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• Oracle Flashback Technologies - Overview

  - by Sridhar_R-Oracle

  Oracle Flashback Technologies - IntroductionIn his May 29th 2014 blog, my colleague Joe Meeks introduced Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and discussed both planned and unplanned outages. Let’s take a closer look at unplanned outages. These can be caused by physical failures (e.g., server, storage, network, file deletion, physical corruption, site failures) or by logical failures – cases where all components and files are physically available, but data is incorrect or corrupt. These logical failures are usually caused by human errors or application logic errors. This blog series focuses on these logical errors – what causes them and how to address and recover from them using Oracle Database Flashback. In this introductory blog post, I’ll provide an overview of the Oracle Database Flashback technologies and will discuss the features in detail in future blog posts. Let’s get started. We are all human beings (unless a machine is reading this), and making mistakes is a part of what we do…often what we do best!  We “fat finger”, we spill drinks on keyboards, unplug the wrong cables, etc.  In addition, many of us, in our lives as DBAs or developers, must have observed, caused, or corrected one or more of the following unpleasant events: Accidentally updated a table with wrong values !! Performed a batch update that went wrong - due to logical errors in the code !! Dropped a table !! How do DBAs typically recover from these types of errors? First, data needs to be restored and recovered to the point-in-time when the error occurred (incomplete or point-in-time recovery).  Moreover, depending on the type of fault, it’s possible that some services – or even the entire database – would have to be taken down during the recovery process.Apart from error conditions, there are other questions that need to be addressed as part of the investigation. For example, what did the data look like in the morning, prior to the error? What were the various changes to the row(s) between two timestamps? Who performed the transaction and how can it be reversed?  Oracle Database includes built-in Flashback technologies, with features that address these challenges and questions, and enable you to perform faster, easier, and convenient recovery from logical corruptions. HistoryFlashback Query, the first Flashback Technology, was introduced in Oracle 9i. It provides a simple, powerful and completely non-disruptive mechanism for data verification and recovery from logical errors, and enables users to view the state of data at a previous point in time.Flashback Technologies were further enhanced in Oracle 10g, to provide fast, easy recovery at the database, table, row, and even at a transaction level.Oracle Database 11g introduced an innovative method to manage and query long-term historical data with Flashback Data Archive. The 11g release also introduced Flashback Transaction, which provides an easy, one-step operation to back out a transaction. Oracle Database versions 11.2.0.2 and beyond further enhanced the performance of these features. Note that all the features listed here work without requiring any kind of restore operation.In addition, Flashback features are fully supported with the new multi-tenant capabilities introduced with Oracle Database 12c, Flashback Features Oracle Flashback Database enables point-in-time-recovery of the entire database without requiring a traditional restore and recovery operation. It rewinds the entire database to a specified point in time in the past by undoing all the changes that were made since that time.Oracle Flashback Table enables an entire table or a set of tables to be recovered to a point in time in the past.Oracle Flashback Drop enables accidentally dropped tables and all dependent objects to be restored.Oracle Flashback Query enables data to be viewed at a point-in-time in the past. This feature can be used to view and reconstruct data that was lost due to unintentional change(s) or deletion(s). This feature can also be used to build self-service error correction into applications, empowering end-users to undo and correct their errors.Oracle Flashback Version Query offers the ability to query the historical changes to data between two points in time or system change numbers (SCN) Oracle Flashback Transaction Query enables changes to be examined at the transaction level. This capability can be used to diagnose problems, perform analysis, audit transactions, and even revert the transaction by undoing SQLOracle Flashback Transaction is a procedure used to back-out a transaction and its dependent transactions.Flashback technologies eliminate the need for a traditional restore and recovery process to fix logical corruptions or make enquiries. Using these technologies, you can recover from the error in the same amount of time it took to generate the error. All the Flashback features can be accessed either via SQL command line (or) via Enterprise Manager.  Most of the Flashback technologies depend on the available UNDO to retrieve older data. The following table describes the various Flashback technologies: their purpose, dependencies and situations where each individual technology can be used.   Example Syntax Error investigation related:The purpose is to investigate what went wrong and what the values were at certain points in timeFlashback Queries  ( select .. as of SCN | Timestamp )   - Helps to see the value of a row/set of rows at a point in timeFlashback Version Queries  ( select .. versions between SCN | Timestamp and SCN | Timestamp)  - Helps determine how the value evolved between certain SCNs or between timestamps Flashback Transaction Queries (select .. XID=)   - Helps to understand how the transaction caused the changes.Error correction related:The purpose is to fix the error and correct the problems,Flashback Table  (flashback table .. to SCN | Timestamp)  - To rewind the table to a particular timestamp or SCN to reverse unwanted updates Flashback Drop (flashback table ..  to before drop )  - To undrop or undelete a table Flashback Database (flashback database to SCN  | Restore Point )  - This is the rewind button for Oracle databases. You can revert the entire database to a particular point in time. It is a fast way to perform a PITR (point-in-time recovery). Flashback Transaction (DBMS_FLASHBACK.TRANSACTION_BACKOUT(XID..))  - To reverse a transaction and its related transactions Advanced use cases Flashback technology is integrated into Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Oracle Data Guard. So, apart from the basic use cases mentioned above, the following use cases are addressed using Oracle Flashback. Block Media recovery by RMAN - to perform block level recovery Snapshot Standby - where the standby is temporarily converted to a read/write environment for testing, backup, or migration purposes Re-instate old primary in a Data Guard environment – this avoids the need to restore an old backup and perform a recovery to make it a new standby. Guaranteed Restore Points - to bring back the entire database to an older point-in-time in a guaranteed way. and so on..I hope this introductory overview helps you understand how Flashback features can be used to investigate and recover from logical errors.  As mentioned earlier, I will take a deeper-dive into to some of the critical Flashback features in my upcoming blogs and address common use cases.

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• People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal  Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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• ASP.NET WebAPI Security 3: Extensible Authentication Framework

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In my last post, I described the identity architecture of ASP.NET Web API. The short version was, that Web API (beta 1) does not really have an authentication system on its own, but inherits the client security context from its host. This is fine in many situations (e.g. AJAX style callbacks with an already established logon session). But there are many cases where you don’t use the containing web application for authentication, but need to do it yourself. Examples of that would be token based authentication and clients that don’t run in the context of the web application (e.g. desktop clients / mobile). Since Web API provides a nice extensibility model, it is easy to implement whatever security framework you want on top of it. My design goals were: Easy to use. Extensible. Claims-based. ..and of course, this should always behave the same, regardless of the hosting environment. In the rest of the post I am outlining some of the bits and pieces, So you know what you are dealing with, in case you want to try the code. At the very heart… is a so called message handler. This is a Web API extensibility point that gets to see (and modify if needed) all incoming and outgoing requests. Handlers run after the conversion from host to Web API, which means that handler code deals with HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage. See Pedro’s post for more information on the processing pipeline. This handler requires a configuration object for initialization. Currently this is very simple, it contains: Settings for the various authentication and credential types Settings for claims transformation Ability to block identity inheritance from host The most important part here is the credential type support, but I will come back to that later. The logic of the message handler is simple: Look at the incoming request. If the request contains an authorization header, try to authenticate the client. If this is successful, create a claims principal and populate the usual places. If not, return a 401 status code and set the Www-Authenticate header. Look at outgoing response, if the status code is 401, set the Www-Authenticate header. Credential type support Under the covers I use the WIF security token handler infrastructure to validate credentials and to turn security tokens into claims. The idea is simple: an authorization header consists of two pieces: the schema and the actual “token”. My configuration object allows to associate a security token handler with a scheme. This way you only need to implement support for a specific credential type, and map that to the incoming scheme value. The current version supports HTTP Basic Authentication as well as SAML and SWT tokens. (I needed to do some surgery on the standard security token handlers, since WIF does not directly support string-ified tokens. The next version of .NET will fix that, and the code should become simpler then). You can e.g. use this code to hook up a username/password handler to the Basic scheme (the default scheme name for Basic Authentication). config.Handler.AddBasicAuthenticationHandler( (username, password) => username == password); You simply have to provide a password validation function which could of course point back to your existing password library or e.g. membership. The following code maps a token handler for Simple Web Tokens (SWT) to the Bearer scheme (the currently favoured scheme name for OAuth2). You simply have to specify the issuer name, realm and shared signature key: config.Handler.AddSimpleWebTokenHandler(     "Bearer",     http://identity.thinktecture.com/trust,     Constants.Realm,     "Dc9Mpi3jaaaUpBQpa/4R7XtUsa3D/ALSjTVvK8IUZbg="); For certain integration scenarios it is very useful if your Web API can consume SAML tokens. This is also easily accomplishable. The following code uses the standard WIF API to configure the usual SAMLisms like issuer, audience, service certificate and certificate validation. Both SAML 1.1 and 2.0 are supported. var registry = new ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry(); registry.AddTrustedIssuer( "d1 c5 b1 25 97 d0 36 94 65 1c e2 64 fe 48 06 01 35 f7 bd db", "ADFS"); var adfsConfig = new SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration(); adfsConfig.AudienceRestriction.AllowedAudienceUris.Add( new Uri(Constants.Realm)); adfsConfig.IssuerNameRegistry = registry; adfsConfig.CertificateValidator = X509CertificateValidator.None; // token decryption (read from configuration section) adfsConfig.ServiceTokenResolver = FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration.CreateAggregateTokenResolver(); config.Handler.AddSaml11SecurityTokenHandler("SAML", adfsConfig); Claims Transformation After successful authentication, if configured, the standard WIF ClaimsAuthenticationManager is called to run claims transformation and validation logic. This stage is used to transform the “technical” claims from the security token into application claims. You can either have a separate transformation logic, or share on e.g. with the containing web application. That’s just a matter of configuration. Adding the authentication handler to a Web API application In the spirit of Web API this is done in code, e.g. global.asax for web hosting: protected void Application_Start() {     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();     ConfigureApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);     BundleTable.Bundles.RegisterTemplateBundles(); } private void ConfigureApis(HttpConfiguration configuration) {     configuration.MessageHandlers.Add( new AuthenticationHandler(ConfigureAuthentication())); } private AuthenticationConfiguration ConfigureAuthentication() {     var config = new AuthenticationConfiguration     {         // sample claims transformation for consultants sample, comment out to see raw claims         ClaimsAuthenticationManager = new ApiClaimsTransformer(),         // value of the www-authenticate header, // if not set, the first scheme added to the handler collection is used         DefaultAuthenticationScheme = "Basic"     };     // add token handlers - see above     return config; } You can find the full source code and some samples here. In the next post I will describe some of the samples in the download, and then move on to authorization. HTH

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• From J2EE to Java EE: what has changed?

  - by Bruno.Borges

  See original @Java_EE tweet on 29 May 2014 Yeap, it has been 8 years since the term J2EE was replaced, and still some people refer to it (mostly recruiters, luckily!). But then comes the question: what has changed besides the name? Our community friend Abhishek Gupta worked on this question and provided an excellent response titled "What's in a name? Java EE? J2EE?". But let me give you a few highlights here so you don't lose yourself with YATO (yet another tab opened): J2EE used to be an infrastructure and resources provider only, requiring developers to depend on external 3rd-party frameworks to then implement application requirements or improve productivity J2EE used to require hundreds of XML lines of codes to define just a dozen of resources like EJBs, MDBs, Servlets, and so on J2EE used to support only EAR (Enterprise Archives) with a bunch of other archives like JARs and WARs just to run a simple Web application And so on, and so on! It was a great technology but still required a lot of work to get something up and running. Remember xDoclet? Remember Struts? The old days of pure Hibernate code? Or when Ajax became a trending topic and we were all implementing it with DWR Servlet? Still, we J2EE developers survived, and learned, and helped evolve the platform to a whole new level of DX (Developer Experience). A new DX for J2EE suggested a new name. One that referred to the platform as the Enterprise Edition of Java, because "Java is why we're here" quoting Bill Shannon. The release of Java EE 5 included so many features that clearly showed developers the platform was going after all those DX gaps. Radical simplification of the persistence model with the introduction of JPA Support of Annotations following the launch of Java SE 5.0 Updated XML APIs with the introduction of StAX Drastic simplification of the EJB component model (with annotations!) Convention over Configuration and Dependency Injection A few bullets you may say but that represented a whole new DX and a vision for upcoming versions. Clearly, the release of Java EE 5 helped drive the future of the platform by reducing the number of XMLs, Java Interfaces, simplified configurations, provided convention-over-configuration, etc! We then saw the release of Java EE 6 with even more great features like Managed Beans, CDI, Bean Validation, improved JSP and Servlets APIs, JASPIC, the posisbility to deploy plain WARs and so many other improvements it is difficult to list in one sentence. And we've gotta give Spring Framework some credit here: thanks to Rod Johnson and team, concepts like Dependency Injection fit perfectly into the Java EE Platform. Clearly, Spring used to be one of the most inspiring frameworks for the Java EE platform, and it is great to see things like Pivotal and Spring supporting JSR 352 Batch API standard! Cooperation to keep improving DX at maximum in the server-side Java landscape.  The master piece result of these previous releases is seen and called today as Java EE 7, which by providing a newly and improved JavaServer Faces release, with new features for Web Development like WebSockets API, improved JAX-RS, and JSON-P, but also including Batch API and so many other great improvements, has increased developer productivity and brought innovation to server-side Java developers. Java EE is not just a new name (which was introduced back in May 2006!) but a new Developer Experience for server-side Java developers. To show you why we are here and where we are going (see the Java EE 8 update), we wanted to share with you a draft of the new Java EE logos that the evangelist team created, to help you spread the word about Java EE. You can get access to these images at the Java EE Platform Facebook Album, or the Google+ Java EE Platform Album whichever is better for you, but don't forget to like and/or +1 those social network profiles :-) A message to all job recruiters: stop using J2EE and start using Java EE if you want to find great Java EE 5, Java EE 6, or Java EE 7 developers To not only save you recruiter valuable characters when tweeting that job opportunity but to also match the correct term, we invite you to replace long terms like "Java/J2EE" or even worse "#Java #J2EE #JEE" or all these awkward combinations with the only acceptable hashtag: #JavaEE. And to prove that Java EE is catching among developers and even recruiters, and that J2EE is past, let me highlight here how are the jobs trends! The image below is from Indeed.com trends page, for the following keywords: J2EE, Java/J2EE, Java/JEE, JEE. As you can see, J2EE is indeed going away, while JEE saw some increase. Perhaps because some people are just lazy to type "Java" but at the same time they are aware that J2EE (the '2') is past. We shall forgive that for a while :-) Another proof that J2EE is going away is by looking at its trending statistics at Google. People have been showing less and less interest in the term J2EE. See the chart below:  Recruiter, if you still need proof that J2EE is past, that Java EE is trending, and that other job recruiters are seeking for Java EE developers, and that the developer community is aware of the new term, perhaps these other charts can show you what term you should be using. See for example the Job Trends for Java EE at Indeed.com and notice where it started... 2006! 8 years ago :-) Last but not least, the Google Trends for Java EE term (including the still wrong but forgivable JavaEE term) shows us that the new term is catching up very well. J2EE is past. Oh, and don't worry about the curves going down. We developers like to be hipsters sometimes and today only AngularJS, NodeJS, BigData are going up. Java EE and other traditional server-side technologies such as Spring, or even from other platforms such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, Grails, are pretty much consolidated and the curves... well, they are consolidated too. So If you are a Java EE developer, drop that J2EE from your résumé, and let recruiters also know that this term is past. Embrace Java EE, and enjoy a new developer experience for server-side Java developers. Java EE on TwitterJava EE on Google+Java EE on Facebook

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• Master Data

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly.  This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself.  For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application.  The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product.  The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences.  And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations.  The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts.  This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc.  Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets.  This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data.  When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied.  The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated.  I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications.  What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process.  In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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• Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

  - by Laurent Goldsztejn

  On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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• How to create a virtual network with Azure Connect

  - by Herve Roggero

  If you are trying to establish a virtual network between machines located in disparate networks, you can either use VPN, Virtual Network or Azure Connect. If you want to establish a connection between machines located in Windows Azure, you should consider using the Virtual Network service. If you want to establish a connection between local machines and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, you may be able to use your existing VPN device (assuming you have one), as long as the device is supported by Microsoft. If the VPN device you are using isn’t supported, or if you are trying to create a virtual network between machines from disparate networks (such as machines located in another cloud provider), you can use Azure Connect. This blog post explains how Azure Connect can help you create virtual networks between multiple servers in the cloud, various servers in different cloud environments, and on-premise. Note: Azure Connect is currently in Technical Preview. About Azure Connect Let’s do a quick review of Azure Connect. This technology implements an IPSec tunnel from machines to to a relay service located in the Microsoft cloud (Azure). So in essence, Azure Connect doesn’t provide a point-to-point connection between machines; the network communication is tunneled through the relay service. The relay service in turn offers a mechanism to enforce basic communication rules that you define through Groups. We will review this later. You could network two or more VMs in the Azure cloud (although you should consider using a Virtual Network if you go this route), or servers in the Azure cloud and other machines in the Amazon cloud for example, or even two or more on-premise servers located in different locations for which a direct network connection is not an option. You can place any number of machines in your topology. Azure Connect gives you great flexibility on how you want to build your virtual network across various environments. So Azure Connect makes sense when you want to: Connect machines located in different cloud providers Connect on-premise machines running in different locations Connect Azure VMs with on-premise (if you do not have a VPN device, or if your device is not supported) Connect Azure Roles (Worker Roles, Web Roles) with on-premise servers or in other cloud providers The diagram below shows you a high level network topology that involves machines in the Windows Azure cloud, other cloud providers and on-premise. You should note that the only required component in this diagram is the Relay itself. The other machines are optional (although your network is useful only if you have two or more machines involved). Relay agents are currently available in three geographic areas: US, Europe and Asia. You can change which region you want to use in the Windows Azure management portal. High Level Network Topology With Azure Connect Azure Connect Agent Azure Connect establishes a virtual network and creates virtual adapters on your machines; these virtual adapters communicate through the Relay using IPSec. This is achieved by installing an agent (the Azure Connect Agent) on all the machines you want in your network topology. However, you do not need to install the agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles; that’s because the agent is already installed for you. Any other machine, including Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, needs the agent installed.  To install the agent, simply go to your Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) and click on Networks on the bottom left panel. You will see a list of subscriptions under Connect. If you select a subscription, you will be able to click on the Install Local Endpoint icon on top. Clicking on this icon will begin the download and installation process for the agent. Activating Roles for Azure Connect As previously mentioned, you do not need to install the Azure Connect Agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles because it is already loaded. However, you do need to activate them if you want the roles to participate in your network topology. To do this, you will need to click on the Get Activation Token icon. The activation token must then be copied and placed in the configuration file of your roles. For more information on how to perform this step, visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432964.aspx. Firewall Rules Note that specific firewall rules must exist to allow the agent to communicate through the Relay. You will need to allow TCP 443 and ICMPv6. For additional information, please visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433061.aspx. CA Certificates You can optionally require agents to sign their activation request with the Relay using a trusted certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). Click on Activation Options to learn more. Groups To create your network topology you must first create a group. A group represents a logical container of endpoints (or machines) that can communicate through the Relay. You can create multiple groups allowing you to manage network communication differently. For example you could create a DEVELOPMENT group and a PRODUCTION group. To add an endpoint you must first install an agent that will create a virtual adapter on the machine on which it is installed (as discussed in the previous section). Once you have created a group and installed the agents, the machines will appear in the Windows Azure management portal and you can start assigning machines to groups. The next figure shows you that I created a group called LocalGroup and assigned two machines (both on-premise) to that group. Groups and Computers in Azure Connect As I mentioned previously you can allow these machines to establish a network connection. To do this, you must enable the Interconnected option in the group. The following diagram shows you the definition of the group. In this topology I chose to include local machines only, but I could also add worker roles and web roles in the Azure Roles section (you must first activate your roles, as discussed previously). You could also add other Groups, allowing you to manage inter-group communication. Defining a Group in Azure Connect Testing the Connection Now that my agents have been installed on my two machines, the group defined and the Interconnected option checked, I can test the connection between my machines. The next screenshot shows you that I sent a PING request to DEVLAP02 from DEVDSK02. The PING request was successful. Note however that the time is in the hundreds of milliseconds on average. That is to be expected because the machines are connecting through the Relay located in the cloud. Going through the Relay introduces an extra hop in the communication chain, so if your systems rely on high performance, you may want to conduct some basic performance tests. Sending a PING Request Through The Relay Conclusion As you can see, creating a network topology between machines using the Azure Connect service is simple. It took me less than five minutes to create the above configuration, including the time it took to install the Azure Connect agents on the two machines. The flexibility of Azure Connect allows you to create a virtual network between disparate environments, as long as your operating systems are supported by the agent. For more information on Azure Connect, visit the MSDN website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432997.aspx. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting, a company specialized in cloud computing products and services. Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" from Apress and runs the Azure Florida Association (on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4177626). For more information on Blue Syntax Consulting, visit www.bluesyntax.net. Special Thanks I would like thank those that helped me figure out how Azure Connect works: Marcel Meijer - http://blogs.msmvps.com/marcelmeijer/ Michael Wood - Http://www.mvwood.com Glenn Block - http://www.codebetter.com/glennblock Yves Goeleven - http://cloudshaper.wordpress.com/ Sandrino Di Mattia - http://fabriccontroller.net/ Mike Martin - http://techmike2kx.wordpress.com

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• Securing an ADF Application using OES11g: Part 1

  - by user12587121

  Future releases of the Oracle stack should allow ADF applications to be secured natively with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). In a sequence of postings here I explore one way to achive this with the current technology, namely OES 11.1.1.5 and ADF 11.1.1.6. ADF Security Basics ADF Bascis The Application Development Framework (ADF) is Oracle’s preferred technology for developing GUI based Java applications.  It can be used to develop a UI for Swing applications or, more typically in the Oracle stack, for Web and J2EE applications.  ADF is based on and extends the Java Server Faces (JSF) technology.  To get an idea, Oracle provides an online demo to showcase ADF components. ADF can be used to develop just the UI part of an application, where, for example, the data access layer is implemented using some custom Java beans or EJBs.  However ADF also has it’s own data access layer, ADF Business Components (ADF BC) that will allow rapid integration of data from data bases and Webservice interfaces to the ADF UI component.   In this way ADF helps implement the MVC  approach to building applications with UI and data components. The canonical tutorial for ADF is to open JDeveloper, define a connection to a database, drag and drop a table from the database view to a UI page, build and deploy.  One has an application up and running very quickly with the ability to quickly integrate changes to, for example, the DB schema. ADF allows web pages to be created graphically and components like tables, forms, text fields, graphs and so on to be easily added to a page.  On top of JSF Oracle have added drag and drop tooling with JDeveloper and declarative binding of the UI to the data layer, be it database, WebService or Java beans.  An important addition is the bounded task flow which is a reusable set of pages and transitions.   ADF adds some steps to the page lifecycle defined in JSF and adds extra widgets including powerful visualizations. It is worth pointing out that the Oracle Web Center product (portal, content management and so on) is based on and extends ADF. ADF Security ADF comes with it’s own security mechanism that is exposed by JDeveloper at development time and in the WLS Console and Enterprise Manager (EM) at run time. The security elements that need to be addressed in an ADF application are: authentication, authorization of access to web pages, task-flows, components within the pages and data being returned from the model layer. One  typically relies on WLS to handle authentication and because of this users and groups will also be handled by WLS.  Typically in a Dev environment, users and groups are stored in the WLS embedded LDAP server. One has a choice when enabling ADF security (Application->Secure->Configure ADF Security) about whether to turn on ADF authorization checking or not: In the case where authorization is enabled for ADF one defines a set of roles in which we place users and then we grant access to these roles to the different ADF elements (pages or task flows or elements in a page). An important notion here is the difference between Enterprise Roles and Application Roles. The idea behind an enterprise role is that is defined in terms of users and LDAP groups from the WLS identity store.  “Enterprise” in the sense that these are things available for use to all applications that use that store.  The other kind of role is an Application Role and the idea is that  a given application will make use of Enterprise roles and users to build up a set of roles for it’s own use.  These application roles will be available only to that application.   The general idea here is that the enterprise roles are relatively static (for example an Employees group in the LDAP directory) while application roles are more dynamic, possibly depending on time, location, accessed resource and so on.  One of the things that OES adds that is that we can define these dynamic membership conditions in Role Mapping Policies. To make this concrete, here is how, at design time in Jdeveloper, one assigns these rights in Jdeveloper, which puts them into a file called jazn-data.xml: When the ADF app is deployed to a WLS this JAZN security data is pushed to the system-jazn-data.xml file of the WLS deployment for the policies and application roles and to the WLS backing LDAP for the users and enterprise roles.  Note the difference here: after deploying the application we will see the users and enterprise roles show up in the WLS LDAP server.  But the policies and application roles are defined in the system-jazn-data.xml file.  Consult the embedded WLS LDAP server to manage users and enterprise roles by going to the domain console and then Security Realms->myrealm->Users and Groups: For production environments (or in future to share this data with OES) one would then perform the operation of “reassociating” this security policy and application role data to a DB schema (or an LDAP).  This is done in the EM console by reassociating the Security Provider.  This blog posting has more explanations and references on this reassociation process. If ADF Authentication and Authorization are enabled then the Security Policies for a deployed application can be managed in EM.  Our goal is to be able to manage security policies for the applicaiton rather via OES and it's console. Security Requirements for an ADF Application With this package tour of ADF security we can see that to secure an ADF application with we would expect to be able to take care of at least the following items: Authentication, including a user and user-group store Authorization for page access Authorization for bounded Task Flow access.  A bounded task flow has only one point of entry and so if we protect that entry point by calling to OES then all the pages in the flow are protected.  Authorization for viewing data coming from the data access layer In the next posting we will describe a sample ADF application and required security policies. References ADF Dev Guide: Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework: Enabling ADF Security in a Fusion Web Application Oracle tutorial on securing a sample ADF application, appears to require ADF 11.1.2 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference. First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side Back to the conference. The main topics for us are: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c Adaptive Case management (ACM) Big Data Fast Data Cloud Mobile Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are: Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!) Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates) EM as a single monitoring console OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!) Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive. Adaptive Case Management Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested Big Data Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself. From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post. Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of: Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data. Fast Data Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be. One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered. Cloud Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services. In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner. As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference! Links: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/first-impressions-from-oracle-open-world-2013 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: cattleCrew,Sven Bernhard,OOW2013,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Spacewalk 2.0 provided to manage Oracle Linux systems

  - by wcoekaer

  Oracle Linux customers have a few options to manage and provision their servers. We provide a license to use Oracle Enterprise Manager's Linux OS management, monitoring and provisioning features without additional cost for every server that has an Oracle Linux support subscription. So there is no additional pack to license and no additional per server cost, it's all included in our Basic, Premier and Systems support subscriptions. The nice thing with Oracle Enterprise Manager is that you end up with a single management product that can manage all aspects of your software stack. You have complete insight into the applications running, you have roles and responsibilities, you have third party connectors for storage or other products and it makes it very easy and convenient to correlate data and events when something happens. If you use Oracle VM as well, you end up with a complete cloud portal with selfservice, chargeback, etc... Another, much simpler option, is just using yum. It is very easy to take a server and create directories and expose these through apache as repositories. You can have a simple yum config on each server pointing to a few specific repositories. It requires some manual effort in terms of creating directories, downloading packages and creating local repo files but it's easy to do and for many people a preferred solution. There are also a good number of customers that just connect their servers directly to ULN or to our free update server public-yum. Just to re-iterate, our public-yum servers have all the errata and updates available for free. Now we added another option. Many of our customers have switched from a competing Linux vendor and they had familiarity with their management tools. Switching to Oracle for support is very easy since we don't require changes to the installed servers but we also want to make sure there is a very easy and almost transparent switch for the management tools as well. While Oracle Enterprise Manager is our preferred way of managing systems, we now are offering Spacewalk 2.0 to our customers. The community project can be found here. We have made a few changes to ensure easy and complete support for Oracle Linux, tested it with public-yum, etc.. You can find the rpms in our public-yum repos at http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/. There are repositories for spacewalk server and then for each version (OL5,OL6) and architecture (x86 and x86-64) we have the client repositories as well. Spacewalk itself is only made available for OL6 x86-64. Documentation can be found here. I set it up myself and here are some quick steps on how you can get going in just a matter of minutes: Spacewalk Server Installation : 1) Installing an Oracle Database Use an existing Oracle Database or install a new Oracle Database (Standard or Enterprise Edition) [at this time use 11g, we will add support for 12c in the near future]. This database can be installed on the spacewalk server or on a separate remote server. While Oracle XE might work to create a small sample POC, we do not support the use of Oracle XE, spacewalk repositories can become large and create a significant database workload. Customers can use their existing database licenses, they can download the database with a trial licence from http://edelivery.oracle.com or Oracle Linux subscribers (customers) will be allowed to use the Oracle Database as a spacewalk repository as part of their Oracle Linux subscription at no additional cost. |NOTE : spacewalk requires the database to be configured with the UTF8 characterset. |Installation will fail if your database does not use UTF8. |To verify if your database is configured correctly, run the following command in sqlplus: | |select value from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'; |This should return 'AL32UTF8' 2) Configure the database schema for spacewalk Ideally, create a tablespace in the database to hold the spacewalk schema tables/data; create tablespace spacewalk datafile '/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/spacewalk.dbf' size 10G autoextend on; Create the database user spacewalk (or use some other schema name) in sqlplus. example : create user spacewalk identified by spacewalk; grant connect, resource to spacewalk; grant create table, create trigger, create synonym, create view, alter session to spacewalk; grant unlimited tablespace to spacewalk; alter user spacewalk default tablespace spacewalk; 4) Spacewalk installation and configuration Spacewalk server requires an Oracle Linux 6 x86-64 system. Clients can be Oracle Linux 5 or 6, both 32- and 64bit. The server is only supported on OL6/64bit. The easiest way to get started is to do a 'Minimal' install of Oracle Linux on a server and configure the yum repository to include the spacewalk repo from public-yum. Once you have a system with a minimal install, modify your yum repo to include the spacewalk repo. Example : edit /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-ol.repo and add the following lines at the end of the file : [spacewalk] name=spacewalk baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/spacewalk20/server/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 Install the following pre-requisite packages on your spacewalk server : oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 The above RPMs can be found on the Oracle Technology Network website : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html As the root user, configure the library path to include the Oracle Instant Client libraries : cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d echo /usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib oracle-instantclient11.2.conf ldconfig Install spacewalk : # yum install spacewalk-oracle The above yum command should download and install all required packages to run spacewalk on your local server. | NOTE : if you did a full, desktop or workstation installation, | you have to remove the JTA package | BEFORE installing spacewalk-oracle (rpm -e --nodeps jta) Once the installation completes, simply run the spacewalk configuration tool and you are all set. (make sure to run the command with the 2 arguments) spacewalk-setup --disconnected --external-db Answer the questions during the setup, ensure you provide the current database user (example : spacewalk) and password (example : spacewalk) and database server hostname (the standard hostname of the server on which you have deployed the Oracle database) At the end of the setup script, your spacewalk server should be fully configured and you can log into the web portal. Use your favorite browser to connect to the website : http://[spacewalkserverhostname] The very first action will be to create the main admin account.

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• Why you need to learn async in .NET

  - by PSteele

  I had an opportunity to teach a quick class yesterday about what’s new in .NET 4.0.  One of the topics was the TPL (Task Parallel Library) and how it can make async programming easier.  I also stressed that this is the direction Microsoft is going with for C# 5.0 and learning the TPL will greatly benefit their understanding of the new async stuff.  We had a little time left over and I was able to show some code that uses the Async CTP to accomplish some stuff, but it wasn’t a simple demo that you could jump in to and understand so I thought I’d thrown one together and put it in a blog post. The entire solution file with all of the sample projects is located here. A Simple Example Let’s start with a super-simple example (WindowsApplication01 in the solution). I’ve got a form that displays a label and a button.  When the user clicks the button, I want to start displaying the current time for 15 seconds and then stop. What I’d like to write is this: lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; for (var x = 0; x < 15; x++) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); Thread.Sleep(1000); } lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; (Note that I also changed the label’s color while counting – not quite an ILM-level effect, but it adds something to the demo!) As I’m sure most of my readers are aware, you can’t write WinForms code this way.  WinForms apps, by default, only have one thread running and it’s main job is to process messages from the windows message pump (for a more thorough explanation, see my Visual Studio Magazine article on multithreading in WinForms).  If you put a Thread.Sleep in the middle of that code, your UI will be locked up and unresponsive for those 15 seconds.  Not a good UX and something that needs to be fixed.  Sure, I could throw an “Application.DoEvents()” in there, but that’s hacky. The Windows Timer Then I think, “I can solve that.  I’ll use the Windows Timer to handle the timing in the background and simply notify me when the time has changed”.  Let’s see how I could accomplish this with a Windows timer (WindowsApplication02 in the solution): public partial class Form1 : Form { private readonly Timer clockTimer; private int counter;   public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); clockTimer = new Timer {Interval = 1000}; clockTimer.Tick += UpdateLabel; }   private void UpdateLabel(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); counter++; if (counter == 15) { clockTimer.Enabled = false; lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; } }   private void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; counter = 0; clockTimer.Start(); } } Holy cow – things got pretty complicated here.  I use the timer to fire off a Tick event every second.  Inside there, I can update the label.  Granted, I can’t use a simple for/loop and have to maintain a global counter for the number of iterations.  And my “end” code (when the loop is finished) is now buried inside the bottom of the Tick event (inside an “if” statement).  I do, however, get a responsive application that doesn’t hang or stop repainting while the 15 seconds are ticking away. But doesn’t .NET have something that makes background processing easier? The BackgroundWorker Next I try .NET’s BackgroundWorker component – it’s specifically designed to do processing in a background thread (leaving the UI thread free to process the windows message pump) and allows updates to be performed on the main UI thread (WindowsApplication03 in the solution): public partial class Form1 : Form { private readonly BackgroundWorker worker;   public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); worker = new BackgroundWorker {WorkerReportsProgress = true}; worker.DoWork += StartUpdating; worker.ProgressChanged += UpdateLabel; worker.RunWorkerCompleted += ResetLabelColor; }   private void StartUpdating(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) { var workerObject = (BackgroundWorker) sender; for (int x = 0; x < 15; x++) { workerObject.ReportProgress(0); Thread.Sleep(1000); } }   private void UpdateLabel(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); }   private void ResetLabelColor(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; }   private void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; worker.RunWorkerAsync(); } } Well, this got a little better (I think).  At least I now have my simple for/next loop back.  Unfortunately, I’m still dealing with event handlers spread throughout my code to co-ordinate all of this stuff in the right order. Time to look into the future. The async way Using the Async CTP, I can go back to much simpler code (WindowsApplication04 in the solution): private async void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; for (var x = 0; x < 15; x++) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); await TaskEx.Delay(1000); } lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; } This code will run just like the Timer or BackgroundWorker versions – fully responsive during the updates – yet is way easier to implement.  In fact, it’s almost a line-for-line copy of the original version of this code.  All of the async plumbing is handled by the compiler and the framework.  My code goes back to representing the “what” of what I want to do, not the “how”. I urge you to download the Async CTP.  All you need is .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 sp1 – no need to set up a virtual machine with the VS2011 beta (unless, of course, you want to dive right in to the C# 5.0 stuff!).  Starting playing around with this today and see how much easier it will be in the future to write async-enabled applications.

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• RiverTrail - JavaScript GPPGU Data Parallelism

  - by JoshReuben

  Where is WebCL ? The Khronos WebCL working group is working on a JavaScript binding to the OpenCL standard so that HTML 5 compliant browsers can host GPGPU web apps – e.g. for image processing or physics for WebGL games - http://www.khronos.org/webcl/ . While Nokia & Samsung have some protype WebCL APIs, Intel has one-upped them with a higher level of abstraction: RiverTrail. Intro to RiverTrail Intel Labs JavaScript RiverTrail provides GPU accelerated SIMD data-parallelism in web applications via a familiar JavaScript programming paradigm. It extends JavaScript with simple deterministic data-parallel constructs that are translated at runtime into a low-level hardware abstraction layer. With its high-level JS API, programmers do not have to learn a new language or explicitly manage threads, orchestrate shared data synchronization or scheduling. It has been proposed as a draft specification to ECMA a (known as ECMA strawman). RiverTrail runs in all popular browsers (except I.E. of course). To get started, download a prebuilt version https://github.com/downloads/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/rivertrail-0.17.xpi , install Intel's OpenCL SDK http://www.intel.com/go/opencl and try out the interactive River Trail shell http://rivertrail.github.com/interactive For a video overview, see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jueg6zB5XaM . ParallelArray the ParallelArray type is the central component of this API & is a JS object that contains ordered collections of scalars – i.e. multidimensional uniform arrays. A shape property describes the dimensionality and size– e.g. a 2D RGBA image will have shape [height, width, 4]. ParallelArrays are immutable & fluent – they are manipulated by invoking methods on them which produce new ParallelArray objects. ParallelArray supports several constructors over arrays, functions & even the canvas. // Create an empty Parallel Array var pa = new ParallelArray(); // pa0 = <>   // Create a ParallelArray out of a nested JS array. // Note that the inner arrays are also ParallelArrays var pa = new ParallelArray([ [0,1], [2,3], [4,5] ]); // pa1 = <<0,1>, <2,3>, <4.5>>   // Create a two-dimensional ParallelArray with shape [3, 2] using the comprehension constructor var pa = new ParallelArray([3, 2], function(iv){return iv[0] * iv[1];}); // pa7 = <<0,0>, <0,1>, <0,2>>   // Create a ParallelArray from canvas.  This creates a PA with shape [w, h, 4], var pa = new ParallelArray(canvas); // pa8 = CanvasPixelArray   ParallelArray exposes fluent API functions that take an elemental JS function for data manipulation: map, combine, scan, filter, and scatter that return a new ParallelArray. Other functions are scalar - reduce  returns a scalar value & get returns the value located at a given index. The onus is on the developer to ensure that the elemental function does not defeat data parallelization optimization (avoid global var manipulation, recursion). For reduce & scan, order is not guaranteed - the onus is on the dev to provide an elemental function that is commutative and associative so that scan will be deterministic – E.g. Sum is associative, but Avg is not. map Applies a provided elemental function to each element of the source array and stores the result in the corresponding position in the result array. The map method is shape preserving & index free - can not inspect neighboring values. // Adding one to each element. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.map(function inc(v) {     return v+1; }); //<2,3,4,5,6> combine Combine is similar to map, except an index is provided. This allows elemental functions to access elements from the source array relative to the one at the current index position. While the map method operates on the outermost dimension only, combine, can choose how deep to traverse - it provides a depth argument to specify the number of dimensions it iterates over. The elemental function of combine accesses the source array & the current index within it - element is computed by calling the get method of the source ParallelArray object with index i as argument. It requires more code but is more expressive. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.combine(function inc(i) { return this.get(i)+1; }); reduce reduces the elements from an array to a single scalar result – e.g. Sum. // Calculate the sum of the elements var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var sum = source.reduce(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); scan Like reduce, but stores the intermediate results – return a ParallelArray whose ith elements is the results of using the elemental function to reduce the elements between 0 and I in the original ParallelArray. // do a partial sum var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var psum = source.scan(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); //<1, 3, 6, 10, 15> scatter a reordering function - specify for a certain source index where it should be stored in the result array. An optional conflict function can prevent an exception if two source values are assigned the same position of the result: var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,1,2]); // <2, 4, 5, 3, 1> // if there is a conflict use the max. use 33 as a default value. var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,4,2], 33, function max(a, b) {return a>b?a:b; }); //<2, 33, 5, 3, 4> filter // filter out values that are not even var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var even = source.filter(function even(iv) { return (this.get(iv) % 2) == 0; }); // <2,4> Flatten used to collapse the outer dimensions of an array into a single dimension. pa = new ParallelArray([ [1,2], [3,4] ]); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> pa.flatten(); // <1,2,3,4> Partition used to restore the original shape of the array. var pa = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4]); // <1,2,3,4> pa.partition(2); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> Get return value found at the indices or undefined if no such value exists. var pa = new ParallelArray([0,1,2,3,4], [10,11,12,13,14], [20,21,22,23,24]) pa.get([1,1]); // 11 pa.get([1]); // <10,11,12,13,14>

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 03, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 03, 2014Popular ReleasesBoxStarter: Boxstarter 2.4.76: Running the Setup.bat file will install Chocolatey if not present and then install the Boxstarter modules.GMare: GMare Beta 1.2: Features Added: - Instance painting by holding the alt key down while pressing the left mouse button - Functionality to the binary exporter so that backgrounds from image files can be used - On the binary exporter background information can be edited manually now - Update to the GMare binary read GML script - Game Maker Studio export - Import from GMare project. Multiple options to import desired properties of a .gmpx - 10 undo/redo levels instead of 5 is now the default - New preferences dia...Json.NET: Json.NET 6.0 Release 4: New feature - Added Merge to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added JValue.CreateNull and JValue.CreateUndefined New feature - Added Windows Phone 8.1 support to .NET 4.0 portable assembly New feature - Added OverrideCreator to JsonObjectContract New feature - Added support for overriding the creation of interfaces and abstract types New feature - Added support for reading UUID BSON binary values as a Guid New feature - Added MetadataPropertyHandling.Ignore New feature - Improv...SQL Server Dialog: SQL Server Dialog: Input server, user and password Show folder and file in treeview Customize icon Filter file extension Skip system generate folder and fileAitso-a platform for spatial optimization and based on artificial immune systems: Aitso_0.14.08.01: Aitso0.14.08.01Installer.zipVidCoder: 1.5.24 Beta: Added NL-Means denoiser. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 6254. Added extra error handling to DVD player code to avoid a crash when the player was moved.AutoUpdater.NET : Auto update library for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.3: Fixed problem in DownloadUpdateDialog where download continues even if you close the dialog. Added support for new url field for 64 bit application setup. AutoUpdater.NET will decide which download url to use by looking at the value of IntPtr.Size. Added German translation provided by Rene Kannegiesser. Now developer can handle update logic herself using event suggested by ricorx7. Added italian translation provided by Gianluca Mariani. Fixed bug that prevents Application from exiti...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.041.012 Release 1: Added voxel material textures to read in with mods. Fixed missing texture replacements for mods. Fixed rounding issue in raytrace code. Fixed repair issue with corrupt checkpoint file. Fixed issue with updated SE binaries 01.041.012 using new container configuration.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.601: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.6 Breaking changes: - Changed arguments for the Map method of MagickImage. - QuantizeSettings uses Riemersma by default.Multiple Threads TCP Server: Project: this Project is based on VS 2013, .net freamwork 4.0, you can open it by vs 2010 or laterAricie Shared: Aricie.Shared Version 1.8.00: Version 1.8.0 - Release Notes New: Expression Builder to design Flee Expressions New: Cryptographic helpers and configuration classes Improvement: Many fixes and improvements with property editor Improvement: Token Replace Property explorer now has a restricted mode for additional security Improvement: Better variables, types and object manipulation Fixed: smart file and flee bugs Fixed: Removed Exception while trying to read unsuported files Improvement: several performance twe...Accesorios de sitios Torrent en Español para Synology Download Station: Pack de Torrents en Español 6.0.0: Agregado los módulos de DivXTotal, el módulo de búsqueda depende del de alojamiento para bajar las series Utiliza el rss: http://www.divxtotal.com/rss.php DbEntry.Net (Leafing Framework): DbEntry.Net 4.2: DbEntry.Net is a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 4.0+. It has clearly and easily programing interface for ORM and sql directly, and supoorted Access, Sql Server, MySql, SQLite, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Oracle. It also provide a Ruby On Rails style MVC framework. Asp.Net DataSource and a simple IoC. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Setup.zip include the setup package. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Src.zip include source files and unit tests. DbEntry.Net.v4.2.Samples.zip ...Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1: Welcome to Azure Storage Explorer 6 Preview 1 This is the first release of the latest Azure Storage Explorer, code-named Phoenix. What's New?Here are some important things to know about version 6: Open Source Now being run as a full open source project. Full source code on CodePlex. Collaboration encouraged! Updated Code Base Brand-new code base (WPF/C#/.NET 4.5) Visual Studio 2013 solution (previously VS2010) Uses the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for asynchronous background operat...Wsus Package Publisher: release v1.3.1407.29: Updated WPP to recognize the very latest console version. Some files was missing into the latest release of WPP which lead to crash when trying to make a custom update. Add a workaround to avoid clipboard modification when double-clicking on a label when creating a custom update. Add the ability to publish detectoids. (This feature is still in a BETA phase. Packages relying on these detectoids to determine which computers need to be updated, may apply to all computers).VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.32: changes NEW: Added Support for 'ImgMega.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgCandy.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgPit.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Img.yt' links FIXED: 'Radikal.ru' links FIXED: 'ImageTeam.org' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.com' links FIXED: 'Img.yt' linksAsp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with Todo List WebApplication: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with simple Todo List WebApplication, Overview TodoList is a simple web application to create, store and modify Todo tasks to be maintained by the users, which comprises of following fields to the user (Task Name, Task Description, Severity, Target Date, Task Status). TodoList web application is created using MVC - 4 architecture, code-first Entity Framework (ORM) and Jqgrid for displaying the data.Waterfox: Waterfox 31.0 Portable: New features in Waterfox 31.0: Added support for Unicode 7.0 Experimental support for WebCL New features in Firefox 31.0:New Add the search field to the new tab page Support of Prefer:Safe http header for parental control mozilla::pkix as default certificate verifier Block malware from downloaded files Block malware from downloaded files audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox if no application specified Changed Removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-sp...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6.3: The changes below are included in this release: fixed an exception when collect a server's status but it has been stopped fixed a bug that can cause an exception in case of sending data when the connection dropped already fixed the log4net missing issue for a QuickStart project fixed a warning in a QuickStart projectYnote Classic: Ynote Classic 2.8.5 Beta: Several Changes - Multiple Carets and Multiple Selections - Improved Startup Time - Improved Syntax Highlighting - Search Improvements - Shell Command - Improved StabilityNew ProjectsCreek: Creek is a Collection of many C# Frameworks and my ownSpeaking Speedometer (android): Simple speaking speedometerT125Protocol { Alpha version }: implement T125 Protocol for communicate with a mainframe.Unix Time: This library provides a System.UnixTime as a new Type providing conversion between Unix Time and .NET DateTime.

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• Unlocking Productivity

  - by Michael Snow

  Unlocking Productivity in Life Sciences with Consolidated Content Management by Joe Golemba, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle WebCenter As life sciences organizations look to become more operationally efficient, the ability to effectively leverage information is a competitive advantage. Whether data mining at the drug discovery phase or prepping the sales team before a product launch, content management can play a key role in developing, organizing, and disseminating vital information. The goal of content management is relatively straightforward: put the information that people need where they can find it. A number of issues can complicate this; information sits in many different systems, each of those systems has its own security, and the information in those systems exists in many different formats. Identifying and extracting pertinent information from mountains of farflung data is no simple job, but the alternative—wasted effort or even regulatory compliance issues—is worse. An integrated information architecture can enable health sciences organizations to make better decisions, accelerate clinical operations, and be more competitive. Unstructured data matters Often when we think of drug development data, we think of structured data that fits neatly into one or more research databases. But structured data is often directly supported by unstructured data such as experimental protocols, reaction conditions, lot numbers, run times, analyses, and research notes. As life sciences companies seek integrated views of data, they are typically finding diverse islands of data that seemingly have no relationship to other data in the organization. Information like sales reports or call center reports can be locked into siloed systems, and unavailable to the discovery process. Additionally, in the increasingly networked clinical environment, Web pages, instant messages, videos, scientific imaging, sales and marketing data, collaborative workspaces, and predictive modeling data are likely to be present within an organization, and each source potentially possesses information that can help to better inform specific efforts. Historically, content management solutions that had 21CFR Part 11 capabilities—electronic records and signatures—were focused mainly on content-enabling manufacturing-related processes. Today, life sciences companies have many standalone repositories, requiring different skills, service level agreements, and vendor support costs to manage them. With the amount of content doubling every three to six months, companies have recognized the need to manage unstructured content from the beginning, in order to increase employee productivity and operational efficiency. Using scalable and secure enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, organizations can better manage their unstructured content. These solutions can also be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or research systems, making content available immediately, in the context of the application and within the flow of the employee’s typical business activity. Administrative safeguards—such as content de-duplication—can also be applied within ECM systems, so documents are never recreated, eliminating redundant efforts, ensuring one source of truth, and maintaining content standards in the organization. Putting it in context Consolidating structured and unstructured information in a single system can greatly simplify access to relevant information when it is needed through contextual search. Using contextual filters, results can include therapeutic area, position in the value chain, semantic commonalities, technology-specific factors, specific researchers involved, or potential business impact. The use of taxonomies is essential to organizing information and enabling contextual searches. Taxonomy solutions are composed of a hierarchical tree that defines the relationship between different life science terms. When overlaid with additional indexing related to research and/or business processes, it becomes possible to effectively narrow down the amount of data that is returned during searches, as well as prioritize results based on specific criteria and/or prior search history. Thus, search results are more accurate and relevant to an employee’s day-to-day work. For example, a search for the word "tissue" by a lab researcher would return significantly different results than a search for the same word performed by someone in procurement. Of course, diverse data repositories, combined with the immense amounts of data present in an organization, necessitate that the data elements be regularly indexed and cached beforehand to enable reasonable search response times. In its simplest form, indexing of a single, consolidated data warehouse can be expected to be a relatively straightforward effort. However, organizations require the ability to index multiple data repositories, enabling a single search to reference multiple data sources and provide an integrated results listing. Security and compliance Beyond yielding efficiencies and supporting new insight, an enterprise search environment can support important security considerations as well as compliance initiatives. For example, the systems enable organizations to retain the relevance and the security of the indexed systems, so users can only see the results to which they are granted access. This is especially important as life sciences companies are working in an increasingly networked environment and need to provide secure, role-based access to information across multiple partners. Although not officially required by the 21 CFR Part 11 regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administraiton has begun to extend the type of content considered when performing relevant audits and discoveries. Having an ECM infrastructure that provides centralized management of all content enterprise-wide—with the ability to consistently apply records and retention policies along with the appropriate controls, validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures—is becoming increasingly critical for life sciences companies. Making the move Creating an enterprise-wide ECM environment requires moving large amounts of content into a single enterprise repository, a daunting and risk-laden initiative. The first key is to focus on data taxonomy, allowing content to be mapped across systems. The second is to take advantage new tools which can dramatically speed and reduce the cost of the data migration process through automation. Additional content need not be frozen while it is migrated, enabling productivity throughout the process. The ability to effectively leverage information into success has been gaining importance in the life sciences industry for years. The rapid adoption of enterprise content management, both in operational processes as well as in scientific management, are clear indicators that the companies are looking to use all available data to be better informed, improve decision making, minimize risk, and increase time to market, to maintain profitability and be more competitive. As more and more varieties and sources of information are brought under the strategic management umbrella, the ability to divine knowledge from the vast pool of information is increasingly difficult. Simple search engines and basic content management are increasingly unable to effectively extract the right information from the mountains of data available. By bringing these tools into context and integrating them with business processes and applications, we can effectively focus on the right decisions that make our organizations more profitable. More Information Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

  One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

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• Best Practices - which domain types should be used to run applications

  - by jsavit

  This post is one of a series of "best practices" notes for Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly named Logical Domains) One question that frequently comes up is "which types of domain should I use to run applications?" There used to be a simple answer in most cases: "only run applications in guest domains", but enhancements to T-series servers, Oracle VM Server for SPARC and the advent of SPARC SuperCluster have made this question more interesting and worth qualifying differently. This article reviews the relevant concepts and provides suggestions on where to deploy applications in a logical domains environment. Review: division of labor and types of domain Oracle VM Server for SPARC offloads many functions from the hypervisor to domains (also called virtual machines). This is a modern alternative to using a "thick" hypervisor that provides all virtualization functions, as in traditional VM designs, This permits a simpler hypervisor design, which enhances reliability, and security. It also reduces single points of failure by assigning responsibilities to multiple system components, which further improves reliability and security. In this architecture, management and I/O functionality are provided within domains. Oracle VM Server for SPARC does this by defining the following types of domain, each with their own roles: Control domain - management control point for the server, used to configure domains and manage resources. It is the first domain to boot on a power-up, is an I/O domain, and is usually a service domain as well. I/O domain - has been assigned physical I/O devices: a PCIe root complex, a PCI device, or a SR-IOV (single-root I/O Virtualization) function. It has native performance and functionality for the devices it owns, unmediated by any virtualization layer. Service domain - provides virtual network and disk devices to guest domains. Guest domain - a domain whose devices are all virtual rather than physical: virtual network and disk devices provided by one or more service domains. In common practice, this is where applications are run. Typical deployment A service domain is generally also an I/O domain: otherwise it wouldn't have access to physical device "backends" to offer to its clients. Similarly, an I/O domain is also typically a service domain in order to leverage the available PCI busses. Control domains must be I/O domains, because they boot up first on the server and require physical I/O. It's typical for the control domain to also be a service domain too so it doesn't "waste" the I/O resources it uses. A simple configuration consists of a control domain, which is also the one I/O and service domain, and some number of guest domains using virtual I/O. In production, customers typically use multiple domains with I/O and service roles to eliminate single points of failure: guest domains have virtual disk and virtual devices provisioned from more than one service domain, so failure of a service domain or I/O path or device doesn't result in an application outage. This is also used for "rolling upgrades" in which service domains are upgraded one at a time while their guests continue to operate without disruption. (It should be noted that resiliency to I/O device failures can also be provided by the single control domain, using multi-path I/O) In this type of deployment, control, I/O, and service domains are used for virtualization infrastructure, while applications run in guest domains. Changing application deployment patterns The above model has been widely and successfully used, but more configuration options are available now. Servers got bigger than the original T2000 class machines with 2 I/O busses, so there is more I/O capacity that can be used for applications. Increased T-series server capacity made it attractive to run more vertical applications, such as databases, with higher resource requirements than the "light" applications originally seen. This made it attractive to run applications in I/O domains so they could get bare-metal native I/O performance. This is leveraged by the SPARC SuperCluster engineered system, announced a year ago at Oracle OpenWorld. In SPARC SuperCluster, I/O domains are used for high performance applications, with native I/O performance for disk and network and optimized access to the Infiniband fabric. Another technical enhancement is the introduction of Direct I/O (DIO) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), which make it possible to give domains direct connections and native I/O performance for selected I/O devices. A domain with either a DIO or SR-IOV device is an I/O domain. In summary: not all I/O domains own PCI complexes, and there are increasingly more I/O domains that are not service domains. They use their I/O connectivity for performance for their own applications. However, there are some limitations and considerations: at this time, a domain using physical I/O cannot be live-migrated to another server. There is also a need to plan for security and introducing unneeded dependencies: if an I/O domain is also a service domain providing virtual I/O go guests, it has the ability to affect the correct operation of its client guest domains. This is even more relevant for the control domain. where the ldm has to be protected from unauthorized (or even mistaken) use that would affect other domains. As a general rule, running applications in the service domain or the control domain should be avoided. To recap: Guest domains with virtual I/O still provide the greatest operational flexibility, including features like live migration. I/O domains can be used for applications with high performance requirements. This is used to great effect in SPARC SuperCluster and in general T4 deployments. Direct I/O (DIO) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) make this more attractive by giving direct I/O access to more domains. Service domains should in general not be used for applications, because compromised security in the domain, or an outage, can affect other domains that depend on it. This concern can be mitigated by providing guests' their virtual I/O from more than one service domain, so an interruption of service in the service domain does not cause an application outage. The control domain should in general not be used to run applications, for the same reason. SPARC SuperCluster use the control domain for applications, but it is an exception: it's not a general purpose environment; it's an engineered system with specifically configured applications and optimization for optimal performance. These are recommended "best practices" based on conversations with a number of Oracle architects. Keep in mind that "one size does not fit all", so you should evaluate these practices in the context of your own requirements. Summary Higher capacity T-series servers have made it more attractive to use them for applications with high resource requirements. New deployment models permit native I/O performance for demanding applications by running them in I/O domains with direct access to their devices. This is leveraged in SPARC SuperCluster, and can be leveraged in T-series servers to provision high-performance applications running in domains. Carefully planned, this can be used to provide higher performance for critical applications.

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• How I Work: Staying Productive Whilst Traveling

  - by BuckWoody

  I travel a lot. Not like some folks that are gone every week, mind you, although in the last month I’ve been to: Cambridge, UK; Anchorage, AK; San Jose, CA; Copenhagen, DK, Boston, MA; and I’m currently en-route to Anaheim, CA.  While this many places in a month is a bit unusual for me, I would say I travel frequently. I’ve travelled most of my 28+ years in IT, and at one time was a consultant traveling weekly.   With that much time away from my primary work location, I have to find ways to stay productive. Some might say “just rest – take a nap!” – but I’m not able to do that. For one thing, I’m a very light sleeper and I’ve never slept on a plane - even a 30+ hour trip to New Zealand in Business Class - so that just isn’t option. I also am not always in the plane, of course. There’s the hotel, the taxi/bus/train, the airport and then all that over again when I arrive. Since my regular jobs have many demands, I have to get work done.   Note: No, I’m not always focused on work. I need downtime just like everyone else. Sometimes I just think, watch a movie or listen to tunes – and I give myself permission to do that anytime – sometimes the whole trip. I have too fewheartbeats left in life to only focus on work – it’s just not that important, and neither am I. Some of these tasks are letters to friends and family, or other personal things. What I’m talking about here is a plan, not some task list I have to follow. When I get to the location I’m traveling to, I always build in as much time as I can to ensure I enjoy those sights and the people I’m with. I would find traveling to be a waste if not for that.   The Unrealistic Expectation As I would evaluate the trip I was taking – say a 6-8 hour flight – I would expect to get 10-12 hours of work done. After all, there’s the time at the airport, the taxi and so on, and then of course the time in the air with all of the room, power, internet and everything else I needed to get my work done. I would pile up tasks at home, pack my bags, and head happily to the magical land of the TSA.   Right. On return from the trip, I had accomplished little, had more e-mails and other work that had piled up, and I was tired, hungry, and unorganized. This had to change. So, I decided to do three things: Segment my work Set realistic expectations Plan accordingly  Segmenting By Available Resources The first task was to decide what kind of work I could do in each location – if any. I found that I was dependent on a few things to get work done, such as power, the Internet, and a place to sit down. Before I fly, I take some time at home to get all of the work I’d like to accomplish while away segmented into these areas, and print that out on paper, which goes in my suit-coat pocket along with a mechanical pencil. I print my tickets, and I’m all set for the adventure ahead. Then I simply do each kind of work whenever I’m in that situation. No power There are certain times when I don’t have power available. But not only that, I might not even be able to use most of my electronics. So I now schedule as many phone calls as I can for the taxi/bus/train ride and the airports as I can. I have a paper notebook (Moleskine, of course) and a pencil and I print out any notes or numbers I need prior to the trip. Once I’m airborne or at the airport, I work on my laptop. I check and respond to e-mails, create slides, write code, do architecture, whatever I can.  If I can’t use any electronics, or once the power runs out, I schedule time for reading. I can read at the airport or anywhere, actually, even in-flight or any other transport. I “read with a pencil”, meaning I take a lot of notes, which I liketo put in OneNote, but since in most cases I don’t have power, I use the Moleskine to do that. Speaking of which, sometimes as I’m thinking I come up with new topics, ideas, blog posts, or things to teach in my classes. Once again I take out the notebook and write it down. All of these notes get a check-mark when I get back to the office and transfer the writing to OneNote. I’ve tried those “smart pens” and so on to automate this, but it just never works out. Pencil and paper are just fine. As I mentioned, sometime I just need to think. I’ll do nothing, and let my mind wander, thinking of nothing in particular, or some math problem or science question I’m interested in. My only issue with this is that I communicate tothink, and I don’t want to drive people crazy by being that guy that won’t shut up, so I think in a different way. Power, but no Internet or Phone If I have power but no Internet or phone, I focus on the laptop and the tablet as before, and I also recharge my other gadgets. Power, Internet, Phone and a Place to Work At first I thought that when I arrived at the hotel or event I could get the same amount of work done that I do at the office. Not so. There’s simply too many distractions, things you need, or other issues that allow this. Of course, Ican work on any device, read, think, write or whatever, but I am simply not as productive as I am in my home office. So I plan for about 25-50% as much work getting done in this environment as I think I could really do. I’ve done some measurements, and this holds out to be true almost every time. The key is that I re-set my expectations (and my co-worker’s expectations as well) that this is the case. I use the Out-Of-Office notices to let people know that I’m just not going to be 100% at this time – it’s hard for everyone, but it’s more honest and realistic, and I’d rather they know that – and that I realize that – than to let them think I’m totally available. Because I’m not – I’m traveling. I don’t tend to put too much detail, because after all I don’t necessarily want to let people know when I’m not home :) but I do think it’s important to let people that depend on my know that I’ll get back with them later. I hope this helps you think through your own methodology of staying productive when you travel. Or perhaps you just go offline, and don’t worry about any of this – good for you! That’s completely valid as well.   (Oh, and yes, I wrote this at 35K feet, on Alaska Airlines on a trip. :)  Practice what you preach, Buck.)

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• Translating Your Customizations

  - by Richard Bingham

  This blog post explains the basics of translating the customizations you can make to Fusion Applications products, with the inclusion of information for both composer-based customizations and the generic design-time customizations done via JDeveloper. Introduction Like most Oracle Applications, Fusion Applications installs on-premise with a US-English base language that is, in Release 7, supported by the option to add up to a total of 22 additional language packs (In Oracle Cloud production environments languages are pre-installed already). As such many organizations offer their users the option of working with their local language, and logically that should also apply for any customizations as well. Composer-based UI Customizations Customizations made in Page Composer take into consideration the session LOCALE, as set in the user preferences screen, during all customization work, and stores the customization in the MDS repository accordingly. As such the actual new or changed values used will only apply for the same language under which the customization was made, and text for any other languages requires a separate upload. See the Resource Bundles section below, which incidentally also applies to custom UI changes done in JDeveloper. You may have noticed this when you select the “Select Text Resource” menu option when editing the text on a page. Using this ensures that the resource bundles are used, whereas if you define a static value in Expression Builder it will never be available for translation. Notice in the screenshot below the “What’s New” custom value I have already defined using the ‘Select Text Resource’ feature is internally using the adfBundle groovy function to pull the custom value for my key (RT_S_1) from the ComposerOverrideBundle. Figure 1 – Page Composer showing the override bundle being used. Business Objects Customizing the Business Objects available in the Applications Composer tool for the CRM products, such as adding additional fields, also operates using the session language. Translating these additional values for these fields into other installed languages requires loading additional resource bundles, again as described below. Reports and Analytics Most customizations to Reports and BI Analytics are just essentially reorganizations and visualizations of existing number and text data from the system, and as such will use the appropriate values based on the users session language. Where a translated value or string exists for that session language, it will be used without the need for additional work. Extending through the addition of brand new reports and analytics requires another method of loading the translated strings, as part of what is known as ‘Localizing’ the BI Catalog and Metadata. This time it is via an export/import of XML data through the BI Administrators console, and is described in the OBIEE Admin Guide. Fusion Applications reports based on BI Publisher are already defined in template-per-locale, and in addition provide an extra process for getting the data for translation and reloading. This again uses the standard resource bundle format. Loading a custom report is illustrated in this video from our YouTube channel which shows the screen for both setting the template local and running an export for translation. Fusion Applications Menus Whilst the seeded Navigator and Global Menu values are fully translated when the additional language is installed, if they are customized then the change or new menu item will apply universally, not currently per language. This is set to change in a future release with the new UI Text Editor feature described below. More on Resource Bundles As mentioned above, to provide translations for most of your customizations you need to add values to a resource bundle. This is an industry open standard (OASIS) format XML file with the extension .xliff, and store translated values for the strings used by ADF at run-time. The general process is that these values are exported from the MDS repository, manually edited, and then imported back in again.This needs to be done by an administrator, via either WLST commands or through Enterprise Manager as per the screenshot below. This is detailed out in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. For SaaS environments the Cloud Operations team can assist. Figure 2 – Enterprise Manager’s MDS export used getting resource bundles for manual translation and re-imported on the same screen. All customized strings are stored in an override bundle (xliff file) for each locale, suffixed with the language initials, with English ones being saved to the default. As such each language bundle can be easily identified and updated. Similarly if you used JDeveloper to create your own applications as extensions to Fusion Applications you would use the native support for resource bundles, and add them into the faces-config.xml file for inclusion in your application. An example is this ADF customization video from our YouTube channel. JDeveloper also supports automatic synchronization between your underlying resource bundles and any translatable strings you add – very handy. For more information see chapters on “Using Automatic Resource Bundle Integration in JDeveloper” and “Manually Defining Resource Bundles and Locales” in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. FND Messages and Look-ups FND Messages, as defined here, are not used for UI labels (they are known as ‘strings’), but are the responses back to users as a result of an action, such as from a page submit. Each ‘message’ is defined and stored in the related database table (FND_MESSAGES_B), with another (FND_MESSAGES_TL) holding any language-specific values. These come seeded with the additional language installs, however if you customize the messages via the “Manage Messages” task in Functional Setup Manager, or add new ones, then currently (in Release 7) you’ll need to repeat it for each language. Figure 3 – An FND Message defined in an English user session. Similarly Look-ups are stored in a translation table (FND_LOOKUP_VALUES_TL) where appropriate, and can be customized by setting the users session language and making the change  in the Setup and Maintenance task entitled “Manage [Standard|Common] Look-ups”. Online Help Yes, in fact all the seeded help is applied as part of each language pack install as part of the post-install provisioning process. If you are editing or adding custom online help then the Create Help screen provides a drop-down of which language your help customization will apply to. This is shown in the video below from our YouTube channel, and obviously you’ll need to it for each language in use. What is Coming for Translations? Currently planned for Release 8 is something called the User Interface (UI) Text Editor. This tool will allow the editing of all the text shown on the pages and forms of Fusion Application. This will provide a search based on a particular term or word, say “Worker”, and will allow it to be adjusted, say to “Employee”, which then updates all the Resource Bundles that contain it. In the case of multi-language environments, it will use the users session language (locale) to know which Resource Bundles to apply the change to. This capability will also support customization sandboxes, to help ensure changes can be tested and approved.  It is also interesting to note that the design currently allows any page-specific customizations done using Page Composer or Application Composer to over-write the global changes done via the UI Text Editor, allowing for special context-sensitive values to still be used. Further Reading and Resources The following short list provides the mains resources for digging into more detail on translation support for both Composer and JDeveloper customization projects. There is a dedicated chapter entitled “Translating Custom Text” in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. This has good examples and steps for many tasks, especially administering resource bundles. Using localization formatting (numbers, dates etc) for design-time changes is well documented in the Fusion Applications Developer Guide. For more guidelines on general design-time globalization, see either the ‘Internationalizing and Localizing Pages’ chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) or the general Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide. The Oracle Architecture ‘A-Team’ provided a recent post on customizing the user session timeout popup, using design-time changes to resource bundles. It has detailed step-by-step examples which can be a useful illustration.

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• Create Auto Customization Criteria OAF Search Page

  - by PRajkumar

  1. Create a New Workspace and Project Right click Workspaces and click create new OAworkspace and name it as PRajkumarCustSearch. Automatically a new OA Project will also be created. Name the project as CustSearchDemo and package as prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo   2. Create a New Application Module (AM) Right Click on CustSearchDemo > New > ADF Business Components > Application Module Name -- CustSearchAM Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.server   3. Enable Passivation for the Root UI Application Module (AM) Right Click on CustSearchAM > Edit SearchAM > Custom Properties > Name – RETENTION_LEVEL Value – MANAGE_STATE Click add > Apply > OK   4. Create Test Table and insert data some data in it (For Testing Purpose)   CREATE TABLE xx_custsearch_demo (   -- ---------------------     -- Data Columns     -- ---------------------     column1                  VARCHAR2(100),     column2                  VARCHAR2(100),     column3                  VARCHAR2(100),     column4                  VARCHAR2(100),     -- ---------------------     -- Who Columns     -- ---------------------     last_update_date    DATE         NOT NULL,     last_updated_by     NUMBER   NOT NULL,     creation_date          DATE         NOT NULL,     created_by               NUMBER   NOT NULL,     last_update_login   NUMBER  );   INSERT INTO xx_custsearch_demo VALUES('v1','v2','v3','v4',SYSDATE,0,SYSDATE,0,0); INSERT INTO xx_custsearch_demo VALUES('v1','v3','v4','v5',SYSDATE,0,SYSDATE,0,0); INSERT INTO xx_custsearch_demo VALUES('v2','v3','v4','v5',SYSDATE,0,SYSDATE,0,0); INSERT INTO xx_custsearch_demo VALUES('v3','v4','v5','v6',SYSDATE,0,SYSDATE,0,0); Now we have 4 records in our custom table   5. Create a New Entity Object (EO) Right click on SearchDemo > New > ADF Business Components > Entity Object Name – CustSearchEO Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.schema.server Database Objects -- XX_CUSTSEARCH_DEMO   Note – By default ROWID will be the primary key if we will not make any column to be primary key   Check the Accessors, Create Method, Validation Method and Remove Method   6. Create a New View Object (VO) Right click on CustSearchDemo > New > ADF Business Components > View Object Name -- CustSearchVO Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.server   In Step2 in Entity Page select CustSearchEO and shuttle them to selected list   In Step3 in Attributes Window select columns Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4, and shuttle them to selected list   In Java page deselect Generate Java file for View Object Class: CustSearchVOImpl and Select Generate Java File for View Row Class: CustSearchVORowImpl   7. Add Your View Object to Root UI Application Module Select Right click on CustSearchAM > Application Modules > Data Model Select CustSearchVO and shuttle to Data Model list   8. Create a New Page Right click on CustSearchDemo > New > Web Tier > OA Components > Page Name -- CustSearchPG Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.webui   9. Select the CustSearchPG and go to the strcuture pane where a default region has been created   10. Select region1 and set the following properties: ID -- PageLayoutRN Region Style -- PageLayout AM Definition -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.server.CustSearchAM Window Title – AutoCustomize Search Page Window Title – AutoCustomization Search Page Auto Footer -- True   11. Add a Query Bean to Your Page Right click on PageLayoutRN > New > Region Select new region region1 and set following properties ID – QueryRN Region Style – query Construction Mode – autoCustomizationCriteria Include Simple Panel – False Include Views Panel – False Include Advanced Panel – False   12. Create a New Region of style table Right Click on QueryRN > New > Region Using Wizard Application Module – prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.custsearchdemo.server.CustSearchAM Available View Usages – CustSearchVO1   In Step2 in Region Properties set following properties Region ID – CustSearchTable Region Style – Table   In Step3 in View Attributes shuttle all the items (Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4) available in “Available View Attributes” to Selected View Attributes: In Step4 in Region Items page set style to “messageStyledText” for all items   13. Select CustSearchTable in Structure Panel and set property Width to 100%   14. Include Simple Search Panel Right Click on QueryRN > New > simpleSearchPanel Automatically region2 (header Region) and region1 (MessageComponentLayout Region) created Set Following Properties for region2 Id – SimpleSearchHeader Text -- Simple Search   15. Now right click on message Component Layout Region (SimpleSearchMappings) and create two message text input beans and set the below properties to each   Message TextInputBean1 Id – SearchColumn1 Search Allowed – True Data Type – VARCHAR2 Maximum Length – CSS Class – OraFieldText Prompt – Column1   Message TextInputBean2 Id – SearchColumn2 Search Allowed -- True Data Type – VARCHAR2 Maximum Length – 100 CSS Class – OraFieldText Prompt – Column2   16. Now Right Click on query Components and create simple Search Mappings. Then automatically SimpleSearchMappings and QueryCriteriaMap1 created   17.  Now select the QueryCriteriaMap1 and set the below properties Id – SearchColumn1Map Search Item – SearchColumn1 Result Item – Column1   18. Now again right click on simpleSearchMappings -> New -> queryCriteriaMap, and then set the below properties Id – SearchColumn2Map Search Item – SearchColumn2 Result Item – Column2   19. Congratulation you have successfully finished Auto Customization Search page. Run Your CustSearchPG page and Test Your Work            

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

  - by SQLOS Team

  Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols --  This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes.   MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing     Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations

  - by Tanu Sood

  Welcome to the first of our partner blog series. November Mondays are all about PricewaterhouseCoopers' perespective on Identity and R2. In this series, we have identity management experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) share their perspective on (and experiences with) the recent identity management release, Oracle Identity Management R2. The purpose of the series is to discuss real world identity use cases that helped shape the innovations in the recent R2 release and the implementation strategies that customers are employing today with expertise from PwC. Part 1: Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations In this inaugural post, we will discuss some of the new features of the R2 release of Oracle Identity Manager that some of our customer organizations are implementing today and the business rationale for those. Oracle's R2 Security portfolio represents a solid step forward for a platform that is already market-leading.  Prior to R2, Oracle was an industry titan in security with reliable products, expansive compatibility, and a large customer base.  Oracle has taken their identity platform to the next level in their latest version, R2.  The new features include a customizable UI, a request catalog, flexible security, and enhancements for its connectors, and more. Oracle customers will be impressed by the new Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) business-friendly UI.  Without question, Oracle has invested significant time in responding to customer feedback about making access requests and related activities easier for non-IT users.  The flexibility to add information to screens, hide fields that are not important to a particular customer, and adjust web themes to suit a company's preference make Oracle's Identity Manager stand out among its peers.  Customers can also expect to carry UI configurations forward with minimal migration effort to future versions of OIM.  Oracle's flexible UI will benefit many organizations looking for a customized feel with out-of-the-box configurations. Organizations looking to extend their services to end users will benefit significantly from new usability features like OIM’s ‘Catalog.’  Customers familiar with Oracle Identity Analytics' 'Glossary' feature will be able to relate to the concept.  It will enable Roles, Entitlements, Accounts, and Resources to be requested through the out-of-the-box UI.  This is an industry-changing feature as customers can make the process to request access easier than ever.  For additional ease of use, Oracle has introduced a shopping cart style request interface that further simplifies the experience for end users.  Common requests can be setup as profiles to save time.  All of this is combined with the approval workflow engine introduced in R1 that provides the flexibility customers need to meet their compliance requirements. Enhanced security was also on the list of features Oracle wanted to deliver to its customers.  The new end-user UI provides additional granular access controls.  Common Help Desk use cases can be implemented with ease by updating the application profiles.  Access can be rolled out so that administrators can only manage a certain department or organization.  Further, OIM can be more easily configured to select which fields can be read-only vs. updated.  Finally, this security model can be used to limit search results for roles and entitlements intended for a particular department.  Every customer has a different need for access and OIM now matches this need with a flexible security model. One of the important considerations when selecting an Identity Management platform is compatibility.  The number of supported platform connectors and how well it can integrate with non-supported platforms is a key consideration for selecting an identity suite.  Oracle has a long list of supported connectors.  When a customer has a requirement for a platform not on that list, Oracle has a solution too.  Oracle is introducing a simplified architecture called Identity Connector Framework (ICF), which holds the potential to simplify custom connectors.  Finally, Oracle has introduced a simplified process to profile new disconnected applications from the web browser.  This is a useful feature that enables administrators to profile applications quickly as well as empowering the application owner to fulfill requests from their web browser.  Support will still be available for connectors based on previous versions in R2. Oracle Identity Manager's new R2 version has delivered many new features customers have been asking for.  Oracle has matured their platform with R2, making it a truly distinctive platform among its peers. In our next post, expect a deep dive into use cases for a customer considering R2 as their new Enterprise identity solution. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you about the specific challenges you are facing and your experience in solving those. Meet the Writers Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory  Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving.

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