Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for September, 2004
AMIS Query: The Future of Oracle Designer (and other tools)
Sep 22nd
Yesterday, we had another AMIS Query session titled The Future of Oracle Designer. It discussed the future of Oracle development tools, more specifically Oracle Designer and Forms as well as the iDevelopment Accelerator Suite: CDM, Headstart and CDM RuleFrame. The audience consisted of architects, senior developers and IT-managers from organizations that are avid Designer users.
Presenters during this session were:
- Ton van Kooten – Business Unit Manager Technology Services Oracle Consulting and manager of the team that delivered CDM, Headstart, RuleFrame and JHeadstart to the world
- Frank Brink, Oracle Software Configuration Manager Professional Community Leader at Oracle Consulting and responsible for services around Oracle SCM
- Josef Megens, Designer, Headstart and RuleFrame Professional Community Leader at Oracle Consulting and responsible for the development of Headstart and RuleFrame
- Lucas Jellema, Technical Consultant at AMIS and former member of the CDM/Headstart-team
Oracle Designer – a tip for Generation of Forms – Enforce Post Generation
Sep 22nd
During our session on the Future of Oracle Designer yesterday I had a conversation with Josef Megens of Oracle Consulting and told me of a trick conceived by Mark Vahsen (formerly of Oracle) to ensure that post-generation changes could not be overlooked after generating a form.
The trick is this: include a program unit called POST_GENERATION_CHANGES in each form – or rather in each Module Definition in Designer – that requires post-generation changes. Make sure that this program unit contains a description of all post-generation changes. Also make sure that it does not compile! This means that when a developer generates the form and forgets to apply post-generation changes, compilation of the form will fail with an error message saying something like ‘Compilation of POST_GENERATION_CHANGES failed’. This should be a clear indication to the developer that he or she should apply the post generation changes.
25-11-2004: KC SDPL over Query structuur
Sep 20th
Tijdens deze KC avond presenteert Lucas over Query Structuur.
De stof komt uit 7Up en omvat ondermeer In-Line Views, Scalar Subqueries, Analytical Functions, Joins, nieuwe Connect By functies, rollup, cube en grouping sets. Ook zal er gelegenheid zijn om een en ander achter de PC uit te proberen middels een work shoppie.
Gaarne tijdig aangeven of je wel of niet gaat komen, ajb, in verband met avondeten.
Iedereen weet hoe een SQL query eruit ziet. Zoiets als: Read the rest of this entry »
KC SDPL planning
Sep 18th
In the next 6 to 12 months Knowledge Center Server Development & Programming Languages intends to deal with the themes listed below. The aim is to present at least a large part of those themes in various attractive ways such as presentations, work shops and discussions. Read the rest of this entry »
Struts + XDoclet (webdoclet) and integration with Eclipse
Sep 14th
XDoclet is a tool that proclaims the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle: you code everything in one file once, as opposed to the practice of modern software development, where information & tokens must be repeated in executable code, configuration files as well as deployment descriptors (of course, this has not been invented to hamper us, but allows for greater flexibility in deployment and portability).
Examples of such technologies include e.g. Struts (struts-config.xml and Java source code), Hibernate (POJOs and mapping files), or EJBS (interfaces (local/remote), implementation and deployment descriptors).
Without a code generation tool such as Xdoclet, such technologies quickly become a maintenance nightmare at best, and unworkable at worse. If you are (rather) new to XDoclet, you are referred to my previous post on Attribute-Oriented programming.
In this post, we focus on the use of XDoclet in the Struts framework. The XDoclet module that is used in this case is webdoclet, which can also be employed for other model 2 (that is, MVC-based) frameworks such as WebWork. Finally, we show how to use Xdoclet in Eclipse. Although webdoclet and Struts are paid attention to in particular, this tutorial should get you started employing Xdoclet proficiently in Eclipse in general, using the generic Xdoclet capabilities offered by the JBoss-IDE plug-in. Read the rest of this entry »
The future of CDM RuleFrame – the Oracle framework for server-side business rules
Sep 11th
In this post I will discuss some thoughts I have on the further development of CDM RuleFrame (the Framework for implementing Business Rules). It seems to me that a) Oracle has not done much on RuleFrame since its first incarnation (production release in 2000) and b) the environment has changed to such an incredible extent that the technical options are so much greater than back in 1999 that RuleFrame would – and should – look considerably different today. Some importants developments: Oracle 9i (or even 10g) RDBMS instead of 7.3 as we used to develop RuleFrame, the current status of Oracle Designer, the rise of Java/J2EE applications and of course all the experience we have collected with developing and implementing CDM RuleFrame. Read the rest of this entry »
Report knowledge center meeting on (J)Unit tests
Sep 9th
Yesterday a presentation was given on unit testing during an Amis (Web) Knowledge Center meeting. The aim was to introduce the JUnit framework and related technologies such as DbUnit and Cactus. Read the rest of this entry »
Sybase Releases Free Enterprise Database on Linux
Sep 9th
On /. there is a post on Sybase releasing their flagship database for Linux for free. However, this does not include a release of the source code, so we cannot include it in the upcoming presentation on Open Source Database Systems yet 
Report of Webforms evening
Sep 3rd
The Knowledge Centre Designer & Forms has had a meeting on the 30th of august 2004. The theme of this evening was Webforms. First there was a short overview presentation by Maurik-Jan. Then Harm, Lucas and Anton did thorough presentations about respectively Webutil, Architecture and migration. After the presentations there was a workshop where the guests were able to try out the configuration possibilities of Webforms using Internet Developer Suite 10G. Reactions of attendees were: ‘I have done a few projects whith Webforms already, but in all these cases the environment was already prepared, now i really know how this works and where i have to go to adjust things’,’
The presentations of this evening are gathered in the folder ‘ Bijeenkomsten’ on the Amis Portal.
HTML Buttons with an image
Sep 1st
In HTML it is possible to define an accesskey for a control. For example if you want to have a button which the user can click using the hot-key alt-p., you can do this with the following HTML
<input type="button" value="push me" accesskey="p" onclick="alert('clicked')"/>
It is not possible to underline the first letter with the value attribute to indicate the hot-key. You could use the < input type=image> . But then you would have to use different images and javascript to mimick button behavior when clicked.
Again CSS comes to the rescue. Read the rest of this entry »
