IT-eye

Oracle Application Testing Suite

In July my colleague announced the release of version 8.30. Oracle has made some improvements and the Suite has reached version 8.40, A good time to check what this tool really can do.

Installing the software is not difficult, although I experienced some problems during installation. Make sure you have the correct files downloaded before starting. From JBoss download the zip version as you can see in the following screenshot. The installation is explicitly asking for the zip version. It can’t handle the TAR.bz2 version.

Oracle Application Testing Suite (downloadable from http://www.oracle.com/ )
Application Server: JBoss 4.0.2 (downloadable from http://www.jboss.org/ )

I started within 30 minutes with creating my first Functional Test in Oracle Application Testing Suite. The Suite supplies you with tools to monitor the development of the application. Bugs can be registered and connected to the requirements and test scripts (manual and automatic). This way you have an overview of effects from the reported issues.

This tool gives in a nice way an overview that helps with managing development of a web application. Although I have experienced some problems during installation and the generation of graphs in the web based application is not working yet. I would recommend using this tool when developing a web application.

Product url: Oracle Application Testing Suite

Nieuwsgierig naar de onderscheidende rol van IT-Eye ten opzichte van andere Qlikview partners ben ik op onderzoek uitgegaan met de vraag wat de unieke toegevoegde waarde is die IT-Eye als Qlikview partner kan leveren. Er kan worden gesteld dat de focus van de Qlikview partners is onder te verdelen in grofweg vier categorieën:

• Een focus op een specifieke branche met totaal oplossingen (retail, logistiek)
• Het leveren van algemene ICT oplossingen waaronder Business Intelligence
• De core business op een ander ICT vlak (bijvoorbeeld CRM) met BI als ondersteunende oplossing
• Licentieverkopers

Wat direct opvalt, is dat IT-Eye als één van de weinige partners Business Intelligence als core business heeft. Organisaties intelligenter maken door een betere informatievoorziening wat zorgt voor besluitvorming op basis van rationele gronden. De juiste informatie, op het juiste moment, op de juiste plek. Qlikview is in dit perspectief een revolutionaire enabler die een agile ontwikkeling mogelijk maakt. En dat is waar huidige, snel veranderende omgevingen om vragen.

Door de specialistische kennis over het gehele spectrum van het vakgebied Business Intelligence en de praktijk ervaring in vele branches mag IT-Eye oprecht zeggen verstand te hebben van de business en haar informatievraagstukken. Qlikview kan door deze specialistische kennis en praktijkervaring perfect als sluitende of aanvullende oplossing worden ingezet.

Door de combinatie van bovengenoemde factoren kan IT-Eye zich als organisatie onderscheiden en een stuk toegevoegde waarde leveren ten opzichte van haar concurrentie. Immers, door de combinatie van praktijkervaring, “in-depth” kennis van BI en de juiste tools worden oplossingen bereikt die daadwerkelijk toegevoegde waarde aan de business leveren.

Writing a documentation about the software that is made is important. But why should we document the code in a separate document. We know Javadoc standard to document java code and pldoc for generating documentation from PL/SQL code. In those cases you need to document your code in a pre defined way to let the tool generate correct documentation pages.

BPEL stores the documentation in the code using the annotation tags. This makes it easy to find the documentation area’s in the code. The next step is extracting this information from the BPEL. With xslt we can transform the bpel.xml file into a HTML file. Below you find a sample of a xslt file.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:tns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2003/03/business-process/"
xmlns:bpelx="http://schemas.oracle.com/bpel/extension"
xmlns:bre="http://xmlns.oracle.com/BPELDocSample">
<xsl:template match="/tns:process">
<xsl:element name="html">
<xsl:element name="head">
<xsl:element name="link">
<xsl:attribute name="rel">stylesheet</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="type">text/css</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="href">bpel-flow-doc.css</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:element>
<xsl:element name="body">
<xsl:element name="div">
<xsl:attribute name="class">process</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:element>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="tns:sequence">
<xsl:variable name="sequenceID"><xsl:value-of select="generate-id(.)"/></xsl:variable>
<xsl:element name="div">
<xsl:attribute name="id"><xsl:value-of select="$sequenceID"/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="class">sequence</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:element name="p">
<xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
</xsl:element>
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="tns:scope">
<xsl:variable name="scopeID"><xsl:value-of select="generate-id(.)"/></xsl:variable>
<xsl:element name="div">
<xsl:attribute name="class">scope</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="id"><xsl:value-of select="$scopeID"/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:element name="p">
<xsl:attribute name="class">scope</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
</xsl:element>
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


In this example the sequences and scopes in the BPEL file are transformed into a html file. Expand the xslt file to get the information that you want to see in your HTML. For example: used partner links, Variables etc. Style the html file using CSS and you have a nice html page displaying what you want to see of the BPEL process.

To process the xslt file I made a ANT target. Connecting this to our nightly build the documentation of the process is generated on the moment that the code is compiled.

<!--
===========================================================
== doc-gen
===========================================================
-->
<target name="doc-gen">
<xslt force="true"
in="${basedir}/bpel/${process.name}.bpel"
style="${bpel.documentatie.flow.xsl}"
out="${process.name}.html"/>
<echo level="info">
doc-gen for ${basedir}/bpel/${process.name}.bpel
</echo>
</target>


Useful links:

• Javadoc
• Pldoc

Day three of Devoxx was the best day so far: a very good presentation by Stefan Tilkov on REST patterns and anti-patterns. After reading some discussions on REST, especially some comments by Roy Fielding, i was curious to know what the correct way of applying REST was. Turns out i was close in my applications but i’ll need to add links between resources. Anyway, excellent presentation by Stefan. You can find his presentation on his blog: Devoxx 08 talk.

The day started with a surprise: JavaFX looks better than expected. I was impressed by nine videos running at the same time, and the fact that you can simply drag an applet from the browser and run it as a desktop application. Data binding certainly is an improvement over swing, so i can imagine using JavaFX for all things that you would normally use swing for; not just for creating RIAs. Also, the plugin for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator seems usefull. All RIAs framework vendors seem to agree on the fact that look and feel is very important for RIAs, and that the graphic designers should be included in the development process.

And that is Oracle ADFs biggest disadvantage: limited skinning options. The ADF demo was pretty impressive: A very rich web application without coding java. You have to wonder though what oracle is doing here. A room full of Java coders, and oracle’s message basically is: we dont need you anymore. Not a good message in the current economy, with everybody already afraid of their jobs…

Another interesting talk was the talk about Spring DM: the OSGi based Spring Application server. Now that almost all application servers are moving to OSGi, it seems that OSGi will have a big impact on application developers. It offers a whole new perspective on SOA: all the benefits of services, but without the distracting WS-* standards.