0.14 introduces the new Shareable subscription option on the Basic tab of the JMS Input node so that this feature may be used in message flows.
- Group Nodes: The Group Nodes were introduced in App Connect Enterprise 11.0.0.1 to provide a high performance in-memory aggregation solution that does not require an MQ QueueManager. We are pleased to announce that from 10.0..0.14 the Group Nodes are now available in Integration Bus Version 10 as well as App Connect Enterprise version 11. These nodes provide a new stateless alternative to the Aggregation nodes which have been a part of the IBM Integration Bus product for many years. We have deliberately chosen not to deprecate the Aggregation nodes, as we feel that the two sets of nodes are complementary and provide distinctly different qualities of service which each bring unique value to the product. The three Group nodes are as follows:
- The Group Scatter node marks the beginning of a Group
- The Group Gather node matches up reply messages to Groups based on Reply identifiers / Message identifiers
- The Group Complete node behaves like a new “input” node and deals with the propagation of completed groups, timed-out groups and timed-out unknown messages downstream to other nodes in the message flow.
The Group nodes are non-transactional in their approach. The data on which their behaviours are based, is stored in memory of the integration server, in contrast to the approach used by the Aggregation nodes which utilises the storage of messages on MQ queues. IBM has not yet published results of formal performance and load tests with these nodes, but our internal testing has yielded very positive results in terms of non-functional requirements compared to the Aggregation nodes. When using the Group nodes compared to the Aggregation nodes we have observed the potential for significantly higher throughput, lower mean response times and smaller CPU cost per message. These aspects suggest that the group nodes will be particularly helpful for users dealing with low-latency, rapid response scenarios.
- Support for communication with IBM Event Streams using the Kafka message flow nodes: Fix pack 14 introduces support for connecting with the new IBM Event Streams product using IIB’s Kafka message flow nodes. Given this, it is worth highlighting a new recent feature capability which allows users to more closely configure the KafkaConsumer and KafkaProducer message flow nodes. The IIB Toolkit exposes a fixed set of Kafka options, but there are several other more extended configurations of the Apache Kafka protocol which you may want to control at runtime. For java applications, typically these settings would be provided to the Apache Java client code through the specification of a properties file containing properties in name value pair format. Using the environment variables named MQSI_KAFKA_CONSUMER_PROPERTIES_FILE and MQSI_KAFKA_PRODUCER_PROPERTIES_FILE, users can point to the absolute path of a properties file to override other settings. This capability was first provided through functional APAR IT23442 in IBM Integration Bus v10.0.0.12. Interest in integrating with Apache Kafka continues to grow. Originally developed by LinkedIn, the Apache Kafka technology was open sourced in 2011, and continues to receive attention for its low-latency, high-throughput streaming characteristics which make it very suitable as a cloud based publish-subscribe messaging service. IBM Cloud provides a public Kafka-made-simple service which until recently was referred to as IBM Message Hub. In the middle of September IBM announced that the IBM Message Hub service on IBM Cloud was being renamed to IBM Event Streams in an effort to closely align with a new on-premise private cloud deployment option. The new private cloud IBM Event Streams product, which has just been released, makes it easy to deploy Kafka clusters, get started building event-driven applications and simplifies cross site replication for disaster recovery. To find out more about how to interact with Event Streams using both IIBv10 and ACEv11, check out this recent post.
- SQL Server 2016: IIBv10.0.0.14 now supports ODBC connections to SQL Server 2016
For more details on the IBM Integration Bus 10.0.0.14 Fix Pack, please refer to IBM Integration Bus V10.0 – Fix Pack 10.0.0.14
For more details on the APARs delivered in IBM Integration Bus 10.0.0.14, please refer to Fix list for IBM Integration Bus Version 10.0