Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for February, 2008
HOTSOS 2K8 – Mind the GAPP
Feb 29th
If your there, "mind the GAPP", also during Hotsos.
Tomorrow, my colleagues and me, will arrive in San Colinas, Dallas, TX. Yesterday I got the first taste of Gerwin’s GAPP concept. GAPP, General Approach Performance Profiling, as far as I understood it, is a performance profiling approach that makes use of easy to obtain performance markers that gives insight in the broad spectrum of a business process / architecture. Although still in concept, and you will have to fulfill to some restrictions, it has the promise to being able to predict architecture behavior and/or find the most intrusive performance drains in the system.
Although I am looking forward to Hotsos, I won’t be all fun nerdie free loading stuff, I also promised to write an article for a Dutch Oracle Magazine (deadline in two weeks), and I am still struggling with the content, so I am hoping for a cloud burst while being on the premises. I already have some small insights so far, provided from the organizing ladies from Hotsos, who pointed out that at least 6 Dutchies will attend. So besides Gerwin, Patrick and me, these are probably, Jeroen Evers, Toon Koppelaars and Anjo Kolk. I am looking forward to meeting them again, also old road buddies like Alex Gorbachev (who continues his presentation marathon 
).
Anyway, the weather will be a little bit better than here in Holland and thats nice to know. On the other hand, when is weather not better than in Holland, it is not for nothing that Holland is known for its water related achievements and its rainy climate. Although sometimes the dutchies build small worlds in hot climates as well 
One day to go. We will have to be around 04.00 am on the Schiphol airport and then I will enjoy a good nights sleep in the Omni Hotel. See you there and have a nice trip.
Marco
Advanced Application Development with the Oracle Database – preparing for the RedDatabase Symposium (11th March 2008, Den Haag)
Feb 27th
I am having fun today. Today I started in earnest with my preparation for the RedDatabase Symposium, a very promising three-day event on the Oracle Database, with a total of nine day-long sessions on topics such as Optimizing Oracle RAC and Oracle BI EE as well as Oracle Data Guard and the Oracle Query Optimizer. Somewhere in the heart of the program, you will find a session that I will present. Titled: Advanced Application Development with the Oracle Database. This symposium takes place in The Hague – some 12 minutes light-rail-ride from my home. Quite comfortable – and I could spare the organizers the cost of my hotel room.
When I agreed to do this presentation, I was not quite sure what it would be on. But as I am starting to get a feeling about everything I want to talk about. The second half of the session gets off to flying start with the statement: "SOA is BAD". (I will explain what I mean by that. Hint: BAD is an acronym).
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Managing Java projects – A Contradiction?
Feb 27th
We as project managers really loved managing projects using ‘conventional’ Oracle tools. Most of us actually started as software engineers in projects using these tools. We had experience, knew all the pitfalls and managed productive software development streets. Things our programmers developed were reusable and were repeated time after time. Estimating a project based on functional specs was a piece of cake. Account managers rightfully put their trust in us and our customers were never (well, almost never) disappointed 
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How to stop running RMAN jobs in OEM Grid Control
Feb 26th
Life became very easy after Oracle’s invention of OEM Grid Control. That is what Oracle promised us when they invented it. A couple of months ago one of my colleagues asked me to schedule backup jobs. In the past I made very nice OS scripts in order to make a backup. But now with OEM Grid Control being available for quite some time, I thought let’s try making backups using OEM Grid Control.
And yes it works fine. Grid Control makes quite interesting RMAN scripts. You can schedule these RMAN scripts. At one glimpse you can see all your backup jobs and the status of these backup jobs in the job activity list. Also you can see if these backup jobs have successfully run. For script kiddies OEM Grid Control is bad news, because it makes scripts for you. But if you like to be wizard kiddy, you feel to be in heaven.
But after some while Read the rest of this entry »
What have a Merchant, some strawberries and a performance problem in common…….
Feb 26th
If you want to know what a Merchant, some strawberries and a performance problem have in common, you should come to the AMIS Query at thursday (28-02-2008). In this Query I will explain what these relations are, and how you could use this different way of thinking in your performance problems in practice. The Query may be an eyeopener for everybody interested in performance.
I really would like to see you, please sign in for free to join us at thursday evening.
Regards, Gerwin
Using default search values on the JHeadstart advanced search
Feb 23rd
When building ADF applications using JHeadstart, one can benefit from the pretty advanced search facilities provided by JHeadstart, both through its runtime framework and as generated by the JHeadstart ADF Application Generator. One thing however it does not do is provide support for default values for search items. That means: when I go to the search section for a certain group, by default one or more search items have a value, that the user then can stray from by overriding it. In this article I will briefly discuss how we can apply such default values. Read the rest of this entry »
KC presentation on CodeGen…
Feb 22nd
On February 21st I did a presentation on CodeGen at AMIS. Just a short presentation on what is possible using this great tool. I have created a couple of questions for the hands-on part of the session.
In case you are wondering what CodeGen is exactly, CodeGen is a freeware tool provided by Quest software and developed by Steven Feuerstein (mainly). CodeGen can generate any kind of textfile (source code, documentation etc) based on any Oracle database object (table/view or program). It can generate any kind of language (SQL, PL/SQL, Java etc) as long as it’s a textfile. The scripts are written in CGML (Code Generation Markup Language) which is a proprietary language to CodeGen. It takes some time to learn, but it is quite powerful. And anything that can’t be done with the standard installation of CodeGen can probably be done by extending CodeGen with your own PL/SQL Code.
How to maintain entity validation (JboException) and ORA-20xxx messages in a central resource bundle in your ADF application that uses JHeadstart
Feb 21st
As you can imagine, with many validators on many entity objects you will end up with equally many generated message bundles. When you start localizing the error messages, that means you have to maintain many classes. Keeping those messages consistent can become an error-prone task. In this article I will first describe how to use one single resource bundle (generated by JHeadstart) so that you only have to localize one resource bundle, and keeping entity validation error messages consistent becomes easy. Then I will show that this resource bundle can also be used to maintain ORA-20xxx (SQLException, user-defined PL/SQL error) messages, and finally that this is also possible for any other custom JBO exception thrown from the BC layer. Read the rest of this entry »
Should we use JHeadstart for our ADF Project? It is NOT a black or white decision!
Feb 20th
One of things we do at AMIS is develop sometimes fairly complex applications built on the Oracle ADF technology stack. On several occasions, we have been working closely together with customers with their own development staff, often very experienced in the classic Oracle development tools (primarily Oracle Forms, often Oracle Designer). The objective of our collaboration is twofold: deliver an ADF application and bring the customer’s development team up to speed with Oracle ADF technology. This type of project fits very well with our organization’s culture and the drive of my colleagues and me. We very much like to work together and share information, knowledge and skills. (this blog being an example of that ingrained quality).
Now a question we have to address in each of the situations described above is whether or not to use JHeadstart in each project. Sometimes people approach this question as very "black or white": either we use JHeadstart, or we don’t. However, like on so many occasions, the question is one with several gray-shades as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Fear for renaming (refactoring) ADF BC objects in JDeveloper 10.1.3.3 is not unfounded
Feb 15th
Growing insight during development of a project often results in a wish to rename a BC object (entity object, view object, association, view object attribute, alias, usage, etc.) in JDeveloper. Or in JHeadstart to rename objects like a group, item or a region. Often, developers are not renaming objects because it is not clear to them what the impact will be, and the amount of work which might be involved in case unpredicted errors arise. And the fear for incorrect renaming/refactoring in JDeveloper is certainly not unfounded. 
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