This document provides best practices for developing and managing WebSphere Cast Iron integrations. It discusses naming conventions, error handling, orchestration development, appliance configuration, performance tuning, and upgrade processes. Development best practices include splitting large orchestrations, using configuration properties, and testing before deploying. Appliance best practices involve monitoring resources and purging logs. Performance can be improved by configuring connection pooling, batch processing, and tuning job concurrency. Upgrades involve backing up repositories and deploying existing projects to new versions.

1. © 2016 IBM Corporation
WebSphere Cast Iron
Best Practices
Sarath Ambadas
sambadas@in.ibm.com
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2. © 2016 IBM Corporation2
Agenda
 Development Best Practices
 Appliance Best Practices
 Performance tuning
 Upgrade and migration

3. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Naming Conventions
 Follow standard camel case naming convention. For example :
processSalesOrder
The naming must match the functionality of the artifact.
Easy to understand what it does
Projects are easy to maintain
 Maintain version number for the project. Default is 1.0
 Don’t use underscore or double underscore for variable names
 Naming convention for
Project Names
Orchestration Names
Endpoint names
Activity names
Variable names
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4. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Error Handling
 Orchestrations must implement error handling
Try – Catch blocks
Try with multiple catch blocks
Catch – All block
 Implement a generic error handling orchestration and call that
orchestration using web service from remaining orchestration
Standard behavior for all orchestrations
Reduced work of development and simplify the orchestrations
Implement logging and notifications in the error handling logic
 Capture complete information of the fault (name, message, activity
id/name) in the log message
 If required, implement alternate path logic in the error flow
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5. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Orchestration development
 Use configuration properties : No need to edit project when values
change
Endpoint properties
Configure panel properties
Map input field value properties
 Split large orchestration into meaningful sub orchestrations
Simplify the orchestration
Ease of maintenance when editions happen
 Saving the project often during development so that data wont be lost
 All the projects need to be taken backup in a version control system
 Install Cast Iron Studio in a local file system than network drive
 Use same version of Cast Iron Studio and appliance.
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6. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Orchestration development contd..
 Test the orchestration in studio before deploying in the appliance.
 Use “job keys” feature to customize the jobId based on the customer
data for better tracking of jobs
 Use batch processing capability of the activities‘ for bulk processing
 Filter data while retrieving from the data source only or as soon as it is
retrieved in a Cast Iron activity
 Enable/Disable persistence feature in studio based on the use case
requirements.
 Sequential processing of jobs
 Validate data before it is processed
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7. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Orchestration development
Contd..
 Salesforce.com has 3 set of connectors in Cast Iron
 Connect to a database using the built-in JDBC driver in Cast Iron or by
using the generic JDBC driver provided by the database.
 Write custom java script functions where necessary. For example :
specific date parsing.
 Other important best practices
Configuring retry functionality inside the activity before throwing the error
Configuring connection pools for each of the endpoints
Remove unused variables from project after development is complete.
Use Pick activity to configure more than one inbound trigger.
Some of the configuration properties (and connection properties) can be passed
dynamically as part of the request. This feature helps avoiding editing of project often
when the values are changed
Grouping of the related activities using the group activity.
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8. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Development Best Practices : Orchestration development contd..
 When running Receive request orchestration in studio and want to
invoke it
Use the HTTP poster utility in Studio, add the path to it and make the call. The host
name is populated already
When calling from external client, check for the IP address in the studio logs (error.log)
and use that IP to make the call
 Studio short cuts
 CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+8
To see the XSLT code used for the mapping. To see click on the mapping section and
select the short cut. Then select test tab to see the xslt code
 CTRL+ALT+k
To see the schema structure used for the mapping. To see click on the input schema
variable and select the short cut. Then right click on the variable to see schema options
 {property:/ConfigurationPropertyName}
To read configuration property in the flow. For example : if conditions etc
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9. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Appliance Best Practices :Appliance
 Load the production appliance upto 60-70% of memory.
 Use lowest level of logging when running in production.
 Run the jobs in parallel using the Max simultaneous jobs option. Fine
this value based on the loads on the orchestration and appliance.
 Monitor System sources
Disk usage
Memory
Running jobs
Garbage collection
 If many appliances are present, we can monitor using the manage
appliance feature in Cast Iron
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10. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Appliance Best Practices : Appliance contd…
 When deploying the project files (.par) directly, try from internet explorer
or Chrome. Same applies for uploading of any other files in Web
Management Console
 Uses staging database in appliance to store data temporarily, process it
and then move to target endpoint
 Manage number of job logs retained
Purge and/or archive the jobs based on set of conditions
 Use the export repository option to back the appliance settings and
restore it on a new appliance. Backup this repository often.
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11. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Appliance Best Practices : Groups, Users and Roles
 Standard groups : Admin, publish, User, View
 Custom groups can be created with similar group permission as the
standard groups
 All user in a group will have capabilities of the group
 By default all projects deployed by a user will be available to the group
members.
 Projects can also be given permission to specific user outside of the
group.
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12. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Performance Best Practices : Tuning
 Points to be considered for tuning
What's the size of each incoming object? Is it less than 1 KB or in KB’s or MBs?
What's is the incoming load on the orchestration we are tuning. Is the polling interval or
scheduler set to right values?
How many other orchestrations are running in the appliance.
What is the processing load on these other orchestrations
Is connection pooling properly configured in the endpoint panel for the activities used in
the orchestration
Is the configuration on the endpoint side done properly to handle heavy loads.
Did I tune the orchestrations “Max simultaneous Jobs” value to get best results.
Is the appliance being fully utilized.
Is batch processing configured where necessary
Is the orchestration flow reviewed for performance improvements
Avoid unnecessary log activity's in the orchestration, Also appliance logging set to
minimal.
Where are my endpoints running? Are they in cloud or on premise.
Which Cast Iron offering (Live or appliance) am I looking for based on my throughput
requirements?
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13. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Performance Best Practices : Tuning contd..
 Sometimes the schemas or wsdl loaded into studio are too huge. The
max memory allocated need to be increased
 Support for both 32 bit and 64 bit memory studio versions
 XSD schemas can have recursive reference and will cause OOM when
loaded into studio. This can be tuned using the Edit > Preferences >
XML Schema Resolver options by reducing the number of child level
values.
 Disk space on the appliance: Configure job logs purge/archive
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14. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Appliance Best Practices : Upgrade and migration.
 Take backup of the repository in the current version of the appliance.
 Always try to move to the latest fixpack version available on that major
release.
 All existing projects developed in older versions of studio will work fine
in newer versions of the appliance. They can deployed directly
 For editing older projects, open in the current version of studio, make
changes and save the project.
 Upgrade steps Link
http://www-
01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGR73_7.0.0/com.ibm.wci.gettingstarted.doc/ge
tstart_migration61to70.html?lang=en
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15. © 2016 IBM Corporation
External Tools
 Oxygen editor
 Soap UI
 Filezilla ftp server and client
 Wireshark network monitoring tool
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16. © 2016 IBM Corporation
Questions and Answers
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