Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for December, 2004
Of Data Guard and the Night Watch; a Date with Chris at the Rijksmuseum
Dec 12th
Last Thursday evening was special. On the occasion of Chris Date’s visit to The Netherlands, the product marketing department of Oracle Netherlands had gathered some 25 odd (could also be spelled with dash 25-odd) Oracle experts at The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This remarkable group represented over four centuries of specialist Oracle knowledge; it included for example two members of the Oak Table society.
The evening started with drinks, followed by a tour of the museum. Have you read the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown? What he describes about the Louvre at night time came all back to me as we walked through a deserted Rijksmuseum. An art historian explained many details about Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch, Vermeer’s Milkmaid, Loveletter and The Little Street. Wel also discussed more works by Jan Steen, Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Heda: Still-life with Gilt Goblet by Willem Claesz. Heda. After this tour we set down to an equisitely laid table in one of the exposition rooms in the museum with walls covered with paintings. When you got up to go the bathroom the very first thing you encountered in the next room was, once again, 
! It was very special to have such a personal encounter – not minding the security guard present at all times – with one of the world’s most famous paintings. Read the rest of this entry »
Steve Muench on improving ADF performance
Dec 10th
Yesterday we had a technical session at Amis on ADF. In one discussion a concern was raised on how all the ADF metadata and the abstractionlayers would affect performance. Quite coincidently Steve Muench posted a presentation on Improving ADF performance he gave at Oracle Open World yesterday. A very good read, not only for people working with ADF, but also for those only working with the business components.
9.0.4.5 Maintenance Release Oracle Designer available
Dec 9th
Today I discovered the 9.0.4.5 maintenance release for Oracle Designer 10g on MetaLink. It has been released on November 18th, so this is not hot news. The 9.0.4.5 is not yet available on OTN’s Designer Software Page, there you will still find 9.0.4.4. If you have an existing Designer/SCM 10g release on your machine (either Oracle Designer 10g (9.0.4.3) shipped with Developer Suite 10g (9.0.4) or the release 9.0.4.4), use this download to upgrade Designer/SCM to release 10g (9.0.4.5). Install into the same Oracle home as your existing release, then run the RAU to upgrade the repository.
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Oracle Open Source : SQuirreL
Dec 8th
Not too long ago my colleague Zeger Hendrikse gave this presentation on Open Source Databases. Part of this presentation are the Tools available.
One of the Tools he mentioned also has an Oracle Plugin available. So, continuing the story on Oracle and Open Source, may I present to you: SQuirreL
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Table FUNctions: select a graph in SQL
Dec 8th
You may seen some enthousiastic ramblings on Table Functions in earlier posts I have written. This is another one. With approximately 50 lines of code, you can select crude graphs for any query. For example, a graph that indicates the total salary sum for the three departments in the SCOTT schema:
The underlying query to get this ‘graph’ is the following. Graph is a Table Function that is invoked with a CURSOR expression. Any query will do, as long as it returns two columns: the first a varchar2 – that is the label that is printed along the horizontal axis; the second column must be a numer – that is the value positioned against the vertical axis.
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jWebUnit
Dec 7th
During my current project, i encountered jWebUnit, a unittesting framework based on jUnit and HttpUnit. Old news for some, new for me.
Since we already had some posts on jUnit and HttpUnit, i thought this might be of interest.
An example of its conciseness (as found on the jWebUnit homepage):
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The December shipment is in: New books have arrived
Dec 6th
Last week we received another shipment of books for our evergrowing library. Among this shipment were these titles: Read the rest of this entry »
Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3 Developer Preview is here …
Dec 6th
The Oracle JDeveloper release 10.1.3 Developer preview release can be downloaded from OTN. See JDeveloper Homepage
“The Oracle JDeveloper 10g (10.1.3) release adds many new features, including a new look and feel, a greatly improved coding environment, extensive refactoring options, J2EE 1.4/J2SE 5.0 support, and visual JSF development.”
I took it for a very quick spin today. I must say I like the new look and feel. If you look at some of the new features such as the refactoring (thank you) , the cvs support and the easy maximizable editor tabs (double click on a title to get the editor fullscreen and vice versa) it is not hard to see were they get some of their inspiration.
Much to my surprise they have left ADF out. Makes you wonder. Is ADF undergoing major revisions? If yes where is the focus? Extension of the out-of-the-box support for dataproviders? New Wizards? Drag and drop Editable Tables in JSP ( 
)? Drag and drop support for JSF and ADF Faces? Application templates?
We will have to wait until Oracles releases another preview including ADF as they plan somewhere in 2005.
As for Toplink this release does not contain the 10.1.3 Toplink Developers preview. You’ll have to download the standalone version if you want to testdrive the JAXB and O – XML mapping features. Again in this JDeveloper release it is not possible to export the project to Java source, you can in the standalone version. Seems like a small thing to me to get it in …..
Even the startup icon has been revamped. In my opinion it looks more like a cappucino now…
JDBC database copy of table contents
Dec 2nd
For one of our projects, we wanted to copy the contents of our production database to the test database. Both databases are accessible via JDBC. After an investigation of available tools, I had to revert to my own solution. Read the rest of this entry »
Putting SPELs on ADF Code
Dec 2nd
There is a simple way to use the Expression language you use in JSTL expressions in your JSP’s, in ADF’s DataAction. Actually anywhere you can get hold of a LifeCycleContext (or any subclass) you can use SPEL. What you need is the class oracle.adf.controller.lifecycle.Evaluator.
You can obtain one like this
. Read the rest of this entry »
