I’ve been customizing rendering templates a lot lately using a wide variety of scripting technologies such as JavaScript, jQuery, and SPServices. One requirement I had with all of these rendering templates was to call a custom web service to populate a drop down list. This is relatively easy to do and there are plenty of resources out there on how to deploy web services with SharePoint. I thought I would make a point today though to talk about this issue since I seem to forget about it every time. :-) The issue is that you build and test your pages and they work great as an administrator. However, once an end user tries the page, the script on the page doesn’t work. With any scripting issue, I bust out FireBug in Firefox and take a look at the page. It shows the web service call which works great for the administrator but when the user tries it, the result is 403 forbidden.
Within the contextual event framework, effectively there is a "producer" task flow and a "consumer" task flow. The producer publishes a contextual event, and the consumer subscribes to the contextual event. It's all rather handily described in Section 28.7.1 of the Fusion Guide How to Create Contextual Events Declaratively The publisher can pass a data payload (payLoad, PayLoad, um, pay load?) to the consumer. The publisher users an EL expression to extract data from their local bindings to do this, maybe something like #{bindings.employeeNo.inputValue}, which would be familiar to ADF programmers. The consumer however needs to use an EL expression #{payLoad} to capture the data from the published event.
Managed Methods Inc., a provider of SOA (service-oriented architecture) & Cloud governance, has announced the availability of their JaxView 6.0. While providing full support for SOA & Cloud management for the IT operations, JaxView 6.0 expanded runtime policy enforcement features such as expanded service virtualization and security federation. "We are very pleased with our customer adoption of JaxView for SOA & Cloud governance for monitoring and securing such environments." states Al Aghili Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Managed Methods Inc.
The past few weeks we have been discussing some of the mistakes made in early cloud deployments. This week we are discussing a key mistake that occurs fairly often; one that only manifests long after the solution is operational…blindly assuming that Cloud equals costs savings. Blasphemy, you say – how could it possibly not cost less? Let’s take a look at the considerations and components of IT cost, and revisit this question at the end. The unfortunate truth is that most enterprises have well-established IT cost allocation mechanisms, but few of these have any basis in actual consumption. Put simply, can you (or your users) confidently say that your IT bill reflects how much – or little – you use something? Traditional approaches to IT chargeback involve aggregating the net IT cost, and allocating it proportionally to business units based on head count, server count, or some other surrogate for allocating actual cost. This approach (sometimes affectionately referred to as ‘peanut butter’ – you spread it around) has merit in its simplicity, but cannot be allowed to persist as we move toward Cloud operating models.
In looking back at my JavaFX… does it have a future? posting, my views have been changed by some of the comments made (here and here), in particular about JavaFX vs. Flash/Flex and Java Web Start. JavaFX and applets I agree that comparing JavaFX applets vs Flash/Flex is not something we should be doing. Flash [...]
Oracle said Thursday that Dell and HP will sell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their x86 platforms, which will presumably come as some relief to customers uncertain of Oracle’s intentions. HP said in a canned statement that many users “have hardwired stacks of applications and infrastructure that can’t rapidly change.” Oracle will do the support. Meanwhile, things on the OpenSolaris side of the house are in a tizzy with the widgetry’s governing board issuing ultimatums and threatening to disband if Oracle doesn’t pay it some mind while a breakaway movement is believed to be in progress because Oracle, while committed to Solaris, has reduced its support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.
Terracotta is out to cure skimpy cache by making Ehcache really, really big, 1TB in fact, a size only a few people can use right now, but just you wait, it says, the day is upon us when practically everybody with a database will want it to be in-memory. The biggest caches these days are still 100GB-200GB and they’re a lot of work to build. Maybe there are two or three that hit 200 GB. The average, on the other hand, is more like sub-20 gigs. Terracotta swears it’s made it easy to store over a terabyte of data and hundreds of millions of entries in a single cache, so data retrieval is a whole lot faster and clouds and virtualization aren’t bottlenecked.
NaviSite, Inc., a provider of complex hosting, application management and managed cloud services for the enterprise market, is using a combination of Oracle's Sun servers and Oracle software to run its mission-critical systems. With more than 1,500 customers in 10 datacenters across the US and UK, NaviSite needed to expand its virtualization platform to meet the growing infrastructure demands of its customers, while delivering industry-leading performance and availability.
After months of promising we have finally moved Exadel Flamingo to exadel.org and released version 2.2.0. exadel.org is our community site for hosting open source projects. Flamingo is a light weight framework for connecting rich web and mobile user interfaces to enterprise back end. Flamingo connects Seam, Spring, and Java EE 6 (soon via CDI/JSR299) with the following user interfaces.
Exadel has released Exadel JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse version 1.3.4. The biggest feature in this release is Organize Imports (just like in Java editor). The class for Text node is missing, pressing Ctrl+Shift+O, will display the dialog where the correct class can be selected. You can also invoke Organize Imports from the editor context menu (right-click anywhere in the editor and select Organize Imports). You can also invoke Organize Imports from the editor context menu (right-click [...]
One of the most common questions for people that are new to BIRT is about how to ask data from the DataSet in the report. The question is when building expressions should I use dataSetRow["FIELD"] or row["FIELD"]? So let me see if I can set the record straight. When data is acquired, it is acquired by a DataSet, so the following query in a JDBC DataSet will create a three field resultset.
I don’t know any other technology that has ever gotten as much of a beating as JavaFX did last week (here, here, and here). JavaFX has become a technology that developers love to hate. It’s like a pinata for developers. JavaFX was first announced at JavaOne 2007 (that’s 3 years ago). Many predicted its death even before version 1.0 was released in December 2008, and many continue to call for its demise. Last week also turned out to be the week where I presented Enterprise JavaFX at the Silicon Valley JavaFX JUG, and also the week that Steven Chin created a petition to open source JavaFX. Don’t get me wrong, JavaFX is very far from perfect. It has it’s problems and challenges (listed below) and its future is hanging on life support right now, but let’s start with the good.
Jinfonet Software, a provider of Java reporting solutions, on Thursday unveiled JReport 10. This new version adds rich visualization and interactive reporting to a robust, agile BI platform, providing embedded operational reporting to developers and self-service reporting to end users. JReport 10 brings Agile Business Intelligence to the next level with rich visualization features. Web 2.0 self-service reporting allows highly interactive reports to be accessible across the enterprise with superior performance and scalability.
It would be an understatement to say that this past decade belongs to the Internet. Starting primarily as a research tool, the Internet has now infiltrated every aspect of life – there is very little today that users do not, or cannot, do online. Moreover, new ways to leverage the Internet to personal and professional advantage arise every day. Evidently, all this progress has had an insidious side-effect – user expectations regarding website performance have sky-rocketed over the years. People expect websites, video and audio to load faster than ever before; otherwise, they lose interest and go to other websites. In fact, research firms have ample findings to support this correlation. A 2009 ResearchLink survey found that 26 percent of respondents would move to a competitor’s website if a vendor’s website failed to perform, resulting in immediate revenue loss of 26 percent and a future loss of 15 percent. Forrester Research also found that 36 percent of unique visitors to a website will leave it if it fails to load within the first three seconds. Three seconds – that’s not a lot of time. Yet, user expectations are warranted, seeing how much progress content delivery technology has made in the past few years. Couple these user demands with an architecture that is not fit to deliver the kind of performance they expect, and what we have on our hands is a big problem for companies whose business thrives on web content and e-commerce.
In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships, allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore the persistence.xml file for your JPA web project.
Recently I had the opportunity to figure out how to manipulate sizing, positioning and text wrapping of chart legends so I thought I'd share what I learned. If you have a chart with legend items that don't fit in the available space, BIRT will do one of two things, depending on the wrapping width option. (Wrapping width is found on the legend layout dialog). If the wrapping width is set to zero, BIRT will simply truncate the legend item text and optionally append an ellipsis. (The ellipsis option is located on the legend entries dialog). If the wrapping width is set to a positive value, BIRT will word-wrap the text. Unfortunately when it does this, it doesn't check the vertical boundaries and long items can end up overlapping.
AMD did better than people thought it would in Q2. Even so it barely looks like number two in a two-horse race. Revenues were up 40% year-over-year to a record $1.65 billion when it was expected to come in with $1.55 billion and it would have earned 11 cents a share, better than the six cents forecast, were it not for write-offs connected with the spin-off of its factories. In reality it lost six cents or $43 million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to previous losses. This time last year it lost $330 million. Its operating income this time was $125 million and its gross margin 45%, roughly 20 points below Intel’s but healthy for AMD. In a canned statement, CEO Dirk Meyer said customers launched a record number of new mobile and desktop platforms.
Well you can’t beat free and that’s what TIBCO’s latest cloudware Silver Spotfire is going to be for the next year. It’s an on-demand analytical BI system with a chi-chi social component. Users – and TIBCO says that means anyone – can create visual analytics and interactive dashboards out of Excel, Access and ODBC data and share reports, dashboards, charts and other visualization and calculations to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base And it can be integrated with social media so users can embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles.
BIRT Introduced OLAP style data cubes and crosstabs in version 2.2 and while they have been around for some time we still get a lot of questions on how to use and manipulate them. Below are just some of the resources that have been posted to BIRT Exchange that should help you with cubes and crosstabs. To get an idea of what a BIRT cube is and how to tie it to a crosstab report item, take a look at this article which provides a detailed write-up of the technology and supplies some examples. To see a recorded demonstration of a crosstab style report being build see this tutorial video.
Recently I listened to a large enterprise customer talk enthusiastically about ITCAM’s new agent installation and deployment features. I bet you did a double-take as you read that. Why the enthusiasm? The answer had a lot to do with how the customer delegates IT roles and responsibilities and their desire to go from 500 to 1500 managed JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) without increasing staff.
For your reference, we've listed the Top 10 Performance Problems as we have seen them over the years when working with our clients. I hope this list is enlightening – and I’ve included follow-up links to the blogs to help better understand how to solve these problems. Many libraries out there make remote communication seem like a piece of cake. There is hardly any difference for the developer to call a local vs. remote method. The lack of understanding of what is really going on under the remoting-hood makes people forget about things like latency, serialization, network traffic and memory usage that come with every remoting call. The easy way of using these technologies results in too many calls across these remoting boundaries and in the end causes performance and scalability problems.
WebLogic Server Scripting Tool (WLST) provides powerful command-line capability for system administrators and developers to configure WebLogic server environments. However, its usage and adoption does not reach its full potential, seen at many working places, due to various reasons. This article gives a detailed example of using WLST to configure some of the latest security provisions (SAML 2.0) of WebLogic server, and provides insights on how to overcome the possible hurdles which prevent one from using the tool. Why WLST and What's Stopping You?
MySQL veterans either disaffected or dismissed by Oracle are starting a new company called SkySQL that will offer “enterprise-class support and services for the MySQL ecosystem.” The outfit is being pulled together by former MySQL SVP of global services Ulf Sandberg and its one-paragraph web site, dominated by a picture of a dolphin, says that whoever else is there – without saying who exactly – are former MySQL employees. However, SkySQL is hiring in “all areas, including support, consulting, training, marketing and sales.” Being detail-free left room for MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who’s formally objecting to the Oracle–Sun acquisition now, to position SkySQL as an alternative to Oracle–Sun, which he evidently blames for running off the old MySQL home team.
He said he was going to do it and he has. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has made good his quixotic threat to appeal the European Commission’s decision to approve Oracle’s acquisition of Sun – and with it MySQL, which Sun paid a downright silly billion dollars for two years ago. Oracle closed on Sun in January and Widenius had a few months grace to take his case to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. It is unclear what he hopes to accomplish since he has basically gone underground and turned off his phone while the futility of the move has already cost him his chief spokesman Florian Mueller.
The New York Times says that Oracle killed a Sun project to clone Intel’s x86 Xeon server chip and turn out a “no-frills, low-power variant” that it could put into thousands of servers for folks like Facebook, Yahoo and Google. The paper said it had heard tell of such a thing for a long time but could never quite nail it until recently when it happened to interview a couple of people “with knowledge of Sun’s plans,” “who are not authorized to speak publicly.” As part of the fey plan Sun bought the assets of one Montalvo Systems that had done work on low-power Intel clones and hired some “top talent” out of AMD.