deltalounge

I’m a fan of ready to use appliances for development and demo purposes. Recently it was announced that additional developer Virtual Machines have been released by Oracle. These in addition to the SOA Suite and BPM appliance mentioned before.

Developers can simply download a few files, assemble them with a script , and then import and run the resulting pre-built VM in VirtualBox. This makes starting with these technologies even easier. Each appliance contains some Hands-On-Labs to start learning.

Java Developement

This VirtualBox Appliance contains:

• Java SE (JDK) 1.6.0 u20 (note: Mac OS X 10.5 users must use Apple update)
• Java FX 1.3.1 runtime
• NetBeans IDE 6.9.1
• GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0.1 (installed with NetBeans)

The Aquarium says about this Java EE6 VM:

This is everything you need to get started with Java EE 6 development and you’ll even find three labs (with code and instructions) to start using JSF 2, JAX-RS 1.1, EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, JPA 2.0 and CDI 1.0!

For detailed instructions and downloads go here…

Oracle Database Development

This VirtualBox Appliance contains:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express 4.0
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

For detailed instructions.

It is expected that more flavors will be available in 2011.

• JavaServer Faces 2.0 overview and adoptation roadmap in Oracle ADF Faces and JDeveloper 11g

Integration of ADF Faces with JavaServer Faces 2.0 is an exciting process that has just begun with the release of Oracle JDeveloper 11g R2 and will continue to be significantly enhanced with the subsequent releases. The aim of ADF Faces is to continue to provide the unparalleled level of functionality and productivity to developers while moving to JSF 2.0. From an ADF Faces framework perspective, most of the changes in adopting JSF 2.0 are internal and should be transparent to developers.

• JDeveloper FAQ Index – Frequently Asked (and not so frequently answered) Questions related to the JDeveloper development environment. With very usefull links to ADF resources and on installing and configuring your development environment.
• OraToolWatch – An independent opinion on Oracle Tools by Oracle ACE Director Sten Vesterli
• The Google Group that goes with the The Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook by Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema.
• A JPA tip on @PrivateOwned from the Whitehorses blog.
• Replay Gartner Webinars.
• Technical Debt explained by Andrej Koelewijn.

In this post will show you how to install the Oracle Service Bus on the VirtualBox SOA Suite 11g appliance. For this demo we used a pretty straightforward installation scheme.

Oracle WebLogic Server installation

Download wls1033_oepe111150_linux32.bin for installation on Linux. Install using the command ./wls1033_oepe111150_linux32.bin:

Install WebLogic 10.3.3

[Show as slideshow]

Oracle Service Bus installation

Start the Disk1/runInstaller.sh and specify the JRE/JDK location /oracle/osbhome/jdk160_18/.

Install Oracle Service Bus

[Show as slideshow]

Configure a WebLogic Domain

Configure a Domain using the Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard using ./config.sh in the /oracle/osbhome/oracle_common/common/bin directory.

A straightforward configuration of the WLS Domain requires the following steps:

[Show as slideshow]

Start WebLogic

./startWebLogic.sh and Have Fun!

Few weeks ago I mentioned the VirtualBox SOA Suite and BPM 11g R1 PS2 Appliance. In the last week we’ve been test driving it on several machines.

32-bits Windows7

We noticed that on some 32-bits Windows7 machines the WebLogic Server and SOA Suite fail to start. The reason seems to be that on some 32-bit Windows 7 machines the amount of memory that can be allocated to the VirtualMachine in VirtualBox is limited to 1500 MB.
VirtualBox explains:

The Base Memory sets the amount of RAM that is allocated and given to the VM when it is running. The specified amount of memory will be requested from the host operating system, so it must be available or made available as free memory on the host when attempting to start the VM and will not be available to the host while the VM is running. This is the same setting that was specified in the “New Virtual Machine” wizard.

This can cause a crash when starting the WebLogic Server since the SER_MEM_ARGS are set to:
SER_MEM_ARGS="-Xms512m -Xmx1536m"

These are set in the wls_env.sh which can be found in the /home/oracle/bin/. Altering the -Xmx to a lower value (lower than the amount you can allocate on your workstation) can solve this problem.

Oracle Service Bus

Since I’ve been involved in several projects in the last year that want to use both SOA Suite and the Oracle Service Bus (which at least from some perspectives is part of the SOA Suite) it was a bit disappointing for me that OSB isn’t included. I’ve been asking around for the rationale behind this choice without any satisfying answers so far. Please leave your thoughts in the comments or in this thread of the Oracle forums.

This blog will point you to two valuable but free resources:

Designing the Service Contract

You can download a free PDF on Designing the Service Contract (alternative link). This is a sample chapter from the book Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide. The book is available form here.
There are also two OTN Arch2Arch Podcast interviews with Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide authors Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds now available:

• The architects perspective
• SOA around the globe and important books

Developing a Portlet using ADF

There is a free sample chapter on how to create Portlets using ADF available (alternative link). The chapter is taken from Web 2.0 solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g. The book is available here.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• JSF specification concepts
• The types of portlets you can build with WebCenter
• Developing a portlet using ADF
• Integrating portlets with custom Applications

In this week just before JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld the topic “the future of Java” keeps coming up again and again. Today the tweets coming out of the Oracle ACE Director briefing, that some how aren’t affected by a non-disclosure agreement, seem strong and positive: Ranging from Extremely passionate and very impressive, and incredibly passionate address to amazingly open words. Resulting in the statement Oracle is on the good side of the force… as far as Java is concerned. As close as we mere mortals can get at this point in time…

In one of the tweets Thomas Kurian is quoted:

After my keynote, there is no longer any confusion about the Java feature roadmap.

To see for yourself what the future of Java looks like, watch Thomas Kurian’s keynote live via the stream on JavaOne and Java Develop. To be continued…

Note that the Java Champions have joined the Oracle ACE Directors. As was stated here this significantly raised the number of Eclipse users

In June an AMI (Amazon Machine Image to use on the EC2 platform) for SOA Suite and BPM 11g R1 PS2 became available. In the last days it was announced that a VirtualBox Appliance is available. The timing, just before Oracle OpenWorld 2010 cannot be a coincidence…

This appliance contains a fully configured, ready-to-use SOA/BPM 11g R1 installation. It contains the following software:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 Update 4
• Oracle XE Universal database 10.2.0.1
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.3.0
• SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2
• BPM Suite 11gR1 PS2 (with bundle patch #1)
• BAM 11gR1 PS2
• B2B 11gR1 PS2
• JDeveloper 11.1.1.3

The download and setup instructions can be found on Oracle Technet.

To prepare your visit to Oracle OpenWorld 2010, this post provides some links to selections of sessions with a focus on eg BPM, AIA, et cetera. Here is my top ten:

1. Oracle AIA – Application Integration Architecture
2. Architects and architecture
3. BPM – Business Process Management
4. Cloud Computing
5. Data Integration
6. EDA – Event Driven Architecture
7. Fusion Middleware development
8. Java EE
9. Middleware for Enterprise Applications
10. SOA – Service Oriented Architecture

Plug

Okay, i’ll plug two sessions:

• Customer – S314708 – Transform Your Business with Oracle Application Integration Architecture | Monday, September 20, 14:00 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3011
• Colleague – S316135 – From Oracle Forms to a Service-Oriented Architecture with Oracle SOA Suite 11g | Tuesday, September 21, 5:00PM | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9

Have Fun

Using the AIAMigrationUtility in AIA 11g R1 we encountered the following error:

invokeMigrationUtility:
[echo]
…
[exec] setupMDSstore:
[exec]
[exec] bpel:
[exec] [upgrade]
…
[exec] [upgrade] Reading WSDL Location http://lnx40.deltalounge.net:8001/soa-infra/services/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/client?WSDL
[exec] [upgrade] Jul 26, 2010 3:27:34 PM oracle.viewgen.ViewGenerator main
[exec] [upgrade] SEVERE: Upgrade failed. Check the logs for any exceptions. Ensure that the WSDL URLs specified in the project are reachable and a valid 10.1.3.x project is used for upgrade. Before re-attempting upgrade, restore the original project code source from the backup directory.
[exec] [upgrade] java.lang.NullPointerException
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.setupBinding(CompositeUtil.java:686)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.setupCompositeServices(CompositeUtil.java:444)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.createComposite(CompositeUtil.java:315)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.ViewGenerator.main(ViewGenerator.java:316)
[exec] [upgrade] Exception in thread “Main Thread” java.lang.NullPointerException
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.setupBinding(CompositeUtil.java:686)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.setupCompositeServices(CompositeUtil.java:444)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.composite.CompositeUtil.createComposite(CompositeUtil.java:315)
[exec] [upgrade] at oracle.viewgen.ViewGenerator.main(ViewGenerator.java:316)
[exec]
[exec] BUILD FAILED
[exec] /fs01/app/oracle/esbtst01/weblogic/Oracle_SOA1/bin/ant-sca-upgrade.xml:71: Java returned: 1
[exec]
[exec] Total time: 5 seconds

BUILD FAILED
/fs01/app/oracle/esbtst01/weblogic/aia30/util/AIAMigrationUtility/AIAMigrationUtility.xml:58: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/fs01/app/oracle/esbtst01/weblogic/aia30/util/AIAMigrationUtility/AIAMigrationUtility.xml:140: exec returned: 1

Total time: 7 seconds

This was solved (unexpected) by altering the adf-config.xml in the .adf/META-INF/ directory for the workspace. The following was added:

          <namespace metadata-store-usage="mstore-usage_2"
                     path="/apps/AIAMetaData"/>
....
          <metadata-store-usage id="mstore-usage_2">
            <metadata-store class-name="oracle.mds.persistence.stores.db.DBMetadataStore">
              <property value="DEV_MDS" name="jdbc-userid"/>
              <property value="poctst01" name="jdbc-password"/>
              <property value="jdbc:oracle:thin:@lnx42.deltalounge.net:1521:poctst01"
                        name="jdbc-url"/>
              <property value="soa-infra" name="partition-name"/>
            </metadata-store>
          </metadata-store-usage>

In other words the connection information for the MDS has been provided.

Update ANT and MDS

Today I came across his blogpost on another ANT script using MDS during deployment. Which requires a similar solution: altering the adf-config.xml in the .adf/META-INF/ directory.

In the 10g release of Oracle SOA Suite you could set properties to instruct web service calls to go via SOAP or not. If you were calling services on the same server or domain you could gain some performance with a native call and avoiding the SOAP overhead. To do this you would set the optSoapShortcut property.

With SOA Suite 11g on WLS SOAP optimization is automatically configured. In the scenario where you upgraded to 11g R1 and are using this optimization shortcut approach, you should specify the Server URL in the SOA Infrastructure Common Settings. Optimized calls are only active when the host name value (referred to as WSDL URL in the composite.xml) matches the Server URL.

To configure the SOA Infrastructure Common Settings choose from the SOA Infrastructure Menu > SOA Administration > Common Properties. As shown in the screenshot. Other access ways to this configuration screen are described here.

Enter the server URL in the Server URLs section. This URL is published as part of the SOAP address of a service in the concrete WSDL file. Either set both values to the host name (for example, myhost) or to the full domain name (for example, myhost.domain.com). If these values do not match, a regular SOAP call is performed instead of an optimized local call.

One of the scenarios that you have to set the Server URL in order to use the optimized local call is after a migration of AIA to AIA 11g R1.