Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for October, 2007
Building Enterprise Applications for GlassFish using Netbeans 6.0 (Beta 2) and Maven2
Oct 31st
A few weeks ago an article appeared in the Netbeans Knowledge Base about how to get started with GlassFish V2, Maven2 and Netbeans 6.0. It is a great article doing exactly what the title says: getting you started with Maven2 in Netbeans 6.0 and deploying the project thus created to GlassFish V2. Despite the fact that I couldn’t get a few steps to work correctly, I was able to connect to the Remote Session Bean from my client app and see the log message appear in the GlassFish log.
After having completed the instructions in the article I felt I wanted to do a bit more. Over the past year or so I have been developing a few small Enterprise Applications. These are applications containing an EJB jar file and a war file packed in and deployed through an ear file. The EJB jar contains Entities and Session Beans and the classes in the war file make use of the (Local) Session Beans to allow users of the web application to manage data. This article describes the steps you need to take to create such an application with Netbeans 6.0 (Beta 2) and Maven2.
OAUG Fusion Middleware BootCamp Chicago – Part IV
Oct 30th
The past days have been really interesting. During last Wednesday (november 24) we finished the XML topic, covering
- Generating XML from an Oracle Database,
- Managing XML data in an Oracle Database,
- XML type Views and
- executing SQL operations on XML.
These were very interesting topic indeed. Especially the generation of XML from the database and the SQL operations were interesting.
After this we went on to our next major topic: Web Services.
We covered the standards (SOAP WSDL and UDDI), security, reliability and interoperability, some J2EE stuff, JAX-RPC, SAAJ, JAXR and so on.
In order to cover all this, we had to create an Application Server from within JDeveloper, with a database connection to our locally installed Oracle Database.
We created SOAP messages and examined these using the HTTP Analyzer. We also dug a little into WSDL documents. Like the components a WSDL consists of:
Read the rest of this entry »
Extending the Oracle BPEL Error Hospital with custom Java Actions
Oct 29th
With patch set 10.1.3.3 of its SOA Suite Oracle introduced standard fault handling functionality for BPEL. This Error Hospital framework allows the definition of policies for handling runtime exceptions, like Remote Faults and Binding Faults, that may occur on invoke activities in BPEL processes. Remote Faults occur when the service that the BPEL process tries to invoke cannot be reached, e.g. in case of a network or server failure. Remote Faults can be retried. Binding Faults indicate a mismatch between service provider and service consumer. It makes no sense to retry these unless the mismatch is repaired.
Instead of modeling the error handling behavior for runtime exceptions on invoke activities in BPEL it is now possible to define policies for dealing with these. A policy defines actions for responding to specific faults. Actions may be conditional: if the test that is specified for a condition passes the action will be executed. Specifying a test is not mandatory; in that case the condition is treated as the catch all condition by the Error Hospital framework. Note that multiple conditions may be specified without test element. In that case however, the framework will execute only the last condition specified and simply disregards the other conditions. This does not mean that chaining of actions is impossible. We will demonstrate several capabilities for this in this blog post. 
Read the rest of this entry »
OAUG Fusion Middleware BootCamp Chicago – Part III
Oct 24th
Hi there!
Today we continued our journey into the XML realm, by exploring the XML Schema, XPath, XSL and XML DB.
XML Schemas
XML Schemas are based on XML language and define and validate the structure of an XML document.
They can define simple and complex types, declare elements and attributes.
Why would we want to use these XML Schemas? Well, by using XML Schemas we can unify the modeling of document and data, validate XML documents and use user defined data types. And what is more, they are reusable.
Referencing the XML Schema from within the XML document simply enables the XML Schema definition.
One can, for example, create validation rules for an XML document; using the following type definition and tying these to an element definitions Read the rest of this entry »
Oracle 11g for Windows can now be downloaded via OTN
Oct 23rd
As Laurent already posted on his site; Oracle has made Oracle 11g for Windows (11.1.0.6.0) available on OTN.
So you are now able to download it if you prefer the Windows platform instead of Linux.
Current available versions…
Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6.0)
Standard Edition, Standard Edition One, and Enterprise Edition
- Download Microsoft Windows (1.7 GB) – Including Client, Examples, Gateways, and Clusterware
- Download Linux x86 (1.7 GB) – Including Client, Examples, Gateways, and Clusterware
- Download Linux x86-64 (1.8 GB) – Including Client, Examples, Gateways, and Clusterware
Marco
Custom sql scripts in OAM
Oct 23rd
I noticed Oracle Applications Manager has some very handy sql script you can use when monitoring your EBS environment.
When starting up OAM, navigate to Site Map —-> Monitoring —-> SQL Extensions
The following scripts are available…
OAUG Fusion Middleware BootCamp Chicago – Part II
Oct 23rd
Today was the first day of the FM BootCamp.
After a brief introduction of the program we started with our first topic of this two-week intensive hands-on Fusion Middleware Experience.
Roughly, the four topics to be covered during this BootCamp are:
- Introduction to XML - 2.5 days
- WebServices - 1.5 days
- BPEL - 3 days
- XML Publisher - 3 days
Puzzelen met SQL – Testdata Generatie
Oct 22nd
Puzzelen met SQL – Testdata Generatie
Anton Scheffer en Alex Nuijten
Dit artikel is de on-line tegenhanger van de rubriek Puzzelen met SQL die verschijnt in de Optimize, het vakblad voor Oracle ontwikkelaars in Nederland.
Een van de grote en vervelende uitdagingen bij het maken van SQL Puzzels maar belangrijker nog bij het bouwen van de demo-applicaties en vooral bij het testen van nieuw ontwikkelde applicaties is het samenstellen van een set van voorbeeld-, demo- of test-data. Eindeloos voornamen, achternamen, plaatsnamen en geboortedata invoeren is stomvervelend en als er ook nog eisen aan de kwaliteit worden gesteld – zoals een evenwichtige verdeling over een waardenbereik Read the rest of this entry »
OAUG Fusion Middleware BootCamp Chicago – Part I
Oct 21st
Well,
Today finally was the day. I have been looking forward a lot coming to Chicago for the Fusion Middleware Bootcamp.
Getting up around 5:30am to get to the train station in time. Not a really difficult task for me, because I usually get up around 5.45am to go to work (who? me? workaholic?;-)
The plane left for Chicago at 10:30am and after a smooth flight of about 8,5 hrs the plane landed at Chicago O’Hare.
Here I found out that the trains to downtown Chicago had been canceled due to maintenance on the railways. So I had to take a taxi, in order to get to the hotel.
From Monday morning (October 22nd) to Friday november 2nd I will be attending the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Fusion Middleware BootCamp.
Though I am a technical e-Business Suite consultant / EBS DBA, and this bootcamp is targeted at developers, I still consider this bootcamp very valuable.
My experience (from an EBS perspective) tells that when you know how thing work/what they are used for you can do a much better job as a DBA – Technical Consultant.
Hence, my primary goal is to get to know Fusion Middleware as a product and learn what can be done with it. Make no mistake, this cannot be learned in its entirety during two weeks, but I do hope to get a better understanding of Fusion Middleware, because it is going to be very important in the future, not only as a product at itself, but also very much in combination with Oracle E-Business Suite. I am currently involved in a project based on E-Business Suite 11i with parts of Fusion Middleware (BPEL) for integration. Also, E-Business Suite Release 12 is partly based on Fusion Middleware technology.
In the coming days I will try to give you a (more or less) day-by-day report of what I have learned/discovered. I do hope you will enjoy, and are looking forward to your comments.
PS: In the Netherlands it is 1:20am now. Here it is 18:20 so I am getting quite exhausted.
Regards.
Oracle 11g for Developers – presenting at Oracle Benelux User Group Conference 2007
Oct 17th
Yesterday was nice. Alex and I had two presentation ‘gigs’, the second of which was in the Amsterdam Arena, the AJAX Amsterdam stadium:
It was sold out! Well, our smaller room off to the side… (170 people). We were doing the Oracle SQL and PL/SQL Quiz – which went very well! A great warm up for next month when I am doing the quiz at Oracle Open World. The quiz shows several fairly unknown ((ab)uses) of Oracle SQL and PL/SQL features – the contestants, which is all of the audience, tries to determine which features these are.
Our first presentation of the day at OBUG was on Oracle 11g, new features for SQL and PL/SQL Developers. We had a full room and an attentive audience.
And although many people felt that 11g was for a DBA’s release with very little interesting news for developers, we managed to get most of the audience real interested in several 11g ‘gems’ . We demonstrated features such as Virtual Columns, Compound Trigger, SQL and Function Result Cache, Partial Table Flashback, PIVOT and many more. If you are interested in our presentation, you can find it at: http://www.amis.nl/tech_artikelen.php?id=532 (it is all in English).
We will do the extended version of our presentation and demonstrations, including a hands on workshop with 11g, during a (free) knowledge center event at our Nieuwegein based office on 1st November (starting at 16.30); see:http://www.amis.nl/activiteiten.php?id=531 for details and registration.
Most of what we spoke about is also described in detail in an article for the magazine of the Dutch Oracle User Group: OGh Visie. You can find this article (this one is in Dutch) at: http://www.amis.nl/tech_artikelen.php?id=533 . Note: a collection of our weblog articles on 11g features can be found at http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?page_id=2309.
