Today I want to tell you about a configuration management solution I have developed. It is built for Software AG‘s ESB (the webMethods Integration Server). The latter did, for a very long time, not have built-in capabilities for dealing with configuration values. So what many projects did, was to hack together a quick-and-dirty “solution” that was basically a wrapper around Java properties.

At the time (early 2008) I was working in a “SWAT” team in presales, where we dealt with large prospects that typically looked for a strategic solution to their integration requirements. Of course configuration management, although not as prevalent as today, came up more and more often. So instead of trying to dodge the bullet, I started working on a solution. And since webMethods Integration Server is built on an open architecture, you can easily add things.

So let’s dive into some of the details of my configuration management solution, called
WxConfig. Its overall design goal was to have packages (roughly the platform’s equivalent to a web application on servlet containers) that could be moved around without any additional manual setup or configuration. The latter is a requirement stemming from the fact that we are in an ESB/integration context. By definition most packages therefore have some “relationship” to the outside world, and are not an application running more or less in isolation. Typical example would be a connection to a database, or an ERP system.

Traditionally there were two approaches for dealing with these external environment dependencies. On development (DEV) environments, there was some kind of document, telling the developer what setup/configuration they would have to apply to their DEV environment. For all “higher” stages like test (TEST) or production (PROD) this was hopefully handled by some kind automation; although back in 2008 that was rarely case and more often than not also there a manual checklist was used.

From a presales perspective (that is where it all started) the DEV part was the relevant one. My idea was to come up with something that could transform the document with the setup instructions into some kind of codification. So I basically devised an XML format (or rather a convention) that did just that. It started out quite small, with only schedulers being supported. (In that specific case we needed a periodic execution of logic for a demo.)

Since then a lot of other things were added. The approach was so successful that  many customers have moved their entire environment setup (well, at least those parts that are supported) to the WxConfig solution. And there are, interestingly enough, quite a few customers who use WxConfig solely for environment configuration but not for configuring their actual applications.

You may now ask: Hang on, what about the other environments, like TEST and PROD? Very good question! This is one of the core strengths of the WxConfig solution and therefore warrants a separate post. Stay tuned …