http://www.evita.no/ikbViewerblogg/rss20.xml?blogg=23169 e-vita is one of the leaders in Norway on Oracle Fusion Middleware. We are the first Oracle SOA Specialized Partner in Scandinavia and is also specialized on the Oracle database. e-vita is a member of Oracle Customer Advisory Board on SOA and BPM. en-us (c) 2011 evita.no All rights reserved. http://www.evita.no/ressurs/evita_new/images/iknowblog-logo.png http://www.evita.no/ikbViewer/blogg/rss20.xml?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/77050/?blogg=23169 We have been waiting for the new Virtualbox Image for a long time, and finally it is here. The appliance has improved in many ways since last release, so it has been worth waiting for. Both the appliance itself and the documentation is excellent. It is evident that Oracle has listened to feedback on the previous release, and I think the developer VMs are useful. Especially the adoption of new patchsets and versions (ex when 12c will be available) will gain a lot from quick getting hands-on experiences. This VirtualBox appliance is a multipurpose image which can be used in different domain configurations. The image has a number of pre-configured domains that you can use depending on your need. The image can be set up so that it requires use of as few resources as possible, you can for instance easily disable B2B if you do not need it, or you can shut down the desktop console and save 600MB. It is important to say that this image is not for production purposes. The image contains the following:

• Oracle Database Express Edition 11.2.0
• Oracle SOA Suite 11g 11.1.1.6.0
• Oracle BPM Suite 11g 11.1.1.6.0
• Oracle JDeveloper 11g 11.1.1.6.0
• Oracle Webcenter Suite 11g 11.1.1.6.0
• Oracle Universal Content Management 11g 11.1.1.6.0
• Oracle Linux 64 bit EL 5 Update 5
• Oracle JRockit R28.2.0-79-146777-1.6.0_29s
• Oracle Java SDK 1.6.0_29-b11

Here is the new graphical console (in Norwegian): info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Sun, 06 May 2012 07:24:32 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/77050/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/70662/?blogg=23169 This article shows how to use a Spring Component to create a webservice "on top of" the Oracle SOA WorkflowServiceAPI. info@evita.no (Falkenås, Erik) Thu, 22 Dec 2011 01:30:27 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/70662/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/69304/?blogg=23169 On december 1st, Weblogic 12c was launched with two online presentations:

• Overview presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch
• Technical presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch

The plan is that the release will be available for download on OTN sometime next week (beginning december 5th). This release has over 200 new features, and it has a focus on Cloud readiness. The cloud could be Oracle Public Cloud with Java Services, or a Private cloud. The key new capabillities are around:

• Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity

• Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization

• Integrated Traffic Management

• Enhanced High Availability and Disaster Recovery

• Much Higher Performance

• Seamless Upgrade

I will go into details on some of them. info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:01:09 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/69304/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/66843/?blogg=23169 Today it is rather common for web applications to delegate authentication to the web container, which again might delegate the job to a Single Sign On service. Why bother to do the authentication job when there are good alternatives? For desktop application it is not so common to let others do the authentication. While it is certainly possible, there is often more coding and configuration involved than it is for most web applications. info@evita.no (Aune, Cato) Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:56:53 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/66843/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/66694/?blogg=23169 Error on startup: I/O error while reading domain directory and Connection refused. Could not connect to NodeManager. In this case the host was shut down without shuting down the weblogic domain first. When the host came back up again there are some files that must to be removed.
Remove/rename the state-files under: $MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\adminserver\data\nodemanager
$MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\managedserver1\data\nodemanager   We got a quick response from Jacco H. Landlust: I think you might be fixing a symptom in stead of the real issue. It
seems you have created the domain with config.sh and for production
mode. This sets the username and password in
$DOMAIN_HOME/config/nodemanager/nm_password.properties . You should
check (and correct) the username and password for nodemanager by
clicking on environment --> security --> advanced (in /console). After
that you should remove the boot.properties from
$DOMAIN_HOME/servers/$SERVER_NAME/data/nodemanager/boot.properties.
Only then this error will be fixed more perminently.

I helped my friend Jan van Zoggel to fix this too, see:
http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/oracle-weblogic-nodemanager-bea-300033/

By the way, it's a best practice to move your domain files out of the
$MW_HOME :)

Cheers,

Jacco info@evita.no (Holmen, Paal) Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:33:58 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/66694/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/66695/?blogg=23169 A couple of challenges you might run into when upgrading SOA Suite PS4 on Windows. The issues has not been a consistent in all environments, but if it happens this blog post might help you. info@evita.no (Holmen, Paal) Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:35:48 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/66695/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/66784/?blogg=23169 I think that 2012 will be the year of Oracle BPM, and the good news is that there are excellent resources available to prepare for it. There are webcasts, books and a certification that will help you to be successful in your Oracle BPM project. Announced at Oracle Open World was Process Accellerators. They are prebuilt processes that can serve as Best Practices-implementations and actual runnable implementations. All that now is available makes me think that there is no excuse anymore - the red carpet to Oracle BPM is laid out for us. The topics covered in this post are the following:

• Bookreview of the new BPM Suite 11g Handbook
• Links to Oracle BPM resources
• Process Accellerators
• What is IT Strategies from Oracle?
• What is the next book to read on BPMN?

The most significant announcement at Oracle Open World was the Cloud, and it will be exciting to see that the Cloud will provide for BPM. info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Sun, 30 Oct 2011 11:54:53 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/66784/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/65645/?blogg=23169 Open World 2011 was a great success with 45.000 people. I will in this posting share some of my experiences and thoughts.  You can have a short look at the announcements made at OOW here (I will only get in detail on some of them). What Oracle-people can tell us depends very much of what is already announced, so at OOW the news are being portioned out during the week. We can get a sense of what will happen during the week (reading session titles/descriptions), but one is not sure before it is announced. The biggest thing this year is the Cloud – and I see how this has been a focus at Oracle for a long time now. I believe Cloud will be even bigger the next years. They will provide a Cloud that is a service comparable to what is available on Amazon AWS today, but the Cloud-support will also be available in all layers in the software. This is the reason why next version of Fusion Middleware will be named 12c – for cloud. First available 12c-product is Grid Control 12c – released at OOW. info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:05:46 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/65645/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/59601/?blogg=23169 I had the pleasure of attending the Oracle BPM 11g Advanced workshop in Lisbon last week. Martien van den Akker has already blogged about it. Thanks to Oracle SOA Community and Jürgen Kress for arranging this excellent event. Prasen Palvankar and David Read from Product Management were the best possible instructors. Two of the things that has done life simpler is Virtualbox and Amazon Cloud. Now it is easier to get hands-on experience with Oracle BPM Suite by using pre-installed software. This means you can start directly on development (which is what most of us want to do). On this training we used Amazon Cloud. The servers were set up with complete BPM Suite plus mailserver and SVN for version control - a good environment for a Proof Of Concept (POC) or training. As in any realistic project we did team development using SVN (and Tortoise). Anthony Reynolds has a blog on how to use the VM appliance. Latest version out is 11g PS2, but I hope that PS4 will be available soon. The training was a realistic POC setting, with more focus on hands-on experience than presentations. 4 of the days were used to work (3-4 persons per team), and one day for presenting the results. This was not for beginners, and we did not have a detailed description on what to do (as in several other trainings). As many times before it involved a credit card case (application for increased limit), but this time even more powerful than before. A BPM POC may involve many different technologies, and in this we use the following:

1. ADF Web application for initiating the process
2. Batch processing from file (many requests at once)
3. Advanced Business Rules for determining the allowed increase
4. ADF Human Task for approval screens
5. Cancellation and fraud detection : Implementing Conversation/Correlation constructs (with help from BPEL)
6. BAM - is very easy to integrate in BPM and looks impressing!
7. Sending mail notifications via SOA Suites own services

Personally I enjoy seeing that my SOA Suite experience helps a lot when using BPM. Many of the components are the same: Mediator, Business Rules, Technology adapters, BPEL and Composites. The best thing is having the choice between modeling processes as BPEL or BPMN, where BPMN is the more appropriate model for business users. BPM offers changes to be done with the process via web browser, and also rules to be changed without redeploying the processes. One of my responsibilities in this little project was to build the business rules. In Rules 11g you can calculate aggregates like max, average and minimum. These calculated numbers can also be used in decision tables that are more readable for business users. I was struggling some with the user interface for Rules in JDeveloper, because it is complex. Debugging rules was also not easy before I discovered that I could make a debug function that lets you run rules from JDeveloper. There may be many reasons for using rules - one of them is that business users can better understand rules than PL/SQL or Java-code. The other thing is rules is based on facts on reasoning, so that you do not to say how a problem should be solved. This means that what could be complex programs may be expressed as elegant and compact rules. The good news is also that Rules can be changed runtime in SOA Composer web application. Here are some of the tricks I learned:

1. Start with the simplest possible rules, and make it work
2. Use globals so that they can easily be changed
3. Numbers and decimals make it more difficult, and you may need to typecast, make small changes and test
4. Make a debug function, and test from JDeveloper - this makes iterative changes easier
5. Add some extra attributes in result to store "trace-information" - you may want to know something about the reasoning process

The good news is that in the upcoming feature pack (on top of 11.1.1.5) the Rules editor in JDeveloper will be improved. Thursday night we had a nice trip with boat and dinner in Lisbon. For those that have been in San Francisco, they have a similar bridge in Portugal. Lisbon-training in june can really be recommended.   Friday morning was the day for presentations from the different teams. The different teams had different solutions to the problems, and focused on different challenges in the POC. What will be interesting to see how the best solution would be done when the feature pack is ready - I think that wiould give a better and simpler solution. BPM Suite does really improve a lot in every new release, not only on stability but also on functionality.   Now it is time for summer vacation, one of the nexts posts might be about the Rule Engine. I am now a fan of Business Rules.   Jon Petter info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:12:22 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/59601/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/61493/?blogg=23169 While setting up my test environment with Oracle Linux 6 u1 64bit in VirtualBox, I just couldn't get the Guest Additions to install properly. Installation using Oracle Linux "Basic Server" setup would stop due to missing X Windows and OpenGL. Installation on the "Desktop" setup would complain about missing OpenGL, and although the installation otherwise seemed to complete successfully, the end result was the same: no Guest Additions. This is the workaround I used to get the the Guest Additions working. info@evita.no (Horneland, Øyvind) Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:27:20 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/61493/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/58404/?blogg=23169 e-vita is one of the leaders in Norway on Oracle Fusion Middleware. We are the first Oracle SOA Specialized Partner in Scandinavia and is also specialized on the Oracle database. e-vita is a member of Oracle Customer Advisory Board on SOA and BPM. info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:32:53 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/58404/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/59044/?blogg=23169 What we have noticed is that the Weblogic managed server goes down whenever an admin user logs into Windows server using remote desktop in console mode (e.g. mstsc /console) and then logs off. If the administrator logs into the server in regular mode (e.g. mstsc) and then logs off, this problem is not simulated.
To resolve this problem, you can pass -Xnohup parameter to JVM.

We found the solution on Oracle Forum. Set Java Option this way -

JAVA_OPTION="$JAVA_OPTION -Xnohup"
export JAVA_OPTION info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:01:27 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/59044/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/59046/?blogg=23169 If you have a DB adapter where you select from a view or table that does not have a primary key, you may get duplicate rows returned. This may surprise you. From the documentation : OTN doc- chapter 9.2.6 "Note that Oracle Database Adapter only supports tables where there is a primary key defined. If primary key constraints have not been defined on a table explicitly, then you must provide one at design time while defining the Oracle Database Adapter by using the Adapter Configuration Wizard. If you do not provide a valid primary key, then the unique constraint is not guaranteed, and this could result in possible loss of messages at run time. That is, rows with duplicate primary key values are likely to be lost. " A solution may be to select a column that is unique as the primary key, or you may have to add a virtual column to the view so that it is unique (for instance a random number that is big enough). info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:18:32 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/59046/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/59043/?blogg=23169 iKnowBase Product development has been using Varnish to host their test-environments and to enable simpler URLs for a while now (remove the /ikbViewer) , and our first customer is now using Varnish in production. The site is Lindorffs internetsite : http://www.lindorff.com/ and went live in 11 countries june 15th. The application server used is Weblogic, and iKnowBase version is 5.8. Varnish is an alternative to Oracle Webcache which most of our customers use. info@evita.no (Hjulstad, Jon Petter) Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:25:43 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/59043/?blogg=23169 /ikbViewer/go/target/59042/?blogg=23169 e-vita is one of the leaders in Norway on Oracle Fusion Middleware. We are the first Oracle SOA Specialized Partner in Scandinavia and is also specialized on the Oracle database. e-vita is a member of Oracle Customer Advisory Board on SOA and BPM.

Our consultants are certified and have competencies on:

• SOA Suite
• BPM Suite
• BPA Suite
• Weblogic
• Oracle Service Bus
• Oracle Database
• Oracle Identity management products
• Caching, tuning of database and webapplications
• iKnowBase content management and integration

This blog will focus on these products and our experiences with them.

info@evita.no (e-vita) Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:52:34 GMT /ikbViewer/go/target/59042/?blogg=23169