IT-eye

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.

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!!

Today is the big day that people will be able to buy the Apple iPhone. Unfortunately, people in Europe will have to wait a couple more months. So what’s this got to do with Oracle or Java? Not much. But one thing people have complained about regarding the iPhone is that you can’t install applications on it. The iPhone will come with a full Ajax compatible browser, Safari, and if you want to deliver applications to the iPhone you’ll need to create a web application. People developing with ADF Faces may have an advantage here, as ADF Faces has a render kit for PDA’s. iPhone Safari should be able to render any website, but you’ll still need to consider the small screen, and the bandwidth limits. So a render kit which does this for you might save you time.

With the iPhone Apple is getting into a very crowded market, with a lot less freedom to execute than in the pc market. Apple will have to make deals with telecom providers. But i think even from a pc vendor perspective making mobile phones is inevitable. In a couple of years mobile phones will be powerful enough to replace laptops for most common computing usages. You won’t need a separate laptop. You walk around with your mobile phone, in the office or at home you put it in a docking station, attach a keyboard and a bigger display, and you have all the computing power you need. But this will only work if you can install applications on it or if you can remotely run applications on it, for example using remote desktop, some sort of remove vmware ace.

Robert Scoble is linking to Justin Kestelyn who is asking why Oracle isn’t getting any blogging respect, especially around Web 2.0. According to Robert Oracle would get more respect if they’d invite more bloggers over to Oracle blogging events. Sure, I haven’t seen any events especially targeted at bloggers, but they recently organized a special event for Partners, which i blogged about (though not as much as i would have liked).

During this event Oracle demoed some of the upcoming web 2.0 features in it’s products. Tagging, relating information, wiki, presence, mashups, Ajax will all be available out of the box with Webcenter and JDeveloper 11g. I think this will earn Oracle some web 2.0 respect, when released. You can see some pictures of the demos here.

One commenter on Scoble’s blog said the lack of respect could be caused by Unbreakable Linux, which is seen as a cheap rip off of RedHat Enterprise Linux. According to this commenter Oracle should have created their own distribution. It may be a cause of disrespect, but i think Oracle did a good thing not inventing yet another Linux distribution. There are already enough Linux distributions. In fact, many people claim the problem with open source is that everybody wants to come up with their own solution, instead of working together on one solution. So i think it’s a good thing Oracle didn’t create their own distribution.

There are still a lot of people afraid of using open source because they think it’s not as well supported as commercial closed source software. This is the problem Oracle is trying to fix by providing support for Linux. They want people to migrate to Linux by giving them confidence in the support available.

Another reason for providing Linux support may their focus on making Grid computing easily manageable. If you want to run a grid of a 1000 cpu’s, doing upgrades or installing software should be easy. You want 24*7 availability, while still being able install upgrades and fixes. Oracle is doing this for their database and middleware software, by improving the provisioning facilities in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. By providing support for the operating system, they can also improve management of the grid on the operating system level.

What do you think, should Oracle have made it’s own distribution?

Some moments ago, I discovered Slideshare.net on the internet. This site is a YouTube look-a-like to share your slideshows and presentation with the internet community. You can upload Powerpoint as well as OpenOffice presentations to your personal SlideShare page and make them public. You are also able to download presentations so that you integrate parts of it into your own presentation…I wonder if this violates any private property legislation in some way On the other hand, you should not make them public, if you want to prevent usage by others.

I already found some interesting presentations about topics like web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. I think this site can also be really helpful to inspire you to make attractive and well-organized presentations.

I’m currently in Redwood City attending Oracle’s Xtreme PTS event, which is an event organized by Oracle’s Platform Technologies Solutions support team. The goal of this team is to help Oracle partners deliver better solutions to their customers, and this week a large number of partners are invited to learn about Oracle solutions and products.

I think this week is an excellent idea, as it’s pretty hard to keep up with Oracle. A lot of new products have been released in the last few years, and even more products have been bought by Oracle and are currently being integrated into the Oracle products. Oracle is buying so much that even last weeks event agenda is already outdated. The new agenda includes a session on Tangosol Coherence.

Today we had sessions on the new features in the 11G database, Oracle’s Management tools, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Other session discussed how Oracle can help partners through Oracle PTS and Oracle Support and how partners can use Oracle’s support tools like Configuration Support Manager.

Here are some pictures i made, first a kitesurfer under the Golden Gate Bridge, and another picture of the Oracle offices.

This is really cool! Today, I bumped into the YouTube style site Videolectures.net. The goal of this site is to give you as a maven free access to lectures from the world’s leading scientists (I don’t know if they are really world-leading, but I believe them on their word). As far as I can determine, the lectures are mainly focused on mathematical and computer science subjects.

Because, I have an academic background (Master degree in Computer Science from the Utrecht University) and still interested in mathematical and computer science topics, I am really happy with this initiative. I am now able follow free lectures about topics I’m interested in.

One off the elements in SOA projects is estimating the cost. In classical Designer/ Developer projects we use function points to estimate cost (#function points * hours per point). In our current SOA projects we are using our experience from earlier SOA projects and we are using Scrum.  The interesting point off Scrum is that the team makes a relative estimation off storypoints, use cases or requirements. After this relative estimation the storypoint, use case or requirement that is most clear is estimated into hours based on past experience. The rest is than calculed from that reference point.  This method is good emperical approach and is fun because we are using planning poker.

Today I found an interesting article on how much will your SOA cost from David S. Linthicum. His method is a good indication for the total cost. During the realization phase I will use scrum to determine the productivity of the team and to manage the expectations of the client.

Since release 10.1.3, Oracle contains two flavors for tackling webservice security. In this posting, I want to introduce them shortly and explain in which situation they can be used best.

The Oracle SOA suite contains the Oracle webservice manager (OWSM) for managing services and to add policies to the services to enforce, for example, security. OWSM supports different XML security standards for authentication, authorization and XML decryption and encryption. OWSM uses gateways or agents to enforce the policies on the webservices. Agents run at the client or the server-side of the webservice and the gateway acts as a proxy for the webservice. Gateways can be used to enforce policies on webservices deployed outside the enterprise, where no agents can be used. OWSM also contains monitoring functionality to monitor the webservice activities, even alarms can be set to notify the appropriate persons when something is wrong with a managed webservice.

Less famous is the Oracle AS webservice security (OWSS). OWSS is used to enforce security policies on webservices running inside an OC4J container of the Oracle application server. OWSS used a JAX-RPC interceptor handler to intercept webservice requests that are send on the client and received by the webservice. The interceptor adds WS-Security elements for authentication, signing or encryption to the SOAP message and then forwards the message to the receiving web service. An interceptor on the receiving side decrypt, verify signatures and authenticate the web service message. Building webservices that uses OWSS for adding security can easily be done by using the Webservice Assembler tool provided by Oracle AS web services. The tool can be invoked from the command-line or from Ant in JDeveloper. Securing the web services can be done in JDeveloper by using the wizard or from in the AS console. OWSS contains support for many web service XML security standards, like WS-security, X.509 and SAML.

For now, I only have read documentation of both tools and played a little bit with OWSM. For as far as I can make a fair judgment now, I think OWSM is more suitable in large SOA environments where security policies are needed to be applied enterprise wide on services running everywhere. A tool like OWSM is a must in such large and complex SOA environments. In smaller SOA environments where there are running only a few services in a single OC4J instance, OWSS fits more to secure the services. OWSM would probably be a little bit overkill, because it also introduces more manage and monitor activities.

Before you are going to secure services with OWSM or OWSS, you have to ask yourself which parts needed to be secured, why it is needed to secure them, where the services needed to be secured and against who are the services protected. Answering these questions properly will give you a good insight in which tool is more suitable.

Oracle released the new APEX 3.0 just few days back. The tool, formely called HTML DB has become a real mature rapid web application development tool. Easy in use and lots of nice new features.

Just a few of all the new features :

• PDF Printing
• Flash Charts (no more svg)
• Drag and Drop item layout
• Access Migration

To make development with APEX even more productive add-on libraries are being developed. Patrick Wolf is currently developing the ApexLib. The latest release 1.4 is integrating nicely in the new APEX 3.0

On our projects we use APEX not too often. But its good to see that it really helps on the ‘rapid’ part of developing applications. If you don’t want to get stuck on all the java-frameworks and don’t have the java-knowledge in-house, it’s the ideal tool for developing a web-application. With some html/plsql/javascript-knowledge you’re on the right way!