If you're looking for a good test application for your sandbox...

IBM has a J2EE bench marking application for WebSphere that is occasionally used in some of the Tivoli training classes. I noticed this past week in the Extending TIM 4.6 class some of our labs involved provisioning users to an application called Trade 3. The goal of one lab was to provision the Trade accounts using a customized assembly line in TDI. This Trade application was used in a couple different labs in the course and I thought this would be a great application to add into my sandbox.

The Trade application is a simulated Stock Trading application which is designed to demonstrate J2EE as well as provide a benchmarking tool for your WebSphere Application Server. It requires either DB2 or Oracle for its data and user repository. Trade 3 requires WAS 5 so if your sandbox consists of a single TIM server then you could install Trade 3 on that same box using your existing DB2 instance and the WAS that is hosting your TIM application. You can find instructions on setting up Trade 3 here:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/0303lau/0303lau.html

To set this application up you will need to download the install files and scripts. There is a readme.html included in this download. I would recommend you instead follow the instructions in the technical article because they are more complete there. Get the trade3 install kit here:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/benchmark3.html

Now I'll admit I spent at least 4 or 5 hours Saturday trying to install the Trade 3 application on my TIM server where I'm running WAS 5. This did not go too well probably (now that I look back) because I was following the readme file instead of the tutorial instructions. One of the steps in the process runs a JACL script that installs resources setting up connectivity to DB2 etc... I kept getting errors trying to execute some of the lines from the resource JACL. There was something about a provider1 variable being non-existent.

There is also a Trade 6 application designed to run on WAS 6. Luckily I have a VM in my sandbox running WAS 6 since this is already required for TAM WPM I decided to try and install the Trade 6 application on my WAS 6 server. This meant I was going to have to install yet another DB2 server which I hadn't planned on, but that is OK because having DB2 on my web box is not a bad idea anyhow in trying to keep my VMs capable of running stand alone. I should be able to get the same experiece from my ITIM Lab excercises this way as I would running the Trade 3 app on my TIM server although this way I will need to run both my tim VM and my web1 VM at the same time. That's OK.

So you can find Trade 6 here:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/performance.html


Definitely follow this tutorial to set this up though. This is much better than the readme file included with the download. Again I had some problems with connectivity to DB2. Follow the tutorial to the point of testing the DB2 connection from WAS Admin console. If you have a problem it may be the DB2 configuration and TCP port being used. Pay close attention to what you use to name the service/port. The tutorial can be found here:

https://www6.software.ibm.com/dw/education/dm/dm0506lau/index.html

I also saved these files on my downloads page as well:

http://cahart3367.googlepages.com/downloads

So I plan to use the Trade 6 application as a place to test provisioning users as well as a good application I can protect behind TAM WebSEAL. Sounds like Fun!