Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged wls
WebLogic 11g start and stop automation
Sep 27th
There are many ways of starting and stopping your Oracle WebLogic 11g environments, You can stop your Admin and Managed Server Instances through the Adminsitration console, use the the start and stop scripts shipped with the Oracle WebLogic software and domain creation, or use a tool like WLST to manipulate your entire environment.
In this blog I will use the different kinds of techniques to stop and start your Oracle WebLogic Server environment, even in case of a physical host reboot (planned or unplanned)
For this I used the common UNIX shell scripting in combination with WLST
Choosing the best way for SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus to interact with the Oracle Database
Jun 21st
In the past few weeks, I have encountered a similar discussion in various organisations. Each organisation uses either SOA Suite (11g) or Oracle Service Bus (11g) at the core of their SOA infrastructure – either for integration purposes, for workflow and process orchestration or for both. In each organisation, the role of one or more databases is crucial and interaction between the SOA environment and the database is one of the most common and therefore important functions in their enterprise IT environment.
Given the importance, it is only logical that the way(s) chosen for linking the SOA component to the database is carefully selected – and evaluated every now and again. Technology may have progressed, experience may have taught us a lesson or two, the knowledge and skills may have evolved.
Interestingly enough, the number of ways for SOA Suite and OSB to communicate with the database is quite high. This article includes an illustration that shows over 20 different interaction channels that we can choose from with a fairly wild variation of attributes, required skills, productivity and performance characteristics.
Among the choices we face is the question of the communication protocol to use for accessing the database. Roughly speaking, we can go through JDBC (via a JDBC Data Source on the WebLogic Server), via HTTP or using ‘another’ channel such as File System, FTP, Email, XMPP (Chat) etc. The communication protocol may in part determine another choice that awaits us: what will be the format and nature of the messages that we exchange: text based (XML, JSON, CSV) or strongly (Oracle-ly) typed. We know that on the one hand we have the world of XML in the SOA middleware components, and on the other side the relation world of the Oracle database – at least relational and strongly typed at the core.
So when choosing the method for having the SOA components interact with the database, we have to decide on the communication protocol and we have to determine where in the route from table to SOA component (and vv.) the conversion from Relation to XML or from XML to Relational will take place.
Considerations when making that decision include the question who has to do the work of making the XML <=> Relational conversion at design time and at run time – what is the productivity of an approach and what the performance impact. Other considerations include robustness and agility or ability to maintain and evolve the implementation. Of course the required skills factor into this decision as well as the complexity of the architecture, the design, development, test and deployment process and the nature of the interaction: read only, data manipulation, small or large documents, synchronous or asynchronous (or even fire and forget) etc.
Quickly creating, deploying and testing a WebService interface for ADF Business Components
Dec 29th
As you probably already know, ADF Business Components can very easily be exposed through a WebService interface. An Application Module can be configured with a Service Interface, ordinary ViewObjects and custom methods can be exposed in that interface and deployment is relatively straightforward. In minutes, a WebService can be published that exposes operations based on regular ADF BC functionality. This may well give us the fastest way to provide data services on top of a relational database. Several excellent articles have been published on the ADF BC service interface, for example by Steve Muench and Andrejus Baranovskis.
The blog-article you are reading is created as the result of my research and investigations around an article I hope to publish in Oracle Magazine later in 2011. It is adamant for this article that readers can get the example to work with the smallest number of instructions possible – both to make their life easy and to save on words. The article describes a BPM process that interacts with the HR schema of an Oracle RDBMS as one of its activities. The focus in the article will be on BPM, not on exposing data services for the HR schema. The WebService should therefore be available in a starter application, and be deployable without any fuzz or configuration overhead.
This blog-article demonstrates how to rapidly create the HRService – an ADF BC driven WebService on top of the EmployeesView ViewObject that exposes the EMPLOYEES table in the HR schema through the Employee EntityObject. However, its true purpose is to show how to create the deployment profile and deploy and test this service, either on the integrated WLS or on a standalone WebLogic Server, in the easiest way possible. Note that this easiest way is not the suggested way of working for real production environments.
This article assumes – in case you want to follow along for yourself – that you have JDeveloper 11g PS2, Oracle RDBMS 10gR2 or later with the HR sample schema and the SOA Suite 11g Run Time environment.
Configure JDeveloper 11g to work with Spring 2.5 and AOP
Dec 12th
In a recent article I described the interaction between JavaServer Faces (1.2) and Spring Framework (2.5.x): http://technology.amis.nl/blog/6655/spring-a-surprise-on-a-jsf-developer-how-spring-beans-can-become-jsf-managed-beans. I created a JDeveloper 11g web application that I ran on the integrated WebLogic Server 11g (10..3.2). In this article I will explain the configuration steps I had to go through for making JDeveloper and WebLogic run my simple JSF/Spring application.
1. Create a new generic JDeveloper application; set the project name and add the JSF library
2. Install the JDeveloper Spring extension through the Check for Updates facility under Help in the main menu
Fast Swap in WebLogic 10.3 (and JDeveloper 11g) – redeploy after compile in running application
Jun 26th
One of the cool new things I learned about here at the ODTUG 2009 conference is the fast swap feature in WebLogic Server 10.3 and above. So far, Application Server features have had limit use in my little development world, but this is one that may have quite some value for me, as I am developing my web applications in JDeveloper and constantly deploying, running and testing them. This feature will considerably shorten those development cycles!
The fast swap feature makes it possible to have classes that are changed and recompiled in JDeveloper immediately redeployed on WLS, without actually redeploying the entire application. By setting a single configuration option in a configuration file and configuring the output path for the compiler in JDeveloper I can shorten most of the development-compile-deploy-test cycles by eliminating the deploy (and application restart) step.
