Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
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Utl_compress, gzip and zlib
Mar 13th
Oracle has a a supplied package utl_compress, which can be used to compress and decompress data with PL/SQL. According to the documentation it uses the “Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm”, and “The output of the UTL_COMPRESS compressed data is compatible with gzip”. That means it’s following the RFC 1952 specs, RFC 1951. And that may be very useful (but I have never used it), but I need compression (I’m working on a PDF-generator in PL/SQL) and decompression (unwrapping wrapped PL/SQL!) in the zlib-format, RFC 1950. Both formats use the same algorithm, RFC 1951, but have different headers and trailers. So can utl_compress be used to for compressing/decompressing data according to the zlib-specs. Yes! Read the rest of this entry »
Hotsos 2010 – About swag, the Oscars and other stuff
Mar 7th
Its Sunday and its raining outside. The nice weather on Saturday (approx. sunny / 20 degrees Celsius) has gone. After a decent flight on Friday where I actually made it to switch in Houston from the international Continental flight, going through customs and pick the next one, a domestic Continental Express flight, within the boundaries of 1 and 1/2 hour. I was so fast that switching for one flight to the other, that apparently my luggage didn’t manage to travel with the last flight. So after I found out that my luggage was still somewhere in Houston, I got from Dallas Love Field to the Omni Hotel in Las Colinas, Irving, where the Hotsos conference will be held again. The whole area is a bit in shambles because they are rebuilding a lot of the environment. While getting to the Grapevine Mills mall yesterday, I noticed that they also a building a new Irving Convention Center along the highway. Another addition to the already crowded Dallas/Plano/Irving Metroplex.
Automatic testing Oracle Service Bus using Hudson, maven and SoapUI
Feb 23rd
A lot of current projects are implementing some sort of service based architecture. Testing in this architecture becomes more complex. When implementing an OSB project with Scrum you test-automation is imperative. Scrum will require more frequent testing of your system. This is only feasible (in time and money) when you automate as much as possible.
Using soapUI you are able to create visually SOAP tests on your OSB implementation and running them against the defined infrastructure (develop, test, acceptance). SoapUI enables with easy tools to implements verification and validation of the responses of your OSB implementation. When running the test you are also able to set limits in SLA response times on all the calls. This way you are able to monitor depreciation of performance in older parts of your OSB implementation when adding new services.
You can record and edit your SOAP test easy with the soapUI interface and edit it later. When you maven-enable your project it is quite easy running your tests when you implement the “maven-soapui-plugin” (see my other posting http://technology.amis.nl/blog/3061/automated-soap-testing-with-maven). In the meantime version 3.0 of this plugin is released.
When implementing this with Hudson you do not have to convert the results.xml into a Surefire report. Hudson will manage this for you. Hudson will also enable you with an historical overview of all your test results.
ADF 11g : Carousel going round and round (..and round and..)
Feb 18th
Mostly when you see a carousel-ish component on the internet, it is automatically showing the next entry after a few seconds. I wondered if this could be done with the ADF carousel component as well.
And guess what Read the rest of this entry »
ADF 10g Dynamic Columns: Or how to implement an updatable dynamic table
Jan 11th
Although it is all about ADF 11g these days there are still some challenges in ADF 10g projects that run at some of my customers. Today I finished a task in which I had to create an updatable table in which the number of shown columns wasn’t known at design time. There is the possibility to create an ADF read only dynamic table, that works more or less like the richfaces columns <rich:columns/> http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/columns.jsf?tab=usage&cid=3305454 element. However, I needed an updatable table, but ADF doesn’t know such a component. I had to come up with a different solution. Read the rest of this entry »
Getting started with PrimeFaces on GlassFish v3
Jan 7th
According to the PrimeFaces website, “PrimeFaces is an open source component suite for Java Server Faces featuring 70+ Ajax powered rich set of JSF components. Additional TouchFaces module features a UI kit for developing mobile web applications.“. Since it is an OpenSource JSF implementation that is very close to releasing JSF 2.0 compliant components, I figured it was time to try it out on GlassFish v3.
Read the rest of this entry »
What Happened?
Dec 30th
What’s this?
Nope, it’s not your browser, HTML debugging proxy or broken CSS style sheet. You are still visiting the AMIS technology weblog. Don’t be afraid: AMIS has just updated it with some new features and a new theme. And well, there are some differences for you to marvel at.
You might wonder, What’s new?
Well, first off we implemented the Mystique theme into our weblog. It implements a lot of the features we wanted in the first place without too much of a hassle. Do check the the nice AJAX driven components. Also check the developer’s website of this beauty using the URL in the footer.
Next to that we implemented an AMIS Tweet: a nice way for you guys to follow our developers in their day-to-day business. It’s a custom-styled Tweet-Tracker plugin for Wordpress that allows us to use a Twitter search string over multiple accounts instead of only one.
One of the most important changes is the one where we allow you guys to register on our blog and interact with us through that account. Naturally your comments don’t need to be reviewed and will be displayed immediately, which should reduce the interaction time drastically. You are also allowed to upload your own avatar and add all kinds of information that you want to share with the world with your comments. It’s also a nice way of tracking all of your own comments and activity on our blog.
More features should be made available for our registered fans in the future, but we tend to keep content available to everyone as much as possible.
Sharing Your Code!
One of the most important new features in this version is that “you” are allowed to post code in the comments. It’s still a bit tricky (Wordpress has a powerful output filter) but you should be able to use the [ code ] tags to post your own code. Do keep in mind that all <> tags are made safe using HTML entities. Please read our Howto for some examples.
No more Spoilers
Well, there is still a lot more. But we just don’t want to spoil it all. Have fun reading our posts and happy blogging.
SUGGESTIONS!
We do “love” suggestions on how to improve our blog. If you know how? Please enlighten us!
Contacting us by using the interact with us button should do the trick!
Regards,
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ADF 11g – implementing conditionally required input fields – by playing client side hide and seek
Dec 17th
The requirement I was dealing with today in ADF 11g Rich Client Components was the following: we have an input field that is required under certain conditions. Only when one of this cluster of fields has a value, is it required. Otherwise it is optional. The use case was that the fields represent a detail record. There does not need to be a detail record (optional) but if there is one (one of the fields in the detailrecord has a value), then certain fields are mandatory.
The desire was to dynamically set the required-ness of the inputText – depending on whether one of the items in the detail record cluster has a value or not. Dynamically means that when something changes with one of the items, the conditionally required item is immediately refreshed to either required or optional.
It turned out to be fairly easy to implement: the required attribute can be set using an EL expression that refers to a bean method. In the bean we can easily check the values of the other items and determine whether or not based on that assessment the inputText component is mandatory or not. By setting autoSubmit to true for all the items that determine the mandatoriness – and by adding the inputText as a partialTarget in the PPR request, we achieve the desired functionality. However … Read the rest of this entry »
SOA Suite 11g – Using Spring Component to mimic Http Binding and integrate RESTful services
Dec 16th
In an earlier post, I showed for the Oracle SOA Suite 11g how we can use the Mediator's Java Callout functionality to integrate RESTful services into our SOA Composite applications, even though we currently have no Http Binding Service nor WSIF support (SOAP Java Binding) at our disposal in the SOA Suite – link to article. In SOA Suite 11g PS1 – released in November 2009 – is the preview (not yet officially supported and only available for PoC and early trials – of Spring components. This feature provides another way of integrating Java classes into our SOA Composite applications.
This article demonstrates how we can use the Spring component to bind our SOA Composite Application to the RESTful Translation service provided by Google.
The Oracle SOA Suite 11g HttpBinding or another way to call RESTful services from SOA Composite Applications
Dec 15th
I wanted to take a quick look at REST(ful) WebServices and see how those can be integrated into the SCA based SOA Composite Applications that we create with the Oracle SOA Suite. Currently, it does not have the HTTP binding that the 10.1.3 release of the SOA Suite used to have. So what are the alternatives?
In this article, I want to demonstrate a way of calling RESTful (simple http request based) services into a SOA Composite application. I show one way of doing so using the Google Translation Service, a RESTful service described at http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/ and to be accessed at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=hello%20world&langpair=en%7Cit. This service takes a string to translate and an indication of a source and a destination language. Though maybe not formally resource oriented enough to be called REST-style (or RESTful) service by some, it is a service that does not require SOAP or WS* but simply a HTTP Get request. So at least quite restful.
In this article I will use the work I did and described in the previous article: Leveraging RESTful Services from Java application using Jersey (Introduction). Using project Jersey's support for clients of RESTful services and the JSON-SIMPLE library to interpret the response I get from the GoogleTranslation service, I will hook up with the RESTful Service. Then I will leverage the Mediator Java Callout mechanism to integrate this REST-service-client into a SOA Composite application. The Mediator I create will be the fully SOA Suite integrated front-end of this RESTful Service.
