JCAPS Training II

I'm back at JCAPS training this week. This time the focus is on the eInsight Business Process Manager. eInsight is the JCAPS architecture layer used to combine web services. The services are connected using BPEL which is an XML-based language to define business processes. The latest version of NetBeans also includes a BPEL tool, and I'm anxious to see how they compare.

We have some time scheduled at the end of the formal training to explore some of the JCAPS problems we've been experiencing. In addition to the problems I've already outlined with the repository. I'm hoping we can also explore the following:
  • Lately, we've seen some weird behavior where things that were previously working stopped. The errors in the logs don't seem to make any sense. At first we thought it might be due to some code that was copied to a different location, but I've seen this problem where no code was copied. The only remedy we've found is to recreate both the connectivity map and the deployment profile.
  • I'm having a hard time following "good" programming practices in out JCAPS architecture. Most of our code resides in JCDs. Some of which do a lot of processing. The JCDs don't readily lend themselves to a very modular architecture. Class hierarchies are not possible, making it hard to implement many design patterns. I'd also like to leverage something like Spring or JUnit, but can't figure out how to integrate these into the tool.
  • Any debugging or profiling tips we can pick up. Right now, we rely on the logs and it's tedious.

In any event, the BPEL training should be useful. If the instructor can shed any light on the problems we've been having, that will be a bonus.

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