IT-eye

Ever tried explaining architecture to a layman? How did you do it? Did you, at some point, refer to the original field of architecture – the one associated with names like Gaudí, Koolhaas and Hundertwasser? Maybe the layman brought it up himself? Did it help the discussion?

Probably it did, actually. While IT and Business architecture isn’t really the same, the original field of architecture works well as a metaphor. It’s such a natural comparison that it doesn’t feel as a metaphor. Plus, it fits kinda neatly – as long as you don’t look too close. And that’s exactly where the metaphor loses its value, both because the layman’s knowledge of brick-and-mortar architecture proves inadequate and because, in the end, the fields are just not the same.

Still, metaphors have value in communicating different aspects of architecture. So I’d like to explore different perspectives on architecture using different metaphors, starting with: navigation!

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Not a valid Win32-Application
Last week i encountered a problem with my glassfish installation while preforming a deployment with maven.

In my maven i configured the maven-glassfish-plugin and tried to deploy my application. I received the following message:

[INFO] Unable to start domain "webui". IOException: Cannot run program "C:\prog\glassfishv3\glassfish\bin\asadmin": Crea
teProcess error=193, %1 is not a valid Win32-Application

The plugin tries to execute in my glassfish installation the application asadmin. In this directory there are to files with this name. a windows version with the .bat extension and a unix version without a extension. To solve this problem delete or rename the file without an extension to asadmin.sh. Now windows will send the request to the bat file.

Unable to deploy application

After i solved this issue i encountered a second problem. I configured the plugin to use the passwordfile that’s generated in the domain config.

<groupId>org.glassfish.maven.plugin</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-glassfish-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.1</version>
<configuration>
<glassfishDirectory>${glassfishDirectory}</glassfishDirectory>
<user>${glassfish-user}</user>
<passwordFile>${passwordFile}</passwordFile>
<debug>true</debug>
<echo>true</echo>
<domain>
<name>${project.artifactId}</name>
<adminPort>4848</adminPort>
</domain>
<components>
<component>
<name>${project.artifactId}</name>
<artifact>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}.war</artifact>
</component>
</components>
</configuration>


This works to start and stop the domain but for deploying an application it doesn’t accept the password file. To solve this problem i created a personal password file in my userhome containing the password of my domain in this case ‘admin’ and changed in my settings.xml the value of passwordFile to my personal password file:

here the configuration in my settings.xml

<properties>
<!-- Glassfish -->
<glassfishDirectory>C:/prog/glassfishv3/glassfish</glassfishDirectory>
<passwordFile>${user.home}/passwd.local.file</passwordFile>
<glassfish-user>admin</glassfish-user>
<userPassword>admin</userPassword>
</properties>


here the content of my passwd.local.file

AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin


After completing a migration of a GIS Application to 11g database i was wondering how difficult it could be to integrate Oracle Maps on a APEX page.

I have installed the following components:

• Oracle 11g Database
• OC4J Container 10.1.3.5.0
• Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer 11.1.1.2
• Oracle Spatial Demo Data Set

upgraded the SQL Developer to version 2.1 and installed the GeoRaptor plugin to visualize oracle spatial data

Step 1: “Validate Demo Data and working of GeoRaptor”
Step 2: “Validate Working of MapViewer jsp client”
Step 3: “Validate Working of MapViewer JavaScript client”
Step 4: “Include the JavaScript client in APEX page”
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Today i was using utl_http package on my 11g db and I encountered the following error:

ORA-29273: HTTP request failed
ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_HTTP", line 1577
ORA-24247: network access denied by access control list (ACL)
ORA-06512: at line 1

His is the result of the improved security in 11g. When you want to create a connection to a remote server with one of the util packages: TCP,HTTP,SMTP besides the privileges on the package you need to configure the connection in a Access Control List (ACL). In a ACL you can configure in detail the allowed connections by entering the following parameters:

• Server name or IP
• Port number range
• Database user/role
• Start date
• End date

The package DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN enables you to create and configure ACL’s.

The ACL is a nice security feature but when migrating applications to 11g it’s something you will encounter.

More information:

• dbms_network_acl_admin documentation
• Article writen by Arup Nanda

The configuration of the fault management Framework for a SCA component has been made more flexible than it was in 10g. We can configure fault policies not only on composite level but also on component level. This enables us to configure retry policies not only on an error type and filter but also on specific components. To do this you just need two files:

• fault-policies.xml, fault-policies.xsd
• fault-bindings.xml, fault-bindings.xsd

You have to enable the fault policy by adding the files to your sca component, or you can add a reference in the sca component to hem, for example when they are placed in the mds.

fault-bindings.xml
Examples of fault-bindings.xml files can be found in oracle’s documentations:

• Fault policy on composite level, the chapter is called fault-buildings.xml but they are talking about fault-bindings.xml don’t let this confuse you
• Fault policy on component level

fault-policies.xml
An detailed fault-policies.xml file can be found here.

Mediator
The Fault Management Framework is only applicable for mediators that processes their rules parallel, see documentation Fault Policies Mediator. If an error is matched in the fault policy an possible predefined fault action in the mediator will be ignored. Be aware of this when you are defining your fault policies and error handling.

Example
I have made a simple sca component to show the working of the framework. This sca component has two components {BPEL and Mediator} which are exposed as services to the outside world.
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Today i took a look at the test framework withing the 11g suite. I encountered a strange problem in the test framework of the SOA Suite but before i go into details i will explain the case.

I have made the following sca component that returns a greeting. The input is quite simple a name and a greeting type (‘Hello’ or ‘Bye’). The message is routed depending on the greeting type to a BPEL which response the greeting with a return greeting.
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View IT-eye’s contribution to SOA Magazine, where Mike van Alst (IT-eye) & Dave Berry (Oracle) talk about preventing failures by implementing good governance.

As many of you may know, I’m a big fan of collaboration. I think we all have enough challenges building solutions for our customers, that we all benefit from any kind of collaboration. One such collaboration is the WAAI project. The WAAI acronym is formed by using the first letter of each participating company, being: Whitehorses, Amis, Approach Alliance and – of course – IT-eye.

The way we work is quite simple: every quarter we decide upon what questions we want to have answered. As you can imagine, SOA Suite 11g is quite prominent there. Each and every question has to be answered by delivering a workshop, white paper or presentation. These are collected and presented to an audience consisting of people from the participants. That way we not only build the knowledge, but spread it within our companies as well. And, all of us can use that material to train others, both inside and outside of the companies.

Usually the results are qualitatively really good. Some are extremely good. Such a one has just been posted on OTN, which is a nice feat anyway. You can find the article Jumpstart for OSB development here. We look forward to share a lot more results in the future.

Today I had some troubles to debug a Java class in Eclipse.
The debugger didn’t stop at my breakpoints.
To solve this issue I have editted my debug configuration in eclipse.

Put the following in your vm arguments to increase the initial and max heap size.

-Xms512M -Xmx512M

Other ideas are Welcome!!

Probably, most people have by now at least heard of BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation standard from OMG that is supposed to be the process-modeling standard. I’ve been following news for the last 2 years or so but, admittedly, never really dug deep until I started using it at a client. Even then, it was mostly sales-pitch level and learning a bit of the notation from cheat sheets like the BPMN poster. The past few months, however, I have learned more about the standard – what its possibilities and semantics are and how it can be used. I’ve had training from both a more technical perspective (in an Oracle partner training) as well as from a purely modeling-oriented training (by one of the contributors to the BPMN 2.0 specification, Bruce Silver). And I must say, digging deeper has made me quite enthusiastic about the standard!

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