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• The first day of JavaOne is already over!

  - by delabassee

  In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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• Availability Best Practices on Oracle VM Server for SPARC

  - by jsavit

  This is the first of a series of blog posts on configuring Oracle VM Server for SPARC (also called Logical Domains) for availability. This series will show how to how to plan for availability, improve serviceability, avoid single points of failure, and provide resiliency against hardware and software failures. Availability is a broad topic that has filled entire books, so these posts will focus on aspects specifically related to Oracle VM Server for SPARC. The goal is to improve Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS): An article defining RAS can be found here. Oracle VM Server for SPARC Principles for Availability Let's state some guiding principles for availability that apply to Oracle VM Server for SPARC: Avoid Single Points Of Failure (SPOFs). Systems should be configured so a component failure does not result in a loss of application service. The general method to avoid SPOFs is to provide redundancy so service can continue without interruption if a component fails. For a critical application there may be multiple levels of redundancy so multiple failures can be tolerated. Oracle VM Server for SPARC makes it possible to configure systems that avoid SPOFs. Configure for availability at a level of resource and effort consistent with business needs. Effort and resource should be consistent with business requirements. Production has different availability requirements than test/development, so it's worth expending resources to provide higher availability. Even within the category of production there may be different levels of criticality, outage tolerances, recovery and repair time requirements. Keep in mind that a simple design may be more understandable and effective than a complex design that attempts to "do everything". Design for availability at the appropriate tier or level of the platform stack. Availability can be provided in the application, in the database, or in the virtualization, hardware and network layers they depend on - or using a combination of all of them. It may not be necessary to engineer resilient virtualization for stateless web applications applications where availability is provided by a network load balancer, or for enterprise applications like Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and WebLogic that provide their own resiliency. It's (often) the same architecture whether virtual or not: For example, providing resiliency against a lost device path or failing disk media is done for the same reasons and may use the same design whether in a domain or not. It's (often) the same technique whether using domains or not: Many configuration steps are the same. For example, configuring IPMP or creating a redundant ZFS pool is pretty much the same within the guest whether you're in a guest domain or not. There are configuration steps and choices for provisioning the guest with the virtual network and disk devices, which we will discuss. Sometimes it is different using domains: There are new resources to configure. Most notable is the use of alternate service domains, which provides resiliency in case of a domain failure, and also permits improved serviceability via "rolling upgrades". This is an important differentiator between Oracle VM Server for SPARC and traditional virtual machine environments where all virtual I/O is provided by a monolithic infrastructure that itself is a SPOF. Alternate service domains are widely used to provide resiliency in production logical domains environments. Some things are done via logical domains commands, and some are done in the guest: For example, with Oracle VM Server for SPARC we provide multiple network connections to the guest, and then configure network resiliency in the guest via IP Multi Pathing (IPMP) - essentially the same as for non-virtual systems. On the other hand, we configure virtual disk availability in the virtualization layer, and the guest sees an already-resilient disk without being aware of the details. These blogs will discuss configuration details like this. Live migration is not "high availability" in the sense of "continuous availability": If the server is down, then you don't live migrate from it! (A cluster or VM restart elsewhere would be used). However, live migration can be part of the RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) picture by improving Serviceability - you can move running domains off of a box before planned service or maintenance. The blog Best Practices - Live Migration on Oracle VM Server for SPARC discusses this. Topics Here are some of the topics that will be covered: Network availability using IP Multipathing and aggregates Disk path availability using virtual disks defined with multipath groups ("mpgroup") Disk media resiliency configuring for redundant disks that can tolerate media loss Multiple service domains - this is probably the most significant item and the one most specific to Oracle VM Server for SPARC. It is very widely deployed in production environments as the means to provide network and disk availability, but it can be confusing. Subsequent articles will describe why and how to configure multiple service domains. Note, for the sake of precision: an I/O domain is any domain that has a physical I/O resource (such as a PCIe bus root complex). A service domain is a domain providing virtual device services to other domains; it is almost always an I/O domain too (so it can have something to serve). Resources Here are some important links; we'll be drawing on their content in the next several articles: Oracle VM Server for SPARC Documentation Maximizing Application Reliability and Availability with SPARC T5 Servers whitepaper by Gary Combs Maximizing Application Reliability and Availability with the SPARC M5-32 Server whitepaper by Gary Combs Summary Oracle VM Server for SPARC offers features that can be used to provide highly-available environments. This and the following blog entries will describe how to plan and deploy them.

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• Lighting get darker when texture is aplied

  - by noah

  Im using OpenGL ES 1.1 for iPhone. I'm attempting to implement a skybox in my 3d world and started out by following one of Jeff Lamarches tutorials on creating textures. Heres the tutorial: iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-part-6_25.html Ive successfully added the image to my 3d world but am not sure why the lighting on the other shapes has changed so much. I want the shapes to be the original color and have the image in the background. Before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojmb8793vj514h0/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.34.44%20PM.png After: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8v6yvur8amgudia/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.35.31%20PM.png Heres the init OpenGL: - (void)initOpenGLES1 { glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enable lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); // Turn the first light on glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); const GLfloat lightAmbient[] = {0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightDiffuse[] = {0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0}; const GLfloat matAmbient[] = {0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.5}; const GLfloat matDiffuse[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat matSpecular[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightPosition[] = {0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0}; const GLfloat lightShininess = 100.0; //Configure OpenGL lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_AMBIENT, matAmbient); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_DIFFUSE, matDiffuse); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SPECULAR, matSpecular); glMaterialf(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SHININESS, lightShininess); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_AMBIENT, lightAmbient); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, lightDiffuse); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, lightPosition); // Define a cutoff angle glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_SPOT_CUTOFF, 40.0); // Set the clear color glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1.0f); // Projection Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); CGSize layerSize = self.view.layer.frame.size; // Swapped height and width for landscape mode gluPerspective(45.0f, (GLfloat)layerSize.height / (GLfloat)layerSize.width, 0.1f, 750.0f); [self initSkyBox]; // Modelview Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // This next line is not really needed as it is the default for OpenGL ES glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glDisable(GL_BLEND); // Enable depth testing glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); } Heres the drawSkybox that gets called in the drawFrame method: -(void)drawSkyBox { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); static const SSVertex3D vertices[] = { {-1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, {-1.0, -1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, -1.0, -0.0} }; static const SSVertex3D normals[] = { {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0} }; static const GLfloat texCoords[] = { 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0 }; glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(0.0, 0.0, -3.0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices); glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, normals); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, texCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Heres the init Skybox: -(void)initSkyBox { // Turn necessary features on glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_SRC_COLOR); // Bind the number of textures we need, in this case one. glGenTextures(1, &texture[0]); // create a texture obj, give unique ID glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // load our new texture name into the current texture glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"space" ofType:@"jpg"]; NSData *texData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:texData]; GLuint width = CGImageGetWidth(image.CGImage); GLuint height = CGImageGetHeight(image.CGImage); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); void *imageData = malloc( height * width * 4 ); // times 4 because will write one byte for rgb and alpha CGContextRef cgContext = CGBitmapContextCreate( imageData, width, height, 8, 4 * width, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big ); // Flip the Y-axis CGContextTranslateCTM (cgContext, 0, height); CGContextScaleCTM (cgContext, 1.0, -1.0); CGColorSpaceRelease( colorSpace ); CGContextClearRect( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ) ); CGContextDrawImage( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ), image.CGImage ); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, imageData); CGContextRelease(cgContext); free(imageData); [image release]; [texData release]; } Any help is greatly appreciated.

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• WebLogic JDBC Use of Oracle Wallet for SSL

  - by Steve Felts

  Introduction Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can be used to secure the connection between the middle tier “client”, WebLogic Server (WLS) in this case, and the Oracle database server.  Data between WLS and database can be encrypted.  The server can be authenticated so you have proof that the database can be trusted by validating a certificate from the server.  The client can be authenticated so that the database only accepts connections from clients that it trusts. Similar to the discussion in an earlier article about using the Oracle wallet for database credentials, the Oracle wallet can also be used with SSL to store the keys and certificates.  By using it correctly, clear text passwords can be eliminated from the JDBC configuration and client/server configuration can be simplified by sharing the wallet across multiple datasources. There is a very good Oracle Technical White Paper on using SSL with the Oracle thin driver at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/wp-oracle-jdbc-thin-ssl-130128.pdf [LINK1].  The link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/index-087556.html [LINK2] describes how to use WebLogic Server with Oracle JDBC Driver SSL. The information in this article is a guide on what steps need to be taken in the variety of available options; use the links above for details. SSL from the driver to the database server is basically turned on by specifying a protocol of “tcps” in the URL.  However, there is a fair amount of setup needed.  Also remember that there is an overhead in performance. Creating the wallets The common use cases are 1. “data encryption and server-only authentication”, requiring just a trust store, or 2. “data encryption and authentication of both tiers” (client and server), requiring a trust store and a key store. It is recommended to use the auto-login wallet type so that clear text passwords are not needed in the datasource configuration to open the wallet.  The store type for an auto-login wallet is “SSO” (Single Sign On), not “JKS” or “PKCS12” as in [LINK2].  The file name is “cwallet.sso”. Wallets are created using the orapki tool.  They need to be created based on the usage (encryption and/or authentication).  This is discussed in detail in [LINK1] in Appendix B or in the Advanced Security Administrator’s Guide of the Database documentation. Database Server Configuration It is necessary to update the sqlnet.ora and listener.ora files with the directory location of the wallet using WALLET_LOCATION.  These files also indicate whether or not SSL_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION is being used (true or false). The Oracle Listener must also be configured to use the TCPS protocol.  The recommended port is 2484. LISTENER = (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=servername)(PORT=2484))) WebLogic Server Classpath The WebLogic Server CLASSPATH must have three additional security files. The files that need to be added to the WLS CLASSPATH are $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_cert_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_core_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.oraclepki_1.0.0.0.jar One way to do this is to add them to PRE_CLASSPATH environment variable for use with the standard WebLogic scripts. Setting the Oracle Security Provider It’s necessary to enable the Oracle PKI provider on the client side.  This can either be done statically by updating the java.security file under the JRE or dynamically by setting it in a WLS startup class using java.security.Security.insertProviderAt(new oracle.security.pki.OraclePKIProvider (), 3); See the full example of the startup class in [LINK2]. Datasource Configuration When creating a WLS datasource, set the PROTOCOL in the URL to tcps as in the following. jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=host)(PORT=port))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=myservice))) For encryption and server authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.trustStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=”SSO” For client authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.keyStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=”SSO” Note that the driver connection properties for the wallet require a file name, not a directory name. Active GridLink ONS over SSL For completeness, there is another SSL usage for WLS datasources.  The communication with the Oracle Notification Service (ONS) for load balancing information and node up/down events can use SSL also. Create an auto-login wallet and use the wallet on the client and server.  The following is a sample sequence to create a test wallet for use with ONS. orapki wallet create -wallet ons -auto_login -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet add -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -keysize 1024 -self_signed -validity 9999 -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet export -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -cert ons/cert.txt -pwd ONS_Wallet On the database server side, it’s necessary to define the walletfile directory in the file $CRS_HOME/opmn/conf/ons.config and run onsctl stop/start. When configuring an Active GridLink datasource, the connection to the ONS must be defined.  In addition to the host and port, the wallet file directory must be specified.  By not giving a password, a SSO wallet is assumed. Summary To use SSL with the Oracle thin driver without any clear text passwords, use an SSO Oracle Wallet.  SSL support in the Oracle thin driver is available starting in 10g Release 2.

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• Oracle GoldenGate 12c - Leading Enterprise Replication

  - by Doug Reid

  Oracle GoldenGate 12c released  on October 17th and includes several new cutting edge features that firmly establishes GoldenGate's leader position in the data replication space.   In fact, this release more than doubles the performance of data delivery, supports Oracle's new multitenant database feature,  it's more secure, has more options for high availability, and has made great strides to simplify the configuration and deployment of the product.     Read through the press release if you haven't already and do not miss the quote from Cern's Eva Dafonte Perez, regarding Oracle GoldenGate 12c "….performs five times faster compared to previous GoldenGate versions and simplifies the management of a multi-tier environment" There are a variety of new and improved features in the Oracle GoldenGate 12c.  Here are the highlights: Optimized for Oracle Database 12c -  GoldenGate 12c is custom tailored to the unique capabilities of Oracle database 12c and out of the box GoldenGate 12c supports multitenant (pluggable database (PDB)) and non-consolidated deployments of Oracle Database 12c.   The naming convention used by database 12c is now in three parts (PDB-name, schema-name, and object name).  We have made changes to the GoldenGate capture process to support the new naming convention and streamlined the whole process so a single GoldenGate capture process is being used at the container level rather than at each individual PDB.  By having the capture process at the container level resource usage and the number of processes are reduced. To view a conceptual architecture diagram click here. Integrated Delivery for the Oracle Database - Leveraging a lightweight streaming API built exclusively for Oracle GoldenGate 12c, this process distributes load, auto tunes the degree of parallelism, scales better, and delivers blinding rates of changed data delivery to the Oracle database.  One of the goals for Oracle GoldenGate 12c was to reduce IT costs by simplifying the configuration and reduce the time to manage complex infrastructures.  In previous versions of Oracle GoldenGate, customers would split transaction loads by grouping tables into multiple different delivery processes (click here to view the previous method). Each delivery process executed independently and without any interaction or knowledge of other delivery processes.  This setup was complicated to configure and time consuming as the developer needed in-depth knowledge of the source and target schemas and the transaction profile. With GoldenGate 12c and Integrated Delivery we have made it easier to configure and faster to deploy.  To view a conceptual architecture diagram of integrated delivery click here Coordinated Delivery for Non-Oracle Databases - Coordinated Delivery orchestrates high-speed apply processes and simplifies the configuration of GoldenGate for non-Oracle targets. In Oracle GoldenGate 12c a single delivery process is used with multiple threads (click here) and key events, such as primary key updates, event markers, DDL, etc, are coordinated between the various threads to insure that the transactions are applied in the same sequence as they were captured, all while delivery improved performance.  Replication Between On-Premises and Cloud-Based systems. - The trend for business to utilize both on-premises and cloud-based systems is rising and businesses need to replicate data back and forth.   GoldenGate 12c can be configured in a variety of ways to provide real-time replication when unrestricted or restricted (limited ports or HTTP tunneling) networks are between on-premises and cloud-based systems.    Expanded Heterogeneity - It wouldn't be a GoldenGate release without new and improved platform support.   Release 1 includes support for MySQL 5.6 and Sybase 15.7.   Upcoming in the next release GoldenGate, support will be expanded for MS SQL Server, DB2, and Teradata. Tighter Security - Oracle GoldenGate 12c is integrated with the Oracle wallet to shield usernames and passwords using strong encryption and aliases.   Customers accustomed to using the Oracle Wallet with other Oracle products will instantly be familiar with how to use this great new feature Expanded Oracle Application and Technology Support -   GoldenGate can be used along with Oracle Coherence to enable real-time changed data feeds to the Coherence cache using Toplink and the Oracle GoldenGate JMS adapter.     Plus,  Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) now offers a low downtime E-Business Suite platform and database migrations using GoldenGate as the enabling technology.  Keep tuned for more blogs on the new features and the upcoming launch webcast where we will go into these new features in more detail.   In the mean time make sure to read through our white paper "Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 1 New Features Overview"

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment.  The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings.  However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy.  For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud.  Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models:  Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering.  Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments.  It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers.  Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need.  Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade.  The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities.  In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need.  Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds.  This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings.  Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds.  In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud.  Oracle can.  It is important for customers that the products and technologies  Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds.  Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse,  as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page.    Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

  - by Bill Evjen

  The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

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• A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

  - by andrewbrust

  Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan.  Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn.  How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that.  NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that.  Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent.  Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy.  Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product.  How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers?  Well, it can be tough.  Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons.  Support fro SharePoint development is a big one.  In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best.  Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help.  There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS.  So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze.  The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection.  If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute.  I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features.  This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug.  Cool?  Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done.  Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred.  VS 2010 allows all that.  This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s.  His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.”  If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it.  It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient.  Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now.  There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7.  With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age.  How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely?  Hard to say.  But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK.  And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics?  I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement.  I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

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• Memento with optional state?

  - by Korey Hinton

  EDIT: As pointed out by Steve Evers and pdr, I am not correctly implementing the Memento pattern, my design is actually State pattern. Menu Program I built a console-based menu program with multiple levels that selects a particular test to run. Each level more precisely describes the operation. At any level you can type back to go back one level (memento). Level 1: Server Type? [1] Server A [2] Server B Level 2: Server environment? [1] test [2] production Level 3: Test type? [1] load [2] unit Level 4: Data Collection? [1] Legal docs [2] Corporate docs Level 4.5 (optional): Load Test Type [2] Multi TIF [2] Single PDF Level 5: Command Type? [1] Move [2] Copy [3] Remove [4] Custom Level 6: Enter a keyword [setup, cleanup, run] Design States PROBLEM: Right now the STATES enum is the determining factor as to what state is BACK and what state is NEXT yet it knows nothing about what the current memento state is. Has anyone experienced a similar issue and found an effective way to handle mementos with optional state? static enum STATES { SERVER, ENVIRONMENT, TEST_TYPE, COLLECTION, COMMAND_TYPE, KEYWORD, FINISHED } Possible Solution (Not-flexible) In reference to my code below, every case statement in the Menu class could check the state of currentMemo and then set the STATE (enum) accordingly to pass to the Builder. However, this doesn't seem flexible very flexible to change and I'm struggling to see an effective way refactor the design. class Menu extends StateConscious { private State state; private Scanner reader; private ServerUtils utility; Menu() { state = new State(); reader = new Scanner(System.in); utility = new ServerUtils(); } // Recurring menu logic public void startPromptingLoop() { List<State> states = new ArrayList<>(); states.add(new State()); boolean redoInput = false; boolean userIsDone = false; while (true) { // get Memento from last loop Memento currentMemento = states.get(states.size() - 1) .saveMemento(); if (currentMemento == null) currentMemento = new Memento.Builder(0).build(); if (!redoInput) System.out.println(currentMemento.prompt); redoInput = false; // prepare Memento for next loop Memento nextMemento = null; STATES state = STATES.values()[states.size() - 1]; // get user input String selection = reader.nextLine(); switch (selection) { case "exit": reader.close(); return; // only escape case "quit": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); break; case "back": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(previous(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); if (states.size() <= 1) { states.remove(0); } else { states.remove(states.size() - 1); states.remove(states.size() - 1); } break; case "1": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "2": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "3": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "4": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; default: if (state.equals(STATES.CATEGORY)) { String command = selection; System.out.println("Executing " + command + " command on: " + currentMemento.type + " " + currentMemento.environment); utility.executeCommand(currentMemento.nickname, command); userIsDone = true; states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else if (state.equals(STATES.KEYWORD)) { nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else { redoInput = true; System.out.println("give it another try"); continue; } break; } if (userIsDone) { // start the recurring menu over from the beginning for (int i = 0; i < states.size(); i++) { if (i != 0) { states.remove(i); // remove all except first } } reader = new Scanner(System.in); this.state = new State(); userIsDone = false; } if (!redoInput) { this.state.restoreMemento(nextMemento); states.add(this.state); } } } }

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• SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record Performance on Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered world record performance with subsecond response time on the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 11. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved throughput of 430,000 cube-queries/hour with an average response time of 0.85 seconds and the median response time of 0.43 seconds. This was achieved by using only 60% of the available CPU resources leaving plenty of headroom for future growth. The SPARC T4-4 server operated on an Oracle OLAP cube with a 4 billion row fact table of sales data containing 4 dimensions. This represents as many as 90 quintillion aggregate rows (90 followed by 18 zeros). Performance Landscape Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark 4 Billion Fact Table Rows System Queries/hour Users* Response Time (sec) Average Median SPARC T4-4 430,000 7,300 0.85 0.43 * Users - the supported number of users with a given think time of 60 seconds Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 1 TB memory Data Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR) 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (each with 80 FMODs) Redo Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR with 8 HDD) Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3) with Oracle OLAP option Benchmark Description The Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark is a workload designed to demonstrate and stress the Oracle OLAP product's core features of fast query, fast update, and rich calculations on a multi-dimensional model to support enhanced Data Warehousing. The bulk of the benchmark entails running a number of concurrent users, each issuing typical multidimensional queries against an Oracle OLAP cube consisting of a number of years of sales data with fully pre-computed aggregations. The cube has four dimensions: time, product, customer, and channel. Each query user issues approximately 150 different queries. One query chain may ask for total sales in a particular region (e.g South America) for a particular time period (e.g. Q4 of 2010) followed by additional queries which drill down into sales for individual countries (e.g. Chile, Peru, etc.) with further queries drilling down into individual stores, etc. Another query chain may ask for yearly comparisons of total sales for some product category (e.g. major household appliances) and then issue further queries drilling down into particular products (e.g. refrigerators, stoves. etc.), particular regions, particular customers, etc. Results from version 2 of the benchmark are not comparable with version 1. The primary difference is the type of queries along with the query mix. Key Points and Best Practices Since typical BI users are often likely to issue similar queries, with different constants in the where clauses, setting the init.ora prameter "cursor_sharing" to "force" will provide for additional query throughput and a larger number of potential users. Except for this setting, together with making full use of available memory, out of the box performance for the OLAP Perf workload should provide results similar to what is reported here. For a given number of query users with zero think time, the main measured metrics are the average query response time, the median query response time, and the query throughput. A derived metric is the maximum number of users the system can support achieving the measured response time assuming some non-zero think time. The calculation of the maximum number of users follows from the well-known response-time law N = (rt + tt) * tp where rt is the average response time, tt is the think time and tp is the measured throughput. Setting tt to 60 seconds, rt to 0.85 seconds and tp to 119.44 queries/sec (430,000 queries/hour), the above formula shows that the T4-4 server will support 7,300 concurrent users with a think time of 60 seconds and an average response time of 0.85 seconds. For more information see chapter 3 from the book "Quantitative System Performance" cited below. -- See Also Quantitative System Performance Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models Edward D. Lazowska, John Zahorjan, G. Scott Graham, Kenneth C. Sevcik external local Oracle Database 11g – Oracle OLAP oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 11/2/2012.

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• grid layout default on wordpress theme

  - by nathan philpott

  I'm having trouble with a multi-layout option on a wordpress theme sight http://sight.wpshower.com/ the traffic have the option of a grid or a list layout at the click of a button. at present the list layout is default. I am interested in making the grid layout default . this is some of the php, i tried simply swapping the word grid for list but although this does work to an extent , if done on the loop.php page it removes the a:hover functions on the post boxes in the grid format. also if done on the index.php it switches buttons on the main index page. any ideas?? loop.php <div id="loop" class="<?php if ($_COOKIE['mode'] == 'grid') echo 'grid'; else echo 'list'; ?> clear"> <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> <div <?php post_class('post clear'); ?> id="post_<?php the_ID(); ?>"> <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) :?> <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" class="thumb"><?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail', array( 'alt' => trim(strip_tags( $post->post_title )), 'title' => trim(strip_tags( $post->post_title )), )); ?></a> <?php endif; ?> <div class="post-category"><?php the_category(' / '); ?></div> <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <!-- <div class="post-meta">by <span class="post-author"><a href="<?php echo get_author_posts_url(get_the_author_meta('ID')); ?>" title="Posts by <?php the_author(); ?>"><?php the_author(); ?></a></span> on <span class="post-date"><?php the_time(__('M j, Y')) ?></span> <em>&bull; </em><?php comments_popup_link(__('No Comments'), __('1 Comment'), __('% Comments'), '', __('Comments Closed')); ?> <?php edit_post_link( __( 'Edit entry'), '<em>&bull; </em>'); ?> </div> --> <?php edit_post_link( __( 'Edit entry'), '<em>&bull; </em>'); ?> <div class="post-content"><?php if (function_exists('smart_excerpt')) smart_excerpt(get_the_excerpt(), 55); ?></div> </div> <?php endwhile; ?> </div> <?php endif; ?> index.php <?php get_header(); ?> <div class="content-title"> Projects <a href="javascript: void(0);" id="mode"<?php if ($_COOKIE['mode'] == 'grid') echo ' class="flip"'; ?>></a> </div> <?php query_posts(array( 'post__not_in' => $exl_posts, 'paged' => $paged, ) ); ?> <?php get_template_part('loop'); ?> <?php wp_reset_query(); ?> <?php get_template_part('pagination'); ?> <?php get_footer(); ?>

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• Texture and Lighting Issue in 3D world

  - by noah

  Im using OpenGL ES 1.1 for iPhone. I'm attempting to implement a skybox in my 3d world and started out by following one of Jeff Lamarches tutorials on creating textures. Heres the tutorial: iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-part-6_25.html Ive successfully added the image to my 3d world but am not sure why the lighting on the other shapes has changed so much. I want the shapes to be the original color and have the image in the background. Before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojmb8793vj514h0/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.34.44%20PM.png After: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8v6yvur8amgudia/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.35.31%20PM.png Heres the init OpenGL: - (void)initOpenGLES1 { glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enable lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); // Turn the first light on glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); const GLfloat lightAmbient[] = {0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightDiffuse[] = {0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0}; const GLfloat matAmbient[] = {0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.5}; const GLfloat matDiffuse[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat matSpecular[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightPosition[] = {0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0}; const GLfloat lightShininess = 100.0; //Configure OpenGL lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_AMBIENT, matAmbient); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_DIFFUSE, matDiffuse); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SPECULAR, matSpecular); glMaterialf(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SHININESS, lightShininess); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_AMBIENT, lightAmbient); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, lightDiffuse); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, lightPosition); // Define a cutoff angle glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_SPOT_CUTOFF, 40.0); // Set the clear color glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1.0f); // Projection Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); CGSize layerSize = self.view.layer.frame.size; // Swapped height and width for landscape mode gluPerspective(45.0f, (GLfloat)layerSize.height / (GLfloat)layerSize.width, 0.1f, 750.0f); [self initSkyBox]; // Modelview Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // This next line is not really needed as it is the default for OpenGL ES glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glDisable(GL_BLEND); // Enable depth testing glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); } Heres the drawSkybox that gets called in the drawFrame method: -(void)drawSkyBox { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); static const SSVertex3D vertices[] = { {-1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, {-1.0, -1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, -1.0, -0.0} }; static const SSVertex3D normals[] = { {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0} }; static const GLfloat texCoords[] = { 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0 }; glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(0.0, 0.0, -3.0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices); glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, normals); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, texCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Heres the init Skybox: -(void)initSkyBox { // Turn necessary features on glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_SRC_COLOR); // Bind the number of textures we need, in this case one. glGenTextures(1, &texture[0]); // create a texture obj, give unique ID glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // load our new texture name into the current texture glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"space" ofType:@"jpg"]; NSData *texData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:texData]; GLuint width = CGImageGetWidth(image.CGImage); GLuint height = CGImageGetHeight(image.CGImage); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); void *imageData = malloc( height * width * 4 ); // times 4 because will write one byte for rgb and alpha CGContextRef cgContext = CGBitmapContextCreate( imageData, width, height, 8, 4 * width, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big ); // Flip the Y-axis CGContextTranslateCTM (cgContext, 0, height); CGContextScaleCTM (cgContext, 1.0, -1.0); CGColorSpaceRelease( colorSpace ); CGContextClearRect( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ) ); CGContextDrawImage( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ), image.CGImage ); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, imageData); CGContextRelease(cgContext); free(imageData); [image release]; [texData release]; } Any help is greatly appreciated.

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• How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Ransomware: Why This New Malware is So Dangerous and How to Protect Yourself

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ransomware is a type of malware that tries to extort money from you. One of the nastiest examples, CryptoLocker, takes your files hostage and holds them for ransom, forcing you to pay hundreds of dollars to regain access. Most malware is no longer created by bored teenagers looking to cause some chaos. Much of the current malware is now produced by organized crime for profit and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. How Ransomware Works Not all ransomware is identical. The key thing that makes a piece of malware “ransomware” is that it attempts to extort a direct payment from you. Some ransomware may be disguised. It may function as “scareware,” displaying a pop-up that says something like “Your computer is infected, purchase this product to fix the infection” or “Your computer has been used to download illegal files, pay a fine to continue using your computer.” In other situations, ransomware may be more up-front. It may hook deep into your system, displaying a message saying that it will only go away when you pay money to the ransomware’s creators. This type of malware could be bypassed via malware removal tools or just by reinstalling Windows. Unfortunately, Ransomware is becoming more and more sophisticated. One of the latest examples, CryptoLocker, starts encrypting your personal files as soon as it gains access to your system, preventing access to the files without knowing the encryption key. CryptoLocker then displays a message informing you that your files have been locked with encryption and that you have just a few days to pay up. If you pay them $300, they’ll hand you the encryption key and you can recover your files. CryptoLocker helpfully walks you through choosing a payment method and, after paying, the criminals seem to actually give you a key that you can use to restore your files. You can never be sure that the criminals will keep their end of the deal, of course. It’s not a good idea to pay up when you’re extorted by criminals. On the other hand, businesses that lose their only copy of business-critical data may be tempted to take the risk — and it’s hard to blame them. Protecting Your Files From Ransomware This type of malware is another good example of why backups are essential. You should regularly back up files to an external hard drive or a remote file storage server. If all your copies of your files are on your computer, malware that infects your computer could encrypt them all and restrict access — or even delete them entirely. When backing up files, be sure to back up your personal files to a location where they can’t be written to or erased. For example, place them on a removable hard drive or upload them to a remote backup service like CrashPlan that would allow you to revert to previous versions of files. Don’t just store your backups on an internal hard drive or network share you have write access to. The ransomware could encrypt the files on your connected backup drive or on your network share if you have full write access. Frequent backups are also important. You wouldn’t want to lose a week’s worth of work because you only back up your files every week. This is part of the reason why automated back-up solutions are so convenient. If your files do become locked by ransomware and you don’t have the appropriate backups, you can try recovering them with ShadowExplorer. This tool accesses “Shadow Copies,” which Windows uses for System Restore — they will often contain some personal files. How to Avoid Ransomware Aside from using a proper backup strategy, you can avoid ransomware in the same way you avoid other forms of malware. CryptoLocker has been verified to arrive through email attachments, via the Java plug-in, and installed on computers that are part of the Zeus botnet. Use a good antivirus product that will attempt to stop ransomware in its tracks. Antivirus programs are never perfect and you could be infected even if you run one, but it’s an important layer of defense. Avoid running suspicious files. Ransomware can arrive in .exe files attached to emails, from illicit websites containing pirated software, or anywhere else that malware comes from. Be alert and exercise caution over the files you download and run. Keep your software updated. Using an old version of your web browser, operating system, or a browser plugin can allow malware in through open security holes. If you have Java installed, you should probably uninstall it. For more tips, read our list of important security practices you should be following. Ransomware — CryptoLocker in particular — is brutally efficient and smart. It just wants to get down to business and take your money. Holding your files hostage is an effective way to prevent removal by antivirus programs after it’s taken root, but CryptoLocker is much less scary if you have good backups. This sort of malware demonstrates the importance of backups as well as proper security practices. Unfortunately, CryptoLocker is probably a sign of things to come — it’s the kind of malware we’ll likely be seeing more of in the future.     

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• BizTalk: Sample: Context routing and Throttling with orchestration

  - by Leonid Ganeline

  The sample demonstrates using orchestration for throttling and using context routing. Usually throttling is implemented on the host level (in BizTalk 2010 we can also using the host instance level throttling). Here is demonstrated the throttling with orchestration convoy that slows down message flow from some customers. Sample implements sort of quality service agreement layer for different kind of customers. The sample demonstrates the context routing between orchestrations. It has several advantages over the content routing. For example, we don’t have to create the property schema and promote properties on the schemas; we don’t have to change the message content to change routing. Use case:  The BizTalk application has a main processing orchestration that process all input messages. The application usually works as an OLTP application. Input messages came in random order without peaks, typical scenario for the on-line users. But sometimes the big data batch payloads come. These batches overload processing orchestrations. All processes, activated by on-line users after the payload, come to the same queue and are processed only after the payload. Result is on-line users can see significant delay in processing. It can be minutes or hours, depending of the batch size. Requirements: On-line user’s processing should work without delays. Big batches cannot disturb on-line users. There should be higher priority for the on-line users and the lower priority for the batches. Design: Decision is to divide the message flow in two branches, one for on-line users and second for batches. Branch with batches provides messages to the processing line with low priority, and the on-line user’s branch – with high priority. All messages are provided by hi-speed receive port. BTS.ReceivePortName context property is used for routing. The Router orchestration separates messages sent from on-line users and from the batch messages. But the Router does not use the BizTalk provided value of this property, the Router set up this value by itself. Router uses the content of the messages to decide if it is from on-line users or from batches. The message context property the BTS.ReceivePortName is changed respectively, its value works as a recipient address, as the “To” address for the next recipient orchestrations. Those next orchestrations are the BatchBottleneck and the MainProcess orchestrations. Messages with context equal “ToBatch” are filtered up by the BatchBottleneck orchestration. It is a unified convoy orchestration and it throttles the message flow, delaying the message delivery to the MainProcess orchestration. The BatchBottleneck orchestration changes the message context to the “ToProcess” and sends messages one after another with small delay in between. Delay can be configured in the BizTalk config file as:                 <appSettings>                                 <add key="GLD_Tests_TwoWayRouting_BatchBottleneck_DelayMillisec" value="100"/>                 </appSettings>   Of course, messages with context equal “ToProcess” are filtered up by the MainProcess orchestration.   NOTES: Filters with string values: In Orchestrations (the first Receive shape in orchestration) use string values WITH quotes; in Send Ports use string values WITHOUT quotes. Filters on the Send Ports are dynamic; we can change them in run-time. Filters on the Orchestrations are static; we can change them only in design-time. To check the existence of the promoted property inside orchestration use the Expression shape with construction like this:       if (BTS.ReceivePortName exists myMessage) { …; } It is not possible in the Message Assignment shape because using the “if” statement inside Message Assignment is prohibited. Several predefined context properties can behave in specific way. Say MessageTracking.OriginatingMessage or XMLNORM.DocumentSpecName, they are required some internal rules should be applied to the format or usage of this properties. MessageTracking.* parameters require you have to use tracking and you can get unexpected run-time errors in some cases. My recommendation is - use very limited set of the predefined context properties. To “attach” the new promoted property to the message, we have to use correlation. The correlation type should include this property. [Here is a good explanation by Saravana ] The sample code is here [sorry, temporary trubles with CodePlex].

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• Unexpected advantage of Engineered Systems

  - by user12244672

  It's not surprising that Engineered Systems accelerate the debugging and resolution of customer issues. But what has surprised me is just how much faster issue resolution is with Engineered Systems such as SPARC SuperCluster. These are powerful, complex, systems used by customers wanting extreme database performance, app performance, and cost saving server consolidation. A SPARC SuperCluster consists or 2 or 4 powerful T4-4 compute nodes, 3 or 6 extreme performance Exadata Storage Cells, a ZFS Storage Appliance 7320 for general purpose storage, and ultra fast Infiniband switches.  Each with its own firmware. It runs Solaris 11, Solaris 10, 11gR2, LDoms virtualization, and Zones virtualization on the T4-4 compute nodes, a modified version of Solaris 11 in the ZFS Storage Appliance, a modified and highly tuned version of Oracle Linux running Exadata software on the Storage Cells, another Linux derivative in the Infiniband switches, etc. It has an Infiniband data network between the components, a 10Gb data network to the outside world, and a 1Gb management network. And customers can run whatever middleware and apps they want on it, clustered in whatever way they want. In one word, powerful.  In another, complex. The system is highly Engineered.  But it's designed to run general purpose applications. That is, the physical components, configuration, cabling, virtualization technologies, switches, firmware, Operating System versions, network protocols, tunables, etc. are all preset for optimum performance and robustness. That improves the customer experience as what the customer runs leverages our technical know-how and best practices and is what we've tested intensely within Oracle. It should also make debugging easier by fixing a large number of variables which would otherwise be in play if a customer or Systems Integrator had assembled such a complex system themselves from the constituent components.  For example, there's myriad network protocols which could be used with Infiniband.  Myriad ways the components could be interconnected, myriad tunable settings, etc. But what has really surprised me - and I've been working in this area for 15 years now - is just how much easier and faster Engineered Systems have made debugging and issue resolution. All those error opportunities for sub-optimal cabling, unusual network protocols, sub-optimal deployment of virtualization technologies, issues with 3rd party storage, issues with 3rd party multi-pathing products, etc., are simply taken out of the equation. All those error opportunities for making an issue unique to a particular set-up, the "why aren't we seeing this on any other system ?" type questions, the doubts, just go away when we or a customer discover an issue on an Engineered System. It enables a really honed response, getting to the root cause much, much faster than would otherwise be the case. Here's a couple of examples from the last month, one found in-house by my team, one found by a customer: Example 1: We found a node eviction issue running 11gR2 with Solaris 11 SRU 12 under extreme load on what we call our ExaLego test system (mimics an Exadata / SuperCluster 11gR2 Exadata Storage Cell set-up).  We quickly established that an enhancement in SRU12 enabled an 11gR2 process to query Infiniband's Subnet Manager, replacing a fallback mechanism it had used previously.  Under abnormally heavy load, the query could return results which were misinterpreted resulting in node eviction.  In several daily joint debugging sessions between the Solaris, Infiniband, and 11gR2 teams, the issue was fully root caused, evaluated, and a fix agreed upon.  That fix went back into all Solaris releases the following Monday.  From initial issue discovery to the fix being put back into all Solaris releases was just 10 days. Example 2: A customer reported sporadic performance degradation.  The reasons were unclear and the information sparse.  The SPARC SuperCluster Engineered Systems support teams which comprises both SPARC/Solaris and Database/Exadata experts worked to root cause the issue.  A number of contributing factors were discovered, including tunable parameters.  An intense collaborative investigation between the engineering teams identified the root cause to a CPU bound networking thread which was being starved of CPU cycles under extreme load.  Workarounds were identified.  Modifications have been put back into 11gR2 to alleviate the issue and a development project already underway within Solaris has been sped up to provide the final resolution on the Solaris side.  The fixed SPARC SuperCluster configuration greatly aided issue reproduction and dramatically sped up root cause analysis, allowing the correct workarounds and fixes to be identified, prioritized, and implemented.  The customer is now extremely happy with performance and robustness.  Since the configuration is common to other customers, the lessons learned are being proactively rolled out to other customers and incorporated into the installation procedures for future customers.  This effectively acts as a turbo-boost to performance and reliability for all SPARC SuperCluster customers.  If this had occurred in a "home grown" system of this complexity, I expect it would have taken at least 6 months to get to the bottom of the issue.  But because it was an Engineered System, known, understood, and qualified by both the Solaris and Database teams, we were able to collaborate closely to identify cause and effect and expedite a solution for the customer.  That is a key advantage of Engineered Systems which should not be underestimated.  Indeed, the initial issue mitigation on the Database side followed by final fix on the Solaris side, highlights the high degree of collaboration and excellent teamwork between the Oracle engineering teams.  It's a compelling advantage of the integrated Oracle Red Stack in general and Engineered Systems in particular.

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• #OOW 2012 @PARIS...talking Oracle and Clouds, and Optimized Datacenter

  - by Eric Bezille

  For those of you who want to get most out of Oracle technologies to evolve your IT to the Next Wave, I encourage you to register to the up coming Oracle Optimized Datacenter event that will take place in Paris on November 28th. You will get the opportunity to exchange with Oracle experts and customers having successfully evolve their IT by leveraging Oracle technologies. You will also get the latest news on some of the Oracle systems announcements made during OOW 2012. During this event we will make an update about Oracle and Clouds, from private to public and hybrid models. So in preparing this session, I thought it was a good start to make a status of Cloud Computing in France, and CIO requirements in particular. Starting in 2009 with the first Cloud Camp in Paris, the market has evolved, but the basics are still the same : think hybrid. From Traditional IT to Clouds One size doesn't fit all, and for big companies having already an IT in place, there will be parts eligible to external (public) cloud, and parts that would be required to stay inside the firewalls, so ability to integrate both side is key.  None the less, one of the major impact of Cloud Computing trend on IT, reported by Forrester, is the pressure it makes on CIO to evolve towards the same model that end-users are now used to in their day to day life, where self-service and flexibility are paramount. This is what is driving IT to transform itself toward "a Global Service Provider", or for some as "IT "is" the Business" (see : Gartner Identifies Four Futures for IT and CIO), and for both models toward a Private Cloud Service Provider. In this journey, there is still a big difference between most of existing external Cloud and a firm IT : the number of applications that a CIO has to manage. Most cloud providers today are overly specialized, but at the end of the day, there are really few business processes that rely on only one application. So CIOs has to combine everything together external and internal. And for the internal parts that they will have to make them evolve to a Private Cloud, the scope can be very large. This will often require CIOs to evolve from their traditional approach to more disruptive ones, the time has come to introduce new standards and processes, if they want to succeed. So let's have a look at the different Cloud models, what type of users they are addressing, what value they bring and most importantly what needs to be done by the  Cloud Provider, and what is left over to the user. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS : what's provided and what needs to be done First of all the Cloud Provider will have to provide all the infrastructure needed to deliver the service. And the more value IT will want to provide, the more IT will have to deliver and integrate : from disks to applications. As we can see in the above picture, providing pure IaaS, left a lot to cover for the end-user, that’s why the end-user targeted by this Cloud Service is IT people. If you want to bring more value to developers, you need to provide to them a development platform ready to use, which is what PaaS is standing for, by providing not only the processors power, storage and OS, but also the Database and Middleware platform. SaaS being the last mile of the Cloud, providing an application ready to use by business users, the remaining part for the end-users being configuring and specifying the application for their specific usage. In addition to that, there are common challenges encompassing all type of Cloud Services : Security : covering all aspect, not only of users management but also data flows and data privacy Charge back : measuring what is used and by whom Application management : providing capabilities not only to deploy, but also to upgrade, from OS for IaaS, Database, and Middleware for PaaS, to a full Business Application for SaaS. Scalability : ability to evolve ALL the components of the Cloud Provider stack as needed Availability : ability to cover “always on” requirements Efficiency : providing a infrastructure that leverage shared resources in an efficient way and still comply to SLA (performances, availability, scalability, and ability to evolve) Automation : providing the orchestration of ALL the components in all service life-cycle (deployment, growth & shrink (elasticity), upgrades,...) Management : providing monitoring, configuring and self-service up to the end-users Oracle Strategy and Clouds For CIOs to succeed in their Private Cloud implementation, means that they encompass all those aspects for each component life-cycle that they selected to build their Cloud. That’s where a multi-vendors layered approach comes short in terms of efficiency. That’s the reason why Oracle focus on taking care of all those aspects directly at Engineering level, to truly provide efficient Cloud Services solutions for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We are going as far as embedding software functions in hardware (storage, processor level,...) to ensure the best SLA with the highest efficiency. The beauty of it, as we rely on standards, is that the Oracle components that you are running today in-house, are exactly the same that we are using to build Clouds, bringing you flexibility, reversibility and fast path to adoption. With Oracle Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic & SPARC SuperCluster, more specifically, when talking about Cloud), we are delivering all those components hardware and software already engineered together at Oracle factory, with a single pane of glace for the management of ALL the components through Oracle Enterprise Manager, and with high-availability, scalability and ability to evolve by design. To give you a feeling of what does that bring in terms just of implementation project timeline, for example with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster, we have a consistent track of record to have the system plug into existing Datacenter and ready in a week. This includes Oracle Database, OS, virtualization, Database Storage (Exadata Storage Cells in this case), Application Storage, and all network configuration. This strategy enable CIOs to very quickly build Cloud Services, taking out not only the complexity of integrating everything together but also taking out the automation and evolution complexity and cost. I invite you to discuss all those aspect in regards of your particular context face2face on November 28th.

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• Microsoft BUILD 2013 Day 1&ndash;Keynote

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013-day-1ndashkeynote.aspx This one is going to be a little long because the keynote was jam-packed so bare with me. The keynote for the first day of BUILD 2013 was kicked off by Steve Balmer.  He made it very clear that Microsoft’s focus is on accelerating its time to market with products and product updates.  His quote was that “Rapid release” is the new norm.  He continued by showing off several new Lumias that have been buzzing around the internet for a while and announce that Sprint will now be carrying the HTC 8XT and Samsung ATIV. Balmer is known for repeating words or phrase for affect.  This time it was “Rapid release, rapid release” and “Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, …”.  This was fun, but even more fun was when he announce that all attendees would receive an Acer Iconia 8” tablet. SCORE! The next subject Balmer focused on is new apps.  The three new ones were Flipboard, Facebook and NFL Fantasy Football.  I liked the first two because these are ones that people coming from other platforms are missing.  The NFL app is great just because it targets a demographic that can be fanatical.  If these types of apps keep coming than the missing app argument goes away. While many Negative Nancy’s are describing Windows 8.1 as Windows 180 Steve Balmer chose to call it a “refined blend” as in a coffee that has been improved with a new mix.  This includes more multi-tasking options and leveraging Bing straight throughout the entire ecosystem. He ended this first section by explaining that this will also bring more Bing development opportunities to the community. Steve Balmer was followed by Julie Larson-Green who spent her time on stage selling us on Windows 8 all over again from my point of view.  Something that I would not have thought was needed until I had listened to some other attendees who had a number of concerns and complaints.  She showed a number of new gestures that will come with Windows 8.1, and while they were cool I was left wondering if they really improved the experience.  I guess only time will tell. I did like the fact that it the UI implementation to bring up “All Apps” now mirrors that of Windows Phone.  The consistency is a big step forward that I hope to see continue.  The cool factor went up from there as she swiped content from a desktop (mega-tablet) to the XBox One.  This seamless experience I believe is what is really needed for any future platform to be relevant. I was much more enthused by the presentation of Antoine Leblond who humbled us by letting us know that there are 5k new API.  How that can be or how anyone would ever use all of them is another question.  His announcement was that the Visual Studio 2013 preview would be available today along with the Windows 8.1 bits.  One of the features of VS2013 that he demonstrated is the power consumption profiler.  With battery life being a key factor with consumer consumption devices this is a welcome addition. He didn’t limit his presentation to VS2013 features though.  He showed how the Store has been redesigned to enable better search and discoverability of apps and how Win 8.1 can perform multiple screen scales depending on the resolution of the device automatically.  The last feature he demoed was the real time video streaming API which he made sure we understood by attaching a Surface to a little robot.  Oh, but there was one more thing.  Antoine and Julie announce that all attendees would also be getting Surface Pros.  BONUS! How much more could there be?  Gurdeep Singh Pall was about to pile on.  He introduced us to Bing as a platform (BaaP?).  He said if they (Microsoft) could do something with and API that is good 3rd party developers can do something that is dynamite and showed us some of the tools they had produced.  These included natural user interface improvements such as voice commands that looked to put Siri to shame.  Add to that 3D, OCR and translation capabilities and the future looks to be full of opportunities. Balmer then came out to show us one last thing.  Project Spark is a game design environment that will be available for Windows 8.1, XBox 360 and XBox One.  All I can say is that if my kids get their hands on this they are going to be able to learn some of what dad does in a much more enjoyable way. At the end of it all I was both exhausted and energized by what I saw.  What could they have possibly left for the day 2 keynote?  I hear it will feature Scott Hanselman.  If that is right we are in for a treat.  See you there. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote,Bing,Visual Studio 2013,Project Spark

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• What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

  - by Jacek Ziabicki

  Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• ADF Reusable Artefacts

  - by Arda Eralp

  Primary reusable ADF Business Component: Entity Objects (EOs) View Objects (VOs) Application Modules (AMs) Framework Extensions Classes Primary reusable ADF Controller: Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) Task Flow Templates Primary reusable ADF Faces: Page Templates Skins Declarative Components Utility Classes Certain components will often be used more than once. Whether the reuse happens within the same application, or across different applications, it is often advantageous to package these reusable components into a library that can be shared between different developers, across different teams, and even across departments within an organization. In the world of Java object-oriented programming, reusing classes and objects is just standard procedure. With the introduction of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, applications can be further modularized into separate model, view, and controller layers. By separating the data (model and business services layers) from the presentation (view and controller layers), you ensure that changes to any one layer do not affect the integrity of the other layers. You can change business logic without having to change the UI, or redesign the web pages or front end without having to recode domain logic. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper support the MVC design pattern. When you create an application in JDeveloper, you can choose many application templates that automatically set up data model and user interface projects. Because the different MVC layers are decoupled from each other, development can proceed on different projects in parallel and with a certain amount of independence. ADF Library further extends this modularity of design by providing a convenient and practical way to create, deploy, and reuse high-level components. When you first design your application, you design it with component reusability in mind. If you created components that can be reused, you can package them into JAR files and add them to a reusable component repository. If you need a component, you may look into the repository for those components and then add them into your project or application. For example, you can create an application module for a domain and package it to be used as the data model project in several different applications. Or, if your application will be consuming components, you may be able to load a page template component from a repository of ADF Library JARs to create common look and feel pages. Then you can put your page flow together by stringing together several task flow components pulled from the library. An ADF Library JAR contains ADF components and does not, and cannot, contain other JARs. It should not be confused with the JDeveloper library, Java EE library, or Oracle WebLogic shared library. Reusable Component Description Data Control Any data control can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR. Some of the data controls supported by Oracle ADF include application modules, Enterprise JavaBeans, web services, URL services, JavaBeans, and placeholder data controls. Application Module When you are using ADF Business Components and you generate an application module, an associated application module data control is also generated. When you package an application module data control, you also package up the ADF Business Components associated with that application module. The relevant entity objects, view objects, and associations will be a part of the ADF Library JAR and available for reuse. Business Components Business components are the entity objects, view objects, and associations used in the ADF Business Components data model project. You can package business components by themselves or together with an application module. Task Flows & Task Flow Templates Task flows can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR for reuse. If you drop a bounded task flow that uses page fragments, JDeveloper adds a region to the page and binds it to the dropped task flow. ADF bounded task flows built using pages can be dropped onto pages. The drop will create a link to call the bounded task flow. A task flow call activity and control flow will automatically be added to the task flow, with the view activity referencing the page. If there is more than one existing task flow with a view activity referencing the page, it will prompt you to select the one to automatically add a task flow call activity and control flow. If an ADF task flow template was created in the same project as the task flow, the ADF task flow template will be included in the ADF Library JAR and will be reusable. Page Templates You can package a page template and its artifacts into an ADF Library JAR. If the template uses image files and they are included in a directory within your project, these files will also be available for the template during reuse. Declarative Components You can create declarative components and package them for reuse. The tag libraries associated with the component will be included and loaded into the consuming project. You can also package up projects that have several different reusable components if you expect that more than one component will be consumed. For example, you can create a project that has both an application module and a bounded task flow. When this ADF Library JAR file is consumed, the application will have both the application module and the task flow available for use. You can package multiple components into one JAR file, or you can package a single component into a JAR file. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper give you the option and flexibility to create reusable components that best suit you and your organization. You create a reusable component by using JDeveloper to package and deploy the project that contains the components into a ADF Library JAR file. You use the components by adding that JAR to the consuming project. At design time, the JAR is added to the consuming project's class path and so is available for reuse. At runtime, the reused component runs from the JAR file by reference.

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• Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

  - by yaldahhakim

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power. Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud. Cloud computing is more than just consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something. Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services  platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.) Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain. Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way. In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.

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