Proactive Health Checks Released on My Oracle Support

Oracle Support have just created a Health Recommendation Catalog/Catalogue on My Oracle Support. Initially it contains 25 recommendations across all the product lines, fortunately the middleware products are fairly well represented so this is already a useful resource and one that will only increase in value. Check out document id 868955.1!!

UK OUG Application Server SIG

I recently had the pleasure of pleasure of presenting to the Application Server SIG of the UK's OUG. The talk was an introduction to tuning and scaling Oracle AS. Although Oracle AS is no longer Oracle's strategic application server it's still the runtime for many of the layered products such as E-Business Suite. The target audience is the "DBA" who finds themselves looking after an Oracle AS instance. The presentation is here of those interested...

BPEL Easter Egg: Reloading Fault Policy Files

A little late for Easter but this is a neat trick discovered today by Sid, one of my colleagues.

We're using the BPEL fault policy framework and while we're developing them it's a bit of a pain to restart the app server every time a change is made. The 10.1.3.3.1 BPEL console now has a button to reload them linked to this URL:

http://server:port/BPELConsole/domain/doReloadFaultPolicy.jsp

For example to reload all of the fault policies in the default domain on a local install of SOA Suite use this URL:

http://localhost:8888/BPELConsole/default/doReloadFaultPolicy.jsp

Unfortunately the BPELConsole button seems to have disappeared in 10.1.3.4 so to reload the fault policies you can paste the URL diectly into your browser (you will be prompted to log in).

Video killed the podcast star

I got a nice surprise recently when I downloaded the latest OTN Techcasts: They've gone all video. The new format opened with an overview of the new release of Enterprise Manager Grid Control. There's also a really nice white board session on Application Grid. The final surprise was how watch-able the video podcasts are on my iPod nano.

Compiz plus JDeveloper on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid

Imagine my joy when on upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 I found that Compiz was finally working on my Thinkpad!!! Transparency, wobbly windows and Win-E for a cool window switcher all looked great providing hours of endless fun.

Imagine my despair when after starting JDeveloper 10.1.3.4 for the first time after the upgrade I was faced with a blank window. It wobbled fine but had no content. The thought of returning to the boring non-wobbly windows world of plain old Gnome was too much to bear so some rapid research turned up a solution that seems worth sharing for the "JDeveloper on Linux plus Compiz" clique.

This is a bug in Sun's JDK that has been fixed in 1.6u10. If like me you are too lazy to update your JDK or can't (JDeveloper 10.1.3.4 is only certified against Java5) then the fix is to simply open the $JDEV_HOME/jdev/bin/jdev script and add the following as the first line:

export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

Save the file, run JDeveloper again and the UI goodies should be all yours....

Of course a simpler fix if you use many different versions of JDeveloper is to add the same line to your ~/.bashrc file.

Oracle or Open Source? Oracle and Open Source!

The recent release of JDeveloper 11g reminded me that Oracle products are available under a variety of licensing models as well as the traditional "paid for" software model that most people are probably familiar with. So what are these alternative models?

Well let's start with JDeveloper itself. Back in June 2005 Oracle offered the JDeveloper licence for zero cost, there's an FAQ here. So JDeveloper is a "free" Oracle product that users can use in a production scenario, the licence is still an Oracle one and JDev is not an open source. Users can also purchase a suppport contract for JDeveloper for those critical projects.

Another example of this type of product is Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (aka XE). This has a licence that means it's free to develop, deploy, and distribute. The distribute part means that customers can bundle it as an embedded databse in their products. There are some restrictions about number of processors, size of user data and memory used but as it includes the awesome Application Express it really is a great fit for a lot of scenarios.

Moving on to the second model and we are going from gratis to libre software (to use the common terms). Oracle is very active in the open source space, active in several projects but also donating several products to kick start open source projects. A great example of this is Oracle Toplink OR framework. This formed the basis of Toplink Essentials which was the Java Persistence API (JPA) reference implementation. Toplink Essentials uses the CDDL licence.

Toplink was also donated as the basis for the EclipseLink project which will become the permanent home for the development of the JPA 2.0 reference implementation and uses the Eclipse Distribution Licence.

Another middleware example was the donation of the ADF Faces JSF components to the Apache Software Foundation. More details about Oracle's open source activities can be found here. Outside the middleware arena there's the XQilla XQuery engine and a ton of enhancements for the Linux kernel.

On a final note it's also worth pointing out that most Oracle products are downloadable from OTN under a licence that allows development and prototyping as well as personal education. So if you're looking to do some self training on the latest Oracle products then fill your boots!

Post Christmas Sobering Reading

Just in time to add to the January blues SANS institute has published this list of the "top" (or bottom depending on your point of view) 25 coding errors.

This old gem recently brought down my favourite internet forum, a reminder that the internet is a dangerous place.