Spring is a powerful framework, but it requires some skill to use efficiently. When I started working with Spring a while ago (actually Spring Boot to develop microservices) I encountered some challenges related to dependency injection and using the @Autowired annotation. In this blog I’ll explain the issues and possible […]
Maarten Smeets
Maarten is a software architect and Oracle ACE. Over the past years he has worked for numerous customers in the Netherlands in developer, analyst and architect roles on topics like software delivery, performance, security and other integration related challenges. Maarten is passionate about his job and likes to share his knowledge through publications, frequent blogging and presentations.
Automate calls to SOAP and REST webservices using simple Python scripts
Probably not many people will tell you running batches over webservices is a good idea. Sometimes though, it can be handy to have a script available to generate webservice calls based on a template message with variables and automate processing the response messages. In addition, if you have a large […]
Getting started with Spring Boot microservices. Why and how.
In order to quickly develop microservices, Spring Boot is a common choice. Why should I be interested in Spring Boot? In this blog post I’ll give you some reasons why looking at Spring Boot is interesting and give some samples on how to get started quickly. I’ll shortly talk about […]
Getting started with Oracle Database in a Docker container!
One of the benefits of using Docker is quick and easy provisioning. I wanted to find out first-hand if this could help me get an Oracle Enterprise Edition database quickly up and running for use in a development environment. Oracle provides Docker images for its Standard and Enterprise Edition database […]
10 reasons NOT to implement Blockchain now
A secure distributed ledger with smart contract capabilities not requiring a bank as an intermediary! Also a single source of truth with complete traceability. Definitely something we want! Blockchain technology promises to make this possible. Blockchain became famous through cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technology could also be considered […]
Quickly create a Virtualbox development VM with XE DB using Kickstart, Packer, Vagrant
The topic of quickly creating an Oracle development VM is not new. Several years ago Edwin Biemond and Lucas Jellema have written several blogs about this and have given presentations about the topics at various conferences. You can also download ready made Virtualbox images from Oracle here and specifically for […]
Oracle SOA Suite and WebLogic: Overview of key and keystore configuration
Keystores and the keys within can be used for security on the transport layer and application layer in Oracle SOA Suite and WebLogic Server. Keystores hold private keys (identity) but also public certificates (trust). This is important when WebLogic / SOA Suite acts as the server but also when it […]
R and the Oracle database: Using dplyr / dbplyr with ROracle on Windows 10
R uses data extensively. Data often resides in a database. In this blog I will describe installing and using dplyr, dbplyr and ROracle on Windows 10 to access data from an Oracle database and use it in R.
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS): Overview of integration options
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service has a lot of options which allows it to integrate with other services and systems. Since it runs JavaScript on Node.js for custom APIs, it is very flexible. Some features allow it to extent its own functionality such as the Firebase configuration option to send notifications […]
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) and Integration Cloud Service (ICS): How secure is your TLS connection?
In a previous blog I have explained which what cipher suites are, the role they play in establishing SSL connections and have provided some suggestions on how you can determine which cipher suite is a strong cipher suite. In this blog post I’ll apply this knowledge to look at incoming […]
SSL/TLS: How to choose your cipher suite
For SSL/TLS connections, cipher suites determine for a major part how secure the connection will be. A cipher suite is a named combination of authentication, encryption, message authentication code (MAC) and key exchange algorithms used to negotiate the security settings (here). But what does this mean and how do you […]
Oracle SOA Suite: Want performance? Don’t log so much and clean up your database!
The Oracle SOA Suite infrastructure, especially composites, use the database intensively. Not only are the process definitions stored in the database, also a lot of audit information gets written there. The SOA infrastructure database, if not well managed, will grow and will eventually have detrimental effects on performance. In this […]
Oracle SOA Suite: Two-way SSL with TLS1.2 made easy (slightly less complicated)
Transport layer security (TLS) is not an easy topic. Many blogs have been written about this already. Surprisingly though, I did not find a single blog which was more or less complete and provided me with everything I needed to know to get this working on SOA Suite 12.2.1. In […]
R: Utilizing multiple CPUs
R is a great piece of software to perform statistical analyses. Computing power can however be a limitation. R by default uses only a single CPU. In almost every machine, multiple CPUs are present, so why not utilize them? In this blog post I’ll give a minimal example and some […]
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS): An introduction to API security: Basic Authentication and OAuth2
As an integration/backend developer, when starting a project using Mobile Cloud Service, it is important to have some understanding of what this MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) has to offer in terms of security features. This is important in order to be able to configure and test MCS. In […]
Machine learning: Getting started with random forests in R
According to Gartner, machine learning is on top of the hype cycle at the peak of inflated expectations. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what machine learning actually is and what it can be done with it. Machine learning is not as abstract as one might think. If you […]
Oracle SOA Suite: Find that composite instance!
When executing BPM or BPEL processes, they are usually executed in the context of a specific entity. Sometimes you want to find instances involved with a specific entity. There are different ways to make this easy. You can for example use composite instance titles or sensors and set them to […]
Oracle Service Bus: Produce messages to a Kafka topic
Oracle Service Bus is a powerful tool to provide features like transformation, throttling, virtualization of messages coming from different sources. There is a (recently opensourced!) Kafka transport available for Oracle Service Bus (see here). Oracle Service Bus can thus be used to do all kinds of interesting things to messages […]
Oracle Service Bus: Pipeline alerts in Splunk using SNMP traps
Oracle Service Bus provides a reporting activity called Alert. The OSB pipeline alerts use a persistent store. This store is file based. Changing the persistent store to JDBC based, does not cause pipeline alerts to be stored in a database instead of on disk. When the persistent store on disk […]
Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox: How to increase the size of a disk and make small(er) exports for distribution
Sometimes I create a VirtualBox disk for usage in a VM with a certain size. I think it will be enough for what I want to use the VM for. After using the VM for a while, it happens (often) that I need more space than I initially assigned. For […]
WebLogic Server: Logging the SOAP action in the access.log
WebLogic Server allows you to customize your access.log. This can be very powerful if you want to monitor for example service response times in a tool like Splunk (see here). When working with SOAP services though, especially those with many operations, it can be insufficient to monitor services to the […]
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS). Implementing custom APIs using JavaScript on Node.js
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is a mobile backend as a service. MCS does its magic by providing a lot of features to make implementing mobile services easy such as (among many others) authentication, logging/analytics, lookups and calling other services. There are also features available to make integration with mobile clients […]
WebLogic Server: Automate obtaining performance metrics from the DMS
Oracle provides the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) as part of WebLogic Server which is extremely useful if you want to obtain aggregated data of an environment in case of for example a performance test. The data which can be obtained from DMS is extensive. This varies from average duration of […]
Oracle Service Bus: A quickstart for the Kafka transport
As mentioned on the following blog post by Lucas Jellema, Kafka is going to play a part in several Oracle products. For some usecases it might eventually even replace JMS. In order to allow for easy integration with Kafka, you can use Oracle Service Bus to create a virtualization layer […]
Sonatype Nexus 2.x: Using the REST API to clean-up your repository
Sonatype provides Nexus. An extensive artifact Repository Manager. It can hold large amounts of stored artifacts and still requests get processed quickly. Also it has an extensive easy to use API which is a definite asset. When a project has been running for a longer period (say years), the repository […]
Sonatype Nexus 3.0. Using the new Groovy API
Sonatype Nexus 3.0 does not have the REST API which was available in Nexus 2.x (see the discussion here). This provides a challenge in case you want to automate certain tasks. Nexus 3 does provide a Groovy API however which allows you to write your own scripts and upload them […]
Oracle NoSQL Database 4.x and the Node.js driver 3.x
There are two ways you can access Oracle NoSQL database from a Node.js application. These are illustrated below. You can use the nosqldb-oraclejs driver and you can use Oracle REST Data Services. In my previous blog post I illustrated how you can access Oracle NoSQL database by using the nosqldb-oraclejs […]
Node.js and Oracle NoSQL Database
Oracle NoSQL Database is an interesting option to consider when you want a schemaless, fast, scale-able database which can provide relaxed (eventual) consistency. Oracle provides a Node.js driver for this database. In this blog I’ll describe how to install Oracle NoSQL database and how to connect to it from a […]
Application Container Cloud: Node.js hosting with enterprise-grade features
Oracle’s Application Container Cloud allows you to run Java SE, Node.js and PHP applications (and more is coming) in a Docker container hosted in the Oracle Public Cloud (OPC). Node.js can crash when applications do strange things. You can think of incorrect error handling, blocking calls or strange memory usage. […]
Node.js: My first SOAP service
I created a simple HelloWorld SOAP service running on Node.js. Why did I do that? I wanted to try if Node.js was a viable solution to use as middleware layer in an application landscape. Not all clients can call JSON services. SOAP is still very common. If Node.js is to […]
Node.js: A simple pattern to increase perceived performance
The asynchronous nature of code running on Node.js provides many interesting options for service orchestration. In this example I will call two translation services (Google and SYSTRAN). I will call both of them quickly after each other (milliseconds). The first answer to be returned, will be the answer returned to […]
Oracle SOA Suite Code Quality: SonarQube Quality Gates, XML Plugin and custom XPath rules
There are several ways to do code quality checks in SOA Suite. In this blog post I will describe a minimal effort setup which uses Jenkins 2.9, SonarQube 5.6 and the SonarQube XML Plugin 1.4.1. SonarQube is a popular tool to check and visualize code quality. An XML Plugin is […]
Seamless source “migration” from SOA Suite 12.1.3 to 12.2.1 using WLST and XSLT
When you migrate sources from SOA Suite 12.1.3 to SOA Suite 12.2.1, the only change I’ve seen JDeveloper do to the (SCA and Service Bus) code is updating versions in the pom.xml files from 12.1.3 to 12.2.1 (and some changes to jws and jpr files). Service Bus 12.2.1 has some […]
Oracle Database 11g: Virtual columns
Views in the Oracle database have several uses. You can use them to provide a view of data in different tables as a single object to query. You can use views to achieve a virtualization layer. Also views can be used to provide a user specific view of data. Implementing […]
Integration Cloud Service (ICS): Execution Agent proxy issue: NumberFormatException
Integration Cloud Service (ICS) offers an Execution Agent which you can download and install on-premises. This provides a local ICS instance. The Execution Agent is useful in several situations. When you have an ICS trial, it is valid only for a period of 30 days. After initial installation (which does […]
My first NodeJS service
Microservices implemented in JavaScript running on NodeJS are becoming quite popular lately. In order to gain some experience with this, I created a little in memory NodeJS cache service. Of course statefulness complicates scalability, but if I would also have implemented a persistent store to avoid this, the scope of […]
Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS): A developer’s first impression
Oracle provides ICS (Integration Cloud Service) as a simple means for citizen developers to do integrations in the cloud and between cloud and on-premises. On the Oracle Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum I got a chance to get some hand-on experience with this product in one of the workshops. In […]
Asynchronous interaction in Oracle BPEL and BPM. WS-Addressing and Correlation sets
There are different ways to achieve asynchronous interaction in Oracle SOA Suite. In this blog article, I’ll explain some differences between WS-Addressing and using correlation sets (in BPEL but also mostly valid for BPM). I’ll cover topics like how to put the Service Bus between calls, possible integration patterns and […]
Performance by using patterns in service implementations
Performance in service oriented environments is often an issue. This is usually caused by a combination of infrastructure, configuration and service efficiency. In this blog article I provide several suggestions to improve performance by using patterns in service implementations. The patterns are described globally since implementations can differ across specific […]
Simple security system using Raspberry Pi 2B + Razberry + Fibaro Motion Sensor (FGMS-001)
In this article I’ll describe how I created a simple home-brew burglar detection system to send me a mail when someone enters my house (so I can call the police). First my choice for the components is explained. Next how these components combine to achieve the functionality wanted. Based on […]