static content - Page 603

Camera frustum calculation coming out wrong

- by Telanor

I'm trying to calculate a view/projection/bounding frustum for the 6 directions of a point light and I'm having trouble with the views pointing along the Y axis. Our game uses a right-handed, Y-up system. For the other 4 directions I create the LookAt matrix using (0, 1, 0) as the up vector. Obviously that doesn't work when looking along the Y axis so for those I use an up vector of (-1, 0, 0) for -Y and (1, 0, 0) for +Y. The view matrix seems to come out correctly (and the projection matrix always stays the same), but the bounding frustum is definitely wrong. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong? This is the code I'm using: camera.Projection = Matrix.PerspectiveFovRH((float)Math.PI / 2, ShadowMapSize / (float)ShadowMapSize, 1, 5); for(var i = 0; i < 6; i++) { var renderTargetView = shadowMap.GetRenderTargetView((TextureCubeFace)i); var up = DetermineLightUp((TextureCubeFace) i); var forward = DirectionToVector((TextureCubeFace) i); camera.View = Matrix.LookAtRH(this.Position, this.Position + forward, up); camera.BoundingFrustum = new BoundingFrustum(camera.View * camera.Projection); } private static Vector3 DirectionToVector(TextureCubeFace direction) { switch (direction) { case TextureCubeFace.NegativeX: return -Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.NegativeY: return -Vector3.UnitY; case TextureCubeFace.NegativeZ: return -Vector3.UnitZ; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveX: return Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveY: return Vector3.UnitY; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveZ: return Vector3.UnitZ; default: throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("direction"); } } private static Vector3 DetermineLightUp(TextureCubeFace direction) { switch (direction) { case TextureCubeFace.NegativeY: return -Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveY: return Vector3.UnitX; default: return Vector3.UnitY; } } Edit: Here's what the values are coming out to for the PositiveX and PositiveY directions: Constants: Position = {X:0 Y:360 Z:0} camera.Projection = [M11:0.9999999 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0.9999999 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:0 M32:0 M33:-1.25 M34:-1] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:-1.25 M44:0] PositiveX: up = {X:0 Y:1 Z:0} target = {X:1 Y:360 Z:0} camera.View = [M11:0 M12:0 M13:-1 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:1 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:1 M32:0 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:-360 M43:0 M44:1] camera.BoundingFrustum: Matrix = [M11:0 M12:0 M13:1.25 M14:1] [M21:0 M22:0.9999999 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:0.9999999 M32:0 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:-360 M43:-1.25 M44:0] Top = {A:0.7071068 B:-0.7071068 C:0 D:254.5584} Bottom = {A:0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5584} Left = {A:0.7071068 B:0 C:0.7071068 D:0} Right = {A:0.7071068 B:0 C:-0.7071068 D:0} Near = {A:1 B:0 C:0 D:-1} Far = {A:-1 B:0 C:0 D:5} PositiveY: up = {X:0 Y:0 Z:-1} target = {X:0 Y:361 Z:0} camera.View = [M11:-1 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0 M23:-1 M24:0] [M31:0 M32:-1 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:360 M44:1] camera.BoundingFrustum: Matrix = [M11:-0.9999999 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0 M23:1.25 M24:1] [M31:0 M32:-0.9999999 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:-451.25 M44:-360] Top = {A:0 B:0.7071068 C:0.7071068 D:-254.5585} Bottom = {A:0 B:0.7071068 C:-0.7071068 D:-254.5585} Left = {A:-0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5585} Right = {A:0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5585} Near = {A:0 B:1 C:0 D:-361} Far = {A:0 B:-1 C:0 D:365} When I use the resulting BoundingFrustum to cull regions outside of it, this is the result: Pass PositiveX: Drew 3 regions Pass NegativeX: Drew 6 regions Pass PositiveY: Drew 400 regions Pass NegativeY: Drew 36 regions Pass PositiveZ: Drew 3 regions Pass NegativeZ: Drew 6 regions There are only 400 regions to draw and the light is in the center of them. As you can see, the PositiveY direction is drawing every single region. With the near/far planes of the perspective matrix set as small as they are, there's no way a single frustum could contain every single region.

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Tip on Reusing Classes in Different .NET Project Types

- by psheriff

All of us have class libraries that we developed for use in our projects. When you create a .NET Class Library project with many classes, you can use that DLL in ASP.NET, Windows Forms and WPF applications. However, for Silverlight and Windows Phone, these .NET Class Libraries cannot be used. The reason is Silverlight and Windows Phone both use a scaled down version of .NET and thus do not have access to the full .NET framework class library. However, there are many classes and functionality that will work in the full .NET and in the scaled down versions that Silverlight and Windows Phone use.Let’s take an example of a class that you might want to use in all of the above mentioned projects. The code listing shown below might be something that you have in a Windows Form or an ASP.NET application. public class StringCommon{ public static bool IsAllLowerCase(string value) { return new Regex(@"^([^A-Z])+$").IsMatch(value); } public static bool IsAllUpperCase(string value) { return new Regex(@"^([^a-z])+$").IsMatch(value); }} The StringCommon class is very simple with just two methods, but you know that the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace is available in Silverlight and Windows Phone. Thus, you know that you may reuse this class in your Silverlight and Windows Phone projects. Here is the problem: if you create a Silverlight Class Library project and you right-click on that project in Solution Explorer and choose Add | Add Existing Item… from the menu, the class file StringCommon.cs will be copied from the original location and placed into the Silverlight Class Library project. You now have two files with the same code. If you want to change the code you will now need to change it in two places! This is a maintenance nightmare that you have just created. If you then add this to a Windows Phone Class Library project, you now have three places you need to modify the code! Add As LinkInstead of creating three separate copies of the same class file, you want to leave the original class file in its original location and just create a link to that file from the Silverlight and Windows Phone class libraries. Visual Studio will allow you to do this, but you need to do one additional step in the Add Existing Item dialog (see Figure 1). You will still right mouse click on the project and choose Add | Add Existing Item… from the menu. You will still highlight the file you want to add to your project, but DO NOT click on the Add button. Instead click on the drop down portion of the Add button and choose the “Add As Link” menu item. This will now create a link to the file on disk and will not copy the file into your new project. Figure 1: Add as Link will create a link, not copy the file over. When this linked file is added to your project, there will be a different icon next to that file in the Solution Explorer window. This icon signifies that this is a link to a file in another folder on your hard drive. Figure 2: The Linked file will have a different icon to show it is a link. Of course, if you have code that will not work in Silverlight or Windows Phone -- because the code has dependencies on features of .NET that are not supported on those platforms – you can always wrap conditional compilation code around the offending code so it will be removed when compiled in those class libraries. SummaryIn this short blog entry you learned how to reuse one of your class libraries from ASP.NET, Windows Forms or WPF applications in your Silverlight or Windows Phone class libraries. You can do this without creating a maintenance nightmare by using the “Add a Link” feature of the Add Existing Item dialog. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.

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A tiny Utility to recycle an IIS Application Pool

- by Rick Strahl

In the last few weeks I've annoyingly been having problems with an area on my Web site. It's basically ancient articles that are using ASP classic pages and for reasons unknown ASP classic locks up on these pages frequently. It's not an individual page, but ALL ASP classic pages lock up. Ah yes, gotta old tech gone bad. It's not super critical since the content is really old, but still a hassle since it's linked content that still gets quite a bit of traffic. When it happens all ASP classic in that AppPool dies. I've been having a hard time tracking this one down - I suspect an errant COM object I have a Web Monitor running on the server that's checking for failures and while the monitor can detect the failures when the timeouts occur, I didn't have a good way to just restart that particular application pool. I started putzing around with PowerShell, but - as so often seems the case - I can never get the PowerShell syntax right - I just don't use it enough and have to dig out cheat sheets etc. In any case, after about 20 minutes of that I decided to just create a small .NET Console Application that does the trick instead, and in a few minutes I had this:using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.DirectoryServices; namespace RecycleApplicationPool { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string appPoolName = "DefaultAppPool"; string machineName = "LOCALHOST"; if (args.Length > 0) appPoolName = args[0]; if (args.Length > 1) machineName = args[1]; string error = null; DirectoryEntry root = null; try { Console.WriteLine("Restarting Application Pool " + appPoolName + " on " + machineName + "..."); root = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + machineName + "/W3SVC/AppPools/" +appPoolName); Console.WriteLine(root.InvokeGet("Name")); root.Invoke("Recycle"); Console.WriteLine("Application Pool recycling complete..."); } catch(Exception ex) { error = "Error: Unable to access AppPool: " + ex.Message; } if ( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(error) ) { Console.WriteLine(error); return; } } } } To run in you basically provide the name of the ApplicationPool and optionally a machine name if it's not on the local box. RecyleApplicationPool.exe "WestWindArticles" And off it goes. What's nice about AppPool recycling versus doing a full IISRESET is that it only affects the AppPool, and more importantly AppPool recycles happen in a staggered fashion - the existing instance isn't shut down immediately until requests finish while a new instance is fired up to handle new requests. So, now I can easily plug this Executable into my West Wind Web Monitor as an action to take when the site is not responding or timing out which is a big improvement than hanging for an unspecified amount of time. I'm posting this fairly trivial bit of code just in case somebody (maybe myself a few months down the road) is searching for ApplicationPool recyling code. It's clearly trivial, but I've written batch files for this a bunch of times before and actually having a small utility around without having to worry whether Powershell is installed and configured right is actually an improvement. Next time I think about using PowerShell remind me that it's just easier to just build a small .NET Console app, 'k? :-) Resources Download Executable and VS Project© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in IIS7 .NET Windows Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Announcing Oracle Knowledge 8.5: Even Superheroes Need Upgrades

- by Richard Lefebvre

It’s no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven superheroes. If you've seen the recent Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one of the movies. Yeah, we’re fans. Especially as Iron Man is a regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation. Oracle certainly has its share of advanced technology. For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the company advance the science of Knowledge Management. And it was some extremely super technology. At that time, Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products, and solutions.’ One short sentence that amounts to a very tall order. Since the acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of InQuira: Oracle Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we still have bad guys to fight. And we are very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans. So what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster. First, we gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart: Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Huge scaling and performance improvements. Then we gave it a better reach: Improved iConnect functionality that delivers contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications. Better content acquisition support across disparate sources. Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language search support for 16 Languages. Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages, as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14 languages. And finally we made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter: Improved Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers. AnswerFlow for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided troubleshooting and answer delivery. Knowledge Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Knowledge Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted, actionable insights. A new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint. We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5 is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree it’s a suit worth wearing. We are continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers, to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation to build from. And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to being finished. Next we are taking Oracle Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure… By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 28 - November 3, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of Oct 28 - Nov 3, 2012. Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Mobile Development Platform Strategy Chart: ADF Mobile, WebCenter Sites, Portal, Content and Social "Unlike desktop web focused efforts, the world of mobile has undergone change at a feverish pace," says social enterprise expert John Brunswick. His extensive post charts various resources that will help you keep up. ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities | Floyd Teter The experiment is over… And now Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares his impressions after spending some time with Oracle ADF Essentials, the free version of Oracle ADF. A review of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook | RedStack "More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment." So says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team solution architect Mark Nelson of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook, by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Expanding the Oracle Enterprise Repository with functional documentation Capgemini middleware specialist Marc Kuijpers shares information on how Oracle Enterprise Repository can be configured "to contain functional assets, i.e. functional designs, use cases and a logical data model" to aid in SOA governance efforts. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what’s truly valuable. Easy way to access JPA with REST (JSON / XML) | Edwin Biemond Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond shows you "what is possible with JPA-RS, how easy it is and howto setup your own EclipseLink REST service." Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic: when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. 2012 IOUG Virtualization SIG – Online Symposium on Nov 7 and Nov 8 | Kai Yu Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu shares information on this week's IOUG Virtualization SIG online event. Does that make it a virtual virtualization event? Thought for the Day "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning — and the response would be, 'We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.'" — Mark Minasi Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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Hello, T4MVC – Goodbye, ASP.NET MVC “magic strings”

- by Brian Schroer

I’m working on my first ASP.NET MVC project, and I really, really like MVC. I hate all of the “magic strings”, though: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", "Index", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", "Create", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li> </ul> </div> They’re prone to misspelling (causing errors that won’t be caught until runtime), there’s duplication, there’s no Intellisense, and they’re not friendly to refactoring tools. I had started down the path of creating static classes with constants for the strings, e.g.: <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", DinnerControllerActions.Index, Controllers.Dinner)%></li> …but that was pretty tedious. Then I discovered T4MVC (http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC). Just add its T4MVC.tt and T4MVC.settings.t4 files to the root of your MVC application, and it magically (and this time, it’s good magic) generates code that allows you to replace the first code sample above with this: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial(MVC.Shared.Views.LogOnUserControl); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Index())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Create())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", MVC.Home.About())%></li> </ul> </div> It gives you a strongly-typed alternative to magic strings for all of these scenarios: Html.Action Html.ActionLink Html.RenderAction Html.RenderPartial Html.BeginForm Url.Action Ajax.ActionLink view names inside controllers But wait, there’s more! It even gives you static helpers for image and script links, e.g.: <img src="<%= Links.Content.nerd_jpg %>" /> <script src="<%= Links.Scripts.Map_js %>" type="text/javascript"></script> …instead of: <img src="/Content/nerd.jpg" /> <script src="/Scripts/Map.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Thanks to David Ebbo for creating this great tool. You can watch an eight and a half minute video about T4MVC on Channel 9 via this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jongalloway/Jon-Takes-Five-with-David-Ebbo-on-T4MVC/. You can download T4MVC from its CodePlex page: http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC.

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How to center and scale Silverlight applications using ViewBox control

- by Jacek Ciereszko

There are many ways to make your application scalable in Web Browser window and align it in the center. Usually we use two Grid controls to align and panel control (like Canvas) to scale our apps. Not the best solution <UserControl … > <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"> <Canvas x:Name="scalePanel" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> … </Canvas> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> The example above usually works but there are better ways. How? Use ViewBox. ViewBox control contains scale mechanisms with some stretching options. So ViewBox together with Grid control is all what we need to align and scale our applications. Good solution <UserControl … > <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Viewbox> ... </Viewbox> </Grid> </UserControl> How to find ViewBox control For those applications created in Silverlight 4, ViewBox is available in plug-in. For applications created in Silverlight 3 you can find it in Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit. Demo Let’s create a simple application that will contain: Button, TextBlock and red Rectangle. It will also have some Margin settings. This application won’t be in the center of window and it will not scale. <UserControl … > <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Grid Margin="100, 50, 100, 20"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Width="100" Height="100" Content="test"/> <TextBlock Text="Button" Width="100" Height="100" /> <Rectangle Width="100" Height="100" Fill="Red"/> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> Run demo: RUN But If we use ViewBox control, we will got centered and always scaled application. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Viewbox> <Grid Margin="100, 50, 100, 20"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Width="100" Height="100" Content="test"/> <TextBlock Text="bottom" Width="100" Height="100" /> <Rectangle Width="100" Height="100" Fill="Red"/> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Viewbox> </Grid> Link to application: RUN (try to resize application’s window) Link to source code: SilverlightCenterApplication.zip References ViewBox for Silverlight 3 http://silverlight.codeplex.com/ Polish version: http://jacekciereszko.pl/2010/05/jak-wysrodkowac-i-skalowac-aplikacje.html Jacek Ciereszko

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Announcing Oracle Knowledge 8.5: Even Superheroes Need Upgrades

- by Chris Warner

It’s no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven superheroes. If you've seen the recent Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one of the movies. Yeah, we’re fans. Especially as Iron Man is a regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation. Oracle certainly has its share of advanced technology. For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the company advance the science of Knowledge Management. And it was some extremely super technology. At that time, Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products, and solutions.’ One short sentence that amounts to a very tall order. Since the acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of InQuira: Oracle Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we still have bad guys to fight. And we are very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans. So what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster. First, we gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart: Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Huge scaling and performance improvements. Then we gave it a better reach: Improved iConnect functionality that delivers contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications. Better content acquisition support across disparate sources. Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language search support for 16 Languages. Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages, as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14 languages. And finally we made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter: Improved Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers. AnswerFlow for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided troubleshooting and answer delivery. Knowledge Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Knowledge Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted, actionable insights. A new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint. We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5 is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree it’s a suit worth wearing. We are continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers, to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation to build from. And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to being finished. Next we are taking Oracle Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure… By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011.

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SPARC T5-4 LDoms for RAC and WebLogic Clusters

- by Jeff Taylor-Oracle

I wanted to use two Oracle SPARC T5-4 servers to simultaneously host both Oracle RAC and a WebLogic Server Cluster. I chose to use Oracle VM Server for SPARC to create a cluster like this: There are plenty of trade offs and decisions that need to be made, for example: Rather than configuring the system by hand, you might want to use an Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 My configuration is similar to jsavit's: Availability Best Practices - Example configuring a T5-8 but I chose to ignore some of the advice. Maybe I should have included an alternate service domain, but I decided that I already had enough redundancy Both Oracle SPARC T5-4 servers were to be configured like this: Cntl 0.25 4 64GB App LDom 2.75 CPU's 44 cores 704 GB DB LDom One CPU 16 cores 256 GB The systems started with everything in the primary domain: # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL NORM UPTIME primary active -n-c-- UART 512 1023G 0.0% 0.0% 11m # ldm list-spconfig factory-default [current] primary # ldm list -o core,memory,physio NAME primary CORE CID CPUSET 0 (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) 1 (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) 2 (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) -- SNIP 62 (496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503) 63 (504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x30000000 255G 0x80000000000 0x80000000000 256G 0x100000000000 0x100000000000 256G 0x180000000000 0x180000000000 256G # Give this memory block to the DB LDom IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@300 pci_0 pci@340 pci_1 pci@380 pci_2 pci@3c0 pci_3 pci@400 pci_4 pci@440 pci_5 pci@480 pci_6 pci@4c0 pci_7 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE1 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE2 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RIO/NET0 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE3 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE4 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE9 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE10 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE11 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE12 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE5 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE6 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE7 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE8 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE13 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE14 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE15 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE16 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA1 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RIO/NET2 Added an additional service processor configuration: # ldm add-spconfig split # ldm list-spconfig factory-default primary split [current] And removed many of the resources from the primary domain: # ldm start-reconf primary # ldm set-core 4 primary # ldm set-memory 32G primary # ldm rm-io pci@340 primary # ldm rm-io pci@380 primary # ldm rm-io pci@3c0 primary # ldm rm-io pci@400 primary # ldm rm-io pci@440 primary # ldm rm-io pci@480 primary # ldm rm-io pci@4c0 primary # init 6 Needed to add resources to the guest domains: # ldm add-domain db # ldm set-core cid=`seq -s"," 48 63` db # ldm add-memory mblock=0x180000000000:256G db # ldm add-io pci@480 db # ldm add-io pci@4c0 db # ldm add-domain app # ldm set-core 44 app # ldm set-memory 704G app # ldm add-io pci@340 app # ldm add-io pci@380 app # ldm add-io pci@3c0 app # ldm add-io pci@400 app # ldm add-io pci@440 app Needed to set up services: # ldm add-vds primary-vds0 primary # ldm add-vcc port-range=5000-5100 primary-vcc0 primary Needed to add a virtual network port for the WebLogic application domain: # ipadm NAME CLASS/TYPE STATE UNDER ADDR lo0 loopback ok -- -- lo0/v4 static ok -- ... lo0/v6 static ok -- ... net0 ip ok -- ... net0/v4 static ok -- xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24 net0/v6 addrconf ok -- .... net0/v6 addrconf ok -- ... net8 ip ok -- -- net8/v4 static ok -- ... # dladm show-phys LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE net1 Ethernet unknown 0 unknown ixgbe1 net0 Ethernet up 1000 full ixgbe0 net8 Ethernet up 10 full usbecm2 # ldm add-vsw net-dev=net0 primary-vsw0 primary # ldm add-vnet vnet1 primary-vsw0 app Needed to add a virtual disk to the WebLogic application domain: # format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c0t5000CCA02505F874d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02505f874 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD0/disk 1. c0t5000CCA02506C468d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02506c468 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD1/disk 2. c0t5000CCA025067E5Cd0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca025067e5c /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD2/disk 3. c0t5000CCA02506C258d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02506c258 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD3/disk Specify disk (enter its number): ^C # ldm add-vdsdev /dev/dsk/c0t5000CCA02506C468d0s2 HDD1@primary-vds0 # ldm add-vdisk HDD1 HDD1@primary-vds0 app Add some additional spice to the pot: # ldm set-variable auto-boot\\?=false db # ldm set-variable auto-boot\\?=false app # ldm set-var boot-device=HDD1 app Bind the logical domains: # ldm bind db # ldm bind app At the end of the process, the system is set up like this: # ldm list -o core,memory,physio NAME primary CORE CID CPUSET 0 (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) 1 (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) 2 (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) 3 (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x30000000 32G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@300 pci_0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE1 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE2 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RIO/NET0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME app CORE CID CPUSET 4 (32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39) 5 (40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47) 6 (48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55) 7 (56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63) 8 (64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71) 9 (72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79) 10 (80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87) 11 (88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) 12 (96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103) 13 (104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111) 14 (112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119) 15 (120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127) 16 (128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135) 17 (136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143) 18 (144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151) 19 (152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159) 20 (160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167) 21 (168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175) 22 (176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183) 23 (184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191) 24 (192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199) 25 (200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207) 26 (208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215) 27 (216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223) 28 (224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231) 29 (232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239) 30 (240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247) 31 (248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255) 32 (256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263) 33 (264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271) 34 (272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279) 35 (280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287) 36 (288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295) 37 (296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303) 38 (304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311) 39 (312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319) 40 (320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327) 41 (328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335) 42 (336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343) 43 (344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351) 44 (352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359) 45 (360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367) 46 (368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375) 47 (376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x830000000 192G 0x4000000000 0x80000000000 256G 0x8080000000 0x100000000000 256G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@340 pci_1 pci@380 pci_2 pci@3c0 pci_3 pci@400 pci_4 pci@440 pci_5 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE3 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE4 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE9 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE10 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE11 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE12 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE5 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE6 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE7 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME db CORE CID CPUSET 48 (384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391) 49 (392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399) 50 (400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407) 51 (408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415) 52 (416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423) 53 (424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431) 54 (432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439) 55 (440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447) 56 (448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455) 57 (456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463) 58 (464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471) 59 (472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479) 60 (480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487) 61 (488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495) 62 (496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503) 63 (504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x80000000 0x180000000000 256G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@480 pci_6 pci@4c0 pci_7 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE13 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE14 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE15 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE16 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA1 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RIO/NET2 Start the domains: # ldm start app LDom app started # ldm start db LDom db started Make sure to start the vntsd service that was created, above. # svcs -a | grep ldo disabled 8:38:38 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default online 8:38:58 svc:/ldoms/agents:default online 8:39:25 svc:/ldoms/ldmd:default # svcadm enable vntsd Now use the MAC address to configure the Solaris 11 Automated Installation. Database Logical Domain # telnet localhost 5000 {0} ok devalias screen /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@7/display@0 disk7 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p3 disk6 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p2 disk5 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p1 disk4 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p0 scsi1 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0 net3 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0,1 net2 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0 virtual-console /virtual-devices/console@1 name aliases {0} ok boot net2 Boot device: /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0 File and args: 1000 Mbps full duplex Link up Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx WLS Logical Domain # telnet localhost 5001 {0} ok devalias hdd1 /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0 vnet1 /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 net /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 disk /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0 virtual-console /virtual-devices/console@1 name aliases {0} ok boot net Boot device: /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 File and args: Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Repeat the process for the second SPARC T5-4, install Solaris, RAC and WebLogic Cluster, and you are ready to go. Maybe buying a SuperCluster would have been easier.

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GWB | May 2010 Newsletter

- by Staff of Geeks

Geekswithblogs.net - May 2010 Newsletter Was your newsletter messed up? If the first newsletter we sent was all white with links all over the place, I apologize. We haven’t sent a newsletter in quite some time and I forgot the rules of theming for email clients. TechEd 2010 New Orleans - Who is coming? John and Jeff will be at TechEd 2010 New Orleans for a short time to pass out shirts to our bloggers. These are the standard GWB shirts you see some of our other bloggers wearing and one could be yours if you let us know you are coming and what your size is. We will announce where we will be once we arrive so you can wear your Geekswithblogs.net shirt and let everyone know where you blog. These shirts will be without URLs, if you want one of those, you will have to join the contest mentioned later in the newsletter. Deadline for response is next Wednesday? Email [email protected] to let us know you are coming! wblo.gs Shortened Url Everyone has URL shorteners these days so we needed our own. Currently Geekswithblogs.net has implemented http://wblo.gs as a shortened URL for you blog. Instead of pushing people to geekswithblogs.net/your_url you can now use wblo.gs/your_url. We hope to published a version of the shortener that will give each post a short URL and a button via your blog to publish to Twitter. This release should be available in the early summer time period. Always wanted one of our awesome Geekswithblogs.net T-Shirts? Starting on May 15th until July 13th, we will giving our Geekswithblogs.net t-shirts away to those members who create 30 technical posts. That is 30 posts in 60 days! This should not be a difficult task with all the new releases from Microsoft. You have Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation 2010, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4.0, Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and so many others to pick from. We will be keeping an eye on the results and publishing those bloggers who successfully meet the requirements by the date. A few rules to remember. The post must be technical in nature, the post must be original content created by the blogger, and the post must be originated during the contest (no pulling content from you old blog). Each shirt will be customized with your URL on the back and you can let us know you size and address when you successfully complete the contest. What features do you want to see? We would love to hear your feedback. It has been awhile since we have published a release of Geekswithblogs.net and we want to get your feature requests in it. Do you like a particular skin we don’t have? Do you want to see comments change? Do you want to see more Twitter integration? Whatever it is, we want to know. Submit your thoughts to [email protected] and we will start a dialog with you shortly after we receive them. Follow Us on Twitter We want to hear from you and make sure you know what is going on with Geekswithblogs.net. Follow the staff on Twitter (@StaffOfGeeks) and feel free to let us know what you think or questions you have here.

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Code Contracts: validating arrays and collections

- by DigiMortal

Validating collections before using them is very common task when we use built-in generic types for our collections. In this posting I will show you how to validate collections using code contracts. It is cool how much awful looking code you can avoid using code contracts. Failing code Let’s suppose we have method that calculates sum of all invoices in collection. We have class Invoice and one of properties it has is Sum. I don’t introduce here any complex calculations on invoices because we have another problem to solve in this topic. Here is our code. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) { var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum); return sum; } This method is very simple but it fails when invoices list contains at least one null. Of course, we can test if invoice is null but having nulls in lists like this is not good idea – it opens green way for different coding bugs in system. Our goal is to react to bugs ASAP at the nearest place they occur. There is one more way how to make our method fail. It happens when invoices is null. I thing it is also one common bugs during development and it even happens in production environments under some conditions that are usually hardly met. Now let’s protect our little calculation method with code contracts. We need two contracts: invoices cannot be null invoices cannot contain any nulls Our first contract is easy but how to write the second one? Solution: Contract.ForAll Preconditions in code are checked using Contract.Ensures method. This method takes boolean value as argument that sais if contract holds or not. There is also method Contract.ForAll that takes collection and predicate that must hold for that collection. Nice thing is ForAll returns boolean. So, we have very simple solution. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) { Contract.Requires(invoices != null); Contract.Requires(Contract.ForAll<Invoice>(invoices, p => p != null)); var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum); return sum; } And here are some lines of code you can use to test the contracts quickly. var invoices = new List<Invoice>(); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); invoices.Add(null); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); //CalculateTotal(null); CalculateTotal(invoices); If your code is covered with unit tests then I suggest you to write tests to check that these contracts hold for every code run. Conclusion Although it seemed at first place that checking all elements in collection may end up with for-loops that does not look so nice we were able to solve our problem nicely. ForAll method of contract class offered us simple mechanism to check collections and it does it smoothly the code-contracts-way. P.S. I suggest you also read devlicio.us blog posting Validating Collections with Code Contracts by Derik Whittaker.

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Master Data Management for Location Data - Oracle Site Hub

- by david.butler(at)oracle.com

Most MDM discussions cover key domains such as customer, supplier, product, service, and reference data. It is usually understood that these domains have complex structures and hundreds if not thousands of attributes that need governing. Location, on the other hand, strikes most people as address data. How hard can that be? But for many industries, locations are complex, and site information is critical to efficient operations and relevant analytics. Retail stores and malls, bank branches, construction sites come to mind. But one of the best industries for illustrating the power of a site mastering application is Oil & Gas. Oracle's Master Data Management solution for location data is the Oracle Site Hub. It is a location mastering solution that enables organizations to centralize site and location specific information from heterogeneous systems, creating a single view of site information that can be leveraged across all functional departments and analytical systems. Let's take a look at the location entities the Oracle Site Hub can manage for the Oil & Gas industry: organizations, property, land, buildings, roads, oilfield, service center, inventory site, real estate, facilities, refineries, storage tanks, vendor locations, businesses, assets; project site, area, well, basin, pipelines, critical infrastructure, offshore platform, compressor station, gas station, etc. Any site can be classified into multiple hierarchies, like organizational hierarchy, operational hierarchy, geographic hierarchy, divisional hierarchies and so on. Any site can also be associated to multiple clusters, i.e. collections of sites, and these can be used as a foundation for driving reporting, analysis, organize daily work, etc. Hierarchies can also be used to model entities which are structured or non-structured collections of nodes, like for example routes, pipelines and more. The User Defined Attribute Framework provides the needed infrastructure to add single row attributes groups like well base attributes (well IDs, well type, well structure and key characterizing measures, and more) and well geometry, and multi row attribute groups like well applications, permits, production data, activities, operations, logs, treatments, tests, drills, treatments, and KPIs. Site Hub can also model areas, lands, fields, basins, pools, platforms, eco-zones, and stratigraphic layers as specific sites, tracking their base attributes, aliases, descriptions, subcomponents and more. Midstream entities (pipelines, logistic sites, pump stations) and downstream entities (cylinders, tanks, inventories, meters, partner's sites, routes, facilities, gas stations, and competitor sites) can also be easily modeled, together with their specific attributes and relationships. Site Hub can store any type of unstructured data associated to a site. This could be stored directly or on an external content management solution, like Oracle Universal Content Management. Considering a well, for example, Site Hub can store any relevant associated multimedia file such as: CAD drawings of the well profile, structure and/or parts, engineering documents, contracts, applications, permits, logs, pictures, photos, videos and more. For any site entity, Site Hub can associate all the related assets and equipments at the site, as well as all relationships between sites, between a site and multiple parties, and between a site and any purchasable or sellable item, over time. Items can be equipment, instruments, facilities, services, products, production entities, production facilities (pipelines, batteries, compressor stations, gas plants, meters, separators, etc.), support facilities (rigs, roads, transmission or radio towers, airstrips, etc.), supplier products and services, catalogs, and more. Items can just be associated to sites using standard Site Hub features, or they can be fully mastered by implementing Oracle Product Hub. Site locations (addresses or geographical coordinates) are also managed with out-of-the-box address geo-coding capabilities coupled with Google Maps integration to deliver powerful mapping capabilities and spatial data analysis. Locations can be shared between different sites. Centered on the site location, any site can also have associated areas. Site Hub can master any site location specific information, like for example cadastral, ownership, jurisdictional, geological, seismic and more, and any site-centric area specific information, like for example economical, political, risk, weather, logistic, traffic information and more. Now if anyone ever asks you why locations need MDM, think about how all these Oil & Gas entities and attributes would translate into your business locations. To learn more about Oracle's full MDM solution for the digital oil field, here is a link to Roberto Negro's outstanding whitepaper: Oracle Site Master Data Management for mastering wells and other PPDM entities in a digital oilfield context

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Windows 8 Camp–Ways to Prepare

- by Lori Lalonde

When Windows 8 was announced at the BUILD conference back in September, it created quite a buzz among the developer community. By the spring of 2012, Windows 8 Developer Camps started popping up everywhere imaginable. I received a lot of questions from CTTDNUG members about whether or not we would be hosting one locally. If you recall my post about the Windows Phone/Azure Developer Workshop that CTTDNUG hosted back in March, you’ll remember that the biggest hurdle to overcome when planning this type of event was finding the right venue. It took some time, but I finally found a venue that was available and provided the prerequisites needed to ensure this camp is a success. I am very excited that CTTDNUG will be hosting a Windows 8 Camp this summer in the Kitchener/Waterloo area. In fact, it’s coming up in less than 2 weeks. Clearly other developers are excited as well, because our registration numbers show that the event is already 70% full! On top of that, I was fortunate enough to also book two well-known evangelists to present and teach at this full day developer camp: Andrei Marukovich and Atley Hunter. This was the icing on the cake. With the content provided by Microsoft, and two local experts that live and breathe Windows 8 development, I know that I, along with other developers that attend this event, will have the opportunity to maximize our learning potential and hit the ground running. If you plan on attending a Windows 8 Developer Camp soon, and want to ensure you get the most “bang for your buck” (figuratively speaking, since these camps are free), there are some things you can do to prepare before the big day: 1) Install the prerequisites on your own device before the big day I can’t stress this enough. Otherwise, you will be spending valuable time during the hands-on period downloading and installing what is needed, rather than digging into the development and using that time to ask the experts on-hand about programming challenges, issues, questions you may have with respect to your development. Prerequisites: Windows 8 Release Preview Visual Studio 2012 RC Download the Windows 8 SDK Samples 2) Purchase, download, and read Charles Petzold’s newest book: Programming Windows 6th Edition This is a great introduction to the type of content you will be learning about during the camp. Doing some light reading beforehand might raise some questions about the concepts discussed in the book, which will give you the opportunity to write them down and bring them with you to the camp. The experts on hand will be able to answer them for you. 3) Make use of the freebies that are available Telerik has recently released a preview of their RadControls for Metro. You can sign up to receive a license code to give you access to install the preview for free and start playing around with it. Syncfusion also offers a free download of their Metro Studio package, which is a collection of metro style icons that you can customize and use in your own applications. Last but not least, once you’ve installed the Windows 8 Release Preview on your own device, go to the Windows 8 Store and download a handful of the free apps that are available. Testing out other Metro apps may give you ideas of what you can do in your own apps and analyze what features you like: application flow, type of animations used, concepts that were leveraged, how live tiles were used, etc. I hope you found these tips to be useful as you embark on a new development journey! Although this post focused on how to prepare for a Windows 8 camp, the same ideas are there whichever developer camp/workshop/event you attend. Learning does not begin and end on the day of the event. Attending a developer camp is just one step of many to master whatever technology you are interested in. It is a continuous process, which is fully maximized when you do your homework beforehand, actively participate during, and follow up by putting what you learned to practice afterwards. Happy coding!

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Get Pop Up Notifications for Your RSS Feeds with Feed Notifier

- by DigitalGeekery

Are you looking for a way to get updates from your favorite websites right to your desktop? If so, you’ll want to check out Feed Notifier. This free Windows application runs in the system tray and delivers pop-up notifications to your desktop when your subscribed RSS feeds are updated. Download and install Feed Notifier. (Download link below) When you are finished installing, the Feed Notifier Preferences window will open. Click on the Add… button to add an RSS feed. Copy and paste the Feed URL into the text box and click Next. Choose your polling interval. This is how often your feed will be checked for new items. You can set your polling interval for days, hours, minutes, or even seconds. Click FInish. At your configured interval, Feed Notifier will check your feeds for new items. If new items are present, they will pop up above your system tray. You’ll get an intro portion of the article. Simply Click the headline in the feed pop up… …to open the full article in your default browser. Setting Preferences Open the preferences of Feed Notifier, by going to Start > All Programs > Feed Notifier, or right clicking on the system tray icon and selecting Preferences. On the Pop-ups tab you can configure the duration in seconds that each article stays displayed on your screen. The default is five seconds. You can also change the size of the display, the theme, and the amount of content displayed. The Options tab offers additional configurations like article caching and using a proxy server. Filter tab allows you to filter in or out certain content. To add a filter click Add… … then type in the filter rule. You can even choose to apply it to only certain feeds. Click OK. Feed Notifier will display on the filters tab the number of times the filter is applied. Click OK when finished. You can scroll though the articles by using the forward and back buttons at the lower left, or use the play / pause buttons to move though the articles in a slideshow-type fashion. Feed Notifier is nice way to get your updated feeds directly to your desktop in a timely fashion. It’s supports all RSS and Atom feeds and features a clean look and feel with plenty of customizable options. Download Feed Notifier Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Outlook Stop Using Internet Explorer’s RSS FeedsChange Default Feed Reader in FirefoxView Feedburner Subscriber Numbers Even if FeedCount is Not DisplayedSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickOrganize your RSS Feeds with FeedDemon TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Heaven & Hell Finder Icon Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain

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Optimization and Saving/Loading

- by MrPlosion1243

I'm developing a 2D tile based game and I have a few questions regarding it. First I would like to know if this is the correct way to structure my Tile class: namespace TileGame.Engine { public enum TileType { Air, Stone } class Tile { TileType type; bool collidable; static Tile air = new Tile(TileType.Air); static Tile stone = new Tile(TileType.Stone); public Tile(TileType type) { this.type = type; collidable = true; } } } With this method I just say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone and this seems right to me but I'm not a very experienced coder and would like assistance. Now the reason I doubt this so much is because I like everything to be as optimized as possible and there is a major flaw in this that I need help overcoming. It has to do with saving and loading... well more on loading actually. The way it's done relies on the principle of casting an enumeration into a byte which gives you the corresponding number where its declared in the enumeration. Each TileType is cast as a byte and written out to a file. So TileType.Air would appear as 0 and TileType.Stone would appear as 1 in the file (well in byte form obviously). Loading in the file is alot different though because I can't just loop through all the bytes in the file cast them as a TileType and assign it: for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { world[y, x].Type = (TileType)byteReader.ReadByte(); } } This just wont work presumably because I have to actually say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone as apposed to world[y, x].Type = TileType.Stone. In order to be able to say that I need a gigantic switch case statement (I only have 2 tiles but you could imagine what it would look like with hundreds): Tile tile; for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { switch(byteReader.ReadByte()){ case 0: tile = Tile.Air; break; case 1: tile = Tile.Stone; break; } world[y, x] = tile; } } Now you can see how unoptimized this is and I don't know what to do. I would really just like to cast the byte as a TileType and use that but as said before I have to say world[y, x] = Tile.whatever and TileType can't be used this way. So what should I do? I would imagine I need to restructure my Tile class to fit the requirements but I don't know how I would do that. Please help! Thanks.

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OTN ArchBeat Top 10 for September 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The results are in... Listed below are the Top 10 most popular items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the month of September 2012. The Real Architects of Los Angeles - OTN Architect Day - Oct 25 No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: Attaching OWSM policies to JRF-based web services clients "OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) is Oracle's recommended method for securing SOAP web services," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Andre Correa. "It provides agents that encapsulate the necessary logic to interact with the underlying software stack on both service and client sides. Such agents have their behavior driven by policies. OWSM ships with a bunch of policies that are adequate to most common real world scenarios." His detailed post shows how to make it happen. Oracle 11gR2 RAC on Software Defined Network (SDN) (OpenvSwitch, Floodlight, Beacon) | Gilbert Stan "The SDN [software defined network] idea is to separate the control plane and the data plane in networking and to virtualize networking the same way we have virtualized servers," explains Gil Standen. "This is an idea whose time has come because VMs and vmotion have created all kinds of problems with how to tell networking equipment that a VM has moved and to preserve connectivity to VPN end points, preserve IP, etc." H/T to Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall for the recommendation. Process Oracle OER Events using a simple Web Service | Bob Webster Bob Webster's post "provides an example of a simple web service that processes Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) Events. The service receives events from OER and utilizes the OER REX API to implement simple OER automations for selected event types." Understanding Oracle BI 11g Security vs Legacy Oracle BI 10g | Christian Screen "After conducting a large amount of Oracle BI 10g to Oracle BI 11g upgrades and after writing the Oracle BI 11g book,"says Oracle ACE Christian Screen, "I still continually get asked one of the most basic questions regarding security in Oracle BI 11g; How does it compare to Oracle BI 10g? The trail of questions typically goes on to what are the differences? And, how do we leverage our current Oracle BI 10g security table schema in Oracle BI 11g?" OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP – Request Flow you must understand!! | Atul Kumar Atul Kumar's post addresses "key points and request flow that you must understand" when integrating three Oracle Identity Management product Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Management, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. Adding a runtime LOV for a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena illustrates how to customize the parameters tab for a taskflow in WebCenter. Tips on Migrating from AquaLogic .NET Accelerator to WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET | Scott Nelson "It has been a very winding path and this blog entry is intended to share both the lessons learned and relevant approaches that led to those learnings," says Scott Nelson. "Like most journeys of discovery, it was not a direct path, and there are notes to let you know when it is practical to skip a section if you are in a hurry to get from here to there." 15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect | Ingo Rammer In this presentation from the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen, Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years. WebCenter Content (WCC) Trace Sections | ECM Architect ECM Architect Kevin Smith shares a detailed technical post covering WebCenter Content (WCC) Trace Sections. Thought for the Day "Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se." — Charles Eames (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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Attachments in Oracle BPM 11g – Create a BPM Process Instance by passing an Attachment

- by Venugopal Mangipudi

Problem Statement: On a recent engagement I had a requirement where we needed to create BPM instances using a message start event. The challenge was that the instance needed to be created after polling a file location and attaching the picked up file (pdf) as an attachment to the instance. Proposed Solution: I was contemplating using process API to accomplish this,but came up with a solution which involves a BPEL process to pickup the file and send a notification to the BPM process by passing the attachment as a payload. The following are some of the brief steps that were used to build the solution: BPM Process to receive an attachment as part of the payload: The BPM Process is a very simple process which has a Message Start event that accepts the attachment as an argument and a Simple User Task that the user can use to view the attachment (as part of the OOTB attachment panel). The Input payload is based on AttachmentPayload.xsd. The 3 key elements of the the payload are: <xsd:element name="filename" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="mimetype" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="content" type="xsd:base64Binary"/> A screenshot of the Human task data assignment that need to performed to attach the file is provided here. Once the process and the UI project (default generated UI) are deployed to the SOA server, copy the wsdl location of the process service (from EM). This WSDL would be used in the BPEL project to create the Instances in the BPM process after a file is polled. BPEL Process to Poll for File and create instances in the BPM process: For the BPEL process a File adapter was configured as a Read service (File Streaming option and keeping the Schema as Opaque). Once a location and the file pattern to poll are provided the Readservice Partner Link was wired to Invoke the BPEL Process. Also, using the BPM Process WSDL, we can create the Webservice reference and can invoke the start operation. Before we do the assignment for the Invoke operation, a global variable should be created to hold the value of the fileName of the file. The mapping to the global variable can be done on the Receive activity properties (jca.file.FileName). So for the assign operation before we invoke the BPM process service, we can get the content of the file from the receive input variable and the fileName from the jca.file.FileName property. The mimetype needs to be hard coded to the mime-type of the file: application/pdf (I am still researching ways to derive the mime type as it is not available as part of the jca.file properties). The screenshot of the BPEL process can be found here and the Assign activity can be found here. The project source can be found at the following location. A sample pdf file to test the project and a screenshot of the BPM Human task screen after the successful creation of the instance can be found here. References: [1] https://blogs.oracle.com/fmwinaction/entry/oracle_bpm_adding_an_attachment

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Dropped impression 25 days after restructure

- by Hamid

Our website is a non English property related website (moshaver.com) which is similar to rightmove.co.uk. On September 2012 our website was adversely affected by Panda causing our Google incoming clicks to drop from around 3000 clicks to less than a thousand. We were hoping that Google will eventually realize that we are not a spam website and things will get better. However, in August 2013 we were almost sure that we needed to do something, so we started to restructure our web content. We used the canonical tag to remove our search results and point to our listing pages, using the noindex tag to remove it from our listing pages which does not have any properties at the moment. We also changed title tags to more friendly ones, in addition to other changes. Our changes were effective on 10th August. As shown in the graph taken from Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization section, these changes has resulted in an increase in the number of times Google displayed our results in its search results. Our impressions almost doubled starting 15th August. However, as the graph shows, our CTR dropped from this date from around 15% to 8%. This might have been because of our changed title tags (so people were less likely to click on them), or it might be normal for increased impressions. This situation has continued up until 10th September, when our impressions decreased dramatically to less than a thousand. This is almost 30% of our original impressions (before website restructure) and 15% of the new impressions. At the same time our impressions has increased dramatically to around 50%. I have two theories for this increase. The first one is that these statistics are less accurate for lower impressions. The second one is that Google is now only displaying our results for queries directly related to our website (our name, our url), and not for general terms, such as "apartments in a specific city". The second theory also explains the dramatic decrease in impression as well. After digging the analytic data a little more, I constructed the following table. It displays the breakdown of our impressions, clicks and ctr in different Google products (web and image) and in total. What I understand from this table is that, most of our increased impressions after restructure were on the image search section. I don't think users of search would be looking for content in our website. Furthermore, it shows that the drop in our web search ctr, is as dramatic of the overall ctr (-30% in compare to -60%) . I thought posting it here might help you understand the situation better. Is it possible that Google has tested our new structure for 25 days, and then decided to decrease our impressions because of the the new low CTR? Or should we look for another factor? If this is the case, how long does it usually take for Google to give us another chance? It has been one month since our impressions has dropped.

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JCP Awards 10 Year Retrospective

- by Heather VanCura

As we celebrate 10 years of JCP Program Award recognition in 2012, take a look back in the Retrospective article covering the history of the JCP awards. Most recently, the JCP awards were celebrated at JavaOne Latin America in Brazil, where SouJava was presented the JCP Member of the Year Award for 2012 (won jointly with the London Java Community) for their contributions and launch of the Global Adopt-a-JSR Program. This is also a good time to honor the JCP Award Nominees and Winners who have been designated as Star Spec Leads. Spec Leads are key to the Java Community Process (JCP) program. Without them, none of the Java Specification Requests (JSRs) would have begun, much less completed and become implemented in shipping products. Nominations for 2012 Start Spec Leads are now open until 31 December. The Star Spec Lead program recognizes Spec Leads who have repeatedly proven their merit by producing high quality specifications, establishing best practices, and mentoring others. The point of such honor is to endorse the good work that they do, showcase their methods for other Spec Leads to emulate, and motivate other JCP program members and participants to get involved in the JCP program. Ed Burns – A Star Spec Lead for 2009, Ed first got involved with the JCP program when he became co-Spec Lead of JSR 127, JavaServer Faces (JSF), a role he has continued through JSF 1.2 and now JSF 2.0, which is JSR 314. Linda DeMichiel – Linda thus involved in the JCP program from its very early days. She has been the Spec Lead on at least three JSRs and an EC member for another three. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Gavin King – Nominated as a JCP Outstanding Spec Lead for 2010, for his work with JSR 299. His endorsement said, “He was not only able to work through disputes and objections to the evolving programming model, but he resolved them into solutions that were more technically sound, and which gained support of its pundits.” Mike Milikich – Nominated for his work on Java Micro Edition (ME) standards, implementations, tools, and Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs), Mike was a 2009 Star Spec Lead for JSR 271, Mobile Information Device Profile 3. David Nuescheler – Serving as the CTO for Day Software, acquired by Adobe Systems, David has been a key player in the growth of the company’s global content management solution. In 2002, he became Spec Lead for JSR 170, Content Repository for Java Technology API, continuing for the subsequent version, JSR 283. Bill Shannon – A well-respected name in the Java community, Bill came to Oracle from Sun as a Distinguished Engineer and is still performing at full speed as Spec Lead for JSR 342, Java EE 7, as an alternate EC member, and hands-on problem solver for the Java community as a whole. Jim Van Peursem – Jim holds a PhD in Computer Engineering. He was part of the Motorola team that worked with Sun labs on the Spotless VM that became the KVM. From within Motorola, Jim has been responsible for many aspects of Java technology deployment, from an independent Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) implementations, to handset development, to working with the industry in defining many related standards. Participation in the JCP Program goes well beyond technical proficiency. The JCP Awards Program is an attempt to say “Thank You” to all of the JCP members, Expert Group Members, Spec Leads, and EC members who give their time to contribute to the evolution of Java technology.

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NetBeans Java Hints: Quick & Dirty Guide

- by Geertjan

In NetBeans IDE 7.2, a new wizard will be found in the "Module Development" category in the New File dialog, for creating new Java Hints. Select a package in a NetBeans module project. Right click, choose New/Other.../Module Development/Java Hint: You'll then see this: Fill in: Class Name: the name of the class that should be generated. E.g. "Example". Hint Display Name: the display name of the hint itself (as will appear in Tools/Options). E.g. "Example Hint". Warning Message: the warning that should be produced by the hint. E.g. "Something wrong is going on". Hint Description: a longer description of the hint, will appear in Tools/Options and eventually some other places. E.g. "This is an example hint that warns about an example problem." Will also provide an Automatic Fix: whether the hint will provide some kind of transformation. E.g. "yes". Fix Display Name: the display name of such a fix/transformation. E.g. "Fix the problem". Click Finish. Should generate "Example.java", the hint itself: import com.sun.source.util.TreePath; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.CompilationInfo; import org.netbeans.spi.editor.hints.ErrorDescription; import org.netbeans.spi.editor.hints.Fix; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.ConstraintVariableType; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.ErrorDescriptionFactory; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.Hint; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.HintContext; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.JavaFix; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.TriggerPattern; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; @Hint(displayName = "DN_com.bla.Example", description = "DESC_com.bla.Example", category = "general") //NOI18N @Messages({"DN_com.bla.Example=Example Hint", "DESC_com.bla.Example=This is an example hint that warns about an example problem."}) public class Example { @TriggerPattern(value = "$str.equals(\"\")", //Specify a pattern as needed constraints = @ConstraintVariableType(variable = "$str", type = "java.lang.String")) @Messages("ERR_com.bla.Example=Something wrong is going on") public static ErrorDescription computeWarning(HintContext ctx) { Fix fix = new FixImpl(ctx.getInfo(), ctx.getPath()).toEditorFix(); return ErrorDescriptionFactory.forName(ctx, ctx.getPath(), Bundle.ERR_com.bla_Example(), fix); } private static final class FixImpl extends JavaFix { public FixImpl(CompilationInfo info, TreePath tp) { super(info, tp); } @Override @Messages("FIX_com.bla.Example=Fix the problem") protected String getText() { return Bundle.FIX_com_bla_Example(); } @Override protected void performRewrite(TransformationContext ctx) { //perform the required transformation } } } Should also generate "ExampleTest.java", a test for it. Unfortunately, the wizard infrastructure is not capable of handling changes related to test dependencies. So the ExampleTest.java has a todo list at its begining: /* TODO to make this test work: - add test dependency on Java Hints Test API (and JUnit 4) - to ensure that the newest Java language features supported by the IDE are available, regardless of which JDK you build the module with: -- for Ant-based modules, add "requires.nb.javac=true" into nbproject/project.properties -- for Maven-based modules, use dependency:copy in validate phase to create target/endorsed/org-netbeans-libs-javacapi-*.jar and add to endorseddirs in maven-compiler-plugin configuration */Warning: if this is a project for which tests never existed before, you may need to close&reopen the project, so that "Unit Test Libraries" node appears - a bug in apisupport projects, as far as I can tell. Thanks to Jan Lahoda for the above rough guide.

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Cellbi Silverlight Controls Giveaway (5 License to give away)

- by mbcrump

Cellbi recently updated their new Silverlight Controls to version 4 and to support Visual Studio 2010. I played with a couple of demos on their site and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. The first thing that I noticed was all of the special text effects and animations included. I emailed them asking if I could give away their controls in my January 2011 giveaway and they said yes. They also volunteered to give away 5 total license so the changes for you to win would increase. I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Cellbi Silverlight Controls! (5 License to give away) Random winner will be announced on February 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump and @cellbi http://mcrump.me/cscfree ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Cellbi because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The What's new in this release page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. That is installed to your local HDD during the installation process. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the program. After everything is installed then you will see the following screen: After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. After you add the controls from the “Choose Items” in Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. It’s hard to show with a static screenshot just how powerful the controls actually are so I will refer you to the demo page to learn more about them. Since all of these are animations/effects it just doesn’t work with a static screenshot. It is worth noting that the Sfx pack really focuses on the following core effects: I will show you the best route to get started building a new project with them below. The best page to start is the sample browser which you can access by going to SvFx Launcher. In my case, I want to build a new Carousel. I simple navigate to the Carousel that I want to build and hit the “Cs” code at the top. This launches Visual Studio 2010 and now I can copy/paste the XAML into my project. That is all there is to it. Hopefully this post was helpful and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win a set of the controls! Subscribe to my feed

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JavaOne Latin America 2012 Trip Report

- by reza_rahman

JavaOne Latin America 2012 was held at the Transamerica Expo Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4-6. The conference was a resounding success with a great vibe, excellent technical content and numerous world class speakers. Some notable local and international speakers included Bruno Souza, Yara Senger, Mattias Karlsson, Vinicius Senger, Heather Vancura, Tori Wieldt, Arun Gupta, Jim Weaver, Stephen Chin, Simon Ritter and Henrik Stahl. Topics covered included the JCP/JUGs, Java SE 7, HTML 5/WebSocket, CDI, Java EE 6, Java EE 7, JSF 2.2, JMS 2, JAX-RS 2, Arquillian and JavaFX. Bruno Borges and I manned the GlassFish booth at the Java Pavilion on Tuesday and Webnesday. The booth traffic was decent and not too hectic. We met a number of GlassFish adopters including perhaps one of the largest GlassFish deployments in Brazil as well as some folks migrating to Java EE from Spring. We invited them to share their stories with us. We also talked with some key members of the local Java community. Tuesday evening we had the GlassFish party at the Tribeca Pub. The party was definitely a hit and we could have used a larger venue (this was the first time we had the GlassFish party in Brazil). Along with GlassFish enthusiasts, a number of Java community leaders were there. We met some of the same folks again at the JUG leader's party on Wednesday evening. On Thursday Arun Gupta, Bruno Borges and I ran a hands-on-lab on JAX-RS, WebSocket and Server-Sent Events (SSE) titled "Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket". This is the same Java EE 7 lab run at JavaOne San Francisco. The lab provides developers a first hand glipse of how an HTML 5 powered Java EE application might look like. We had an overflow crowd for the lab (at one point we had about twenty people standing) and the lab went very well. The slides for the lab are here: Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket from Reza Rahman The actual contents for the lab is available here. Give me a shout if you need help getting it up and running. I gave two solo talks following the lab. The first was on JMS 2 titled "What’s New in Java Message Service 2". This was essentially the same talk given by JMS 2 specification lead Nigel Deakin at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JMS 2 simplified API, JMSContext injection, delivery delays, asynchronous send, JMS resource definition in Java EE 7, standardized configuration for JMS MDBs in EJB 3.2, mandatory JCA pluggability and the like. The session went very well, there was good Q & A and someone even told me this was the best session of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: What’s New in Java Message Service 2 from Reza Rahman My last talk for the conference was on JAX-RS 2 in the keynote hall. Titled "JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API" this was basically the same talk given by the specification leads Santiago Pericas-Geertsen and Marek Potociar at JavaOne San Francisco. I talked about the JAX-RS 2 client API, asyncronous processing, filters/interceptors, hypermedia support, server-side content negotiation and the like. The talk went very well and I got a few very kind complements afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API from Reza Rahman On a more personal note, Sao Paulo has always had a special place in my heart as the incubating city for Sepultura and Soulfy -- two of my most favorite heavy metal musical groups of all time! Consequently, the city has a perpertually alive and kicking metal scene pretty much any given day of the week. This time I got to check out a solid performance by local metal gig Republica at the legendary Manifesto Bar. I also wanted to see a Dio Tribute at the Blackmore but ran out of time and energy... Overall I enjoyed the conference/Sao Paulo and look forward to going to Brazil again next year!

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Social Technology and the Potential for Organic Business Networks

- by Michael Snow

Guest Blog Post by: Michael Fauscette, IDCThere has been a lot of discussion around the topic of social business, or social enterprise, over the last few years. The concept of applying emerging technologies from the social Web, combined with changes in processes and culture, has the potential to provide benefits across the enterprise over a wide range of operations impacting employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Companies are using social tools to build out enterprise social networks that provide, among other things, a people-centric collaborative and knowledge sharing work environment which over time can breakdown organizational silos. On the outside of the business, social technology is adding new ways to support customers, market to prospects and customers, and even support the sales process. We’re also seeing new ways of connecting partners to the business that increases collaboration and innovation. All of the new "connectivity" is, I think, leading businesses to a business model built around the concept of the network or ecosystem instead of the old "stand-by-yourself" approach. So, if you think about businesses as networks in the context of all of the other technical and cultural change factors that we're seeing in the new information economy, you can start to see that there’s a lot of potential for co-innovation and collaboration that was very difficult to arrange before. This networked business model, or what I've started to call “organic business networks,” is the business model of the information economy.The word “organic” could be confusing, but when I use it in this context, I’m thinking it has similar traits to organic computing. Organic computing is a computing system that is self-optimizing, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-protecting. More broadly, organic models are generally patterns and methods found in living systems used as a metaphor for non-living systems.Applying an organic model, organic business networks are networks that represent the interconnectedness of the emerging information business environment. Organic business networks connect people, data/information, content, and IT systems in a flexible, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-protecting system. People are the primary nodes of the network, but the other nodes — data, content, and applications/systems — are no less important.A business built around the organic business network business model would incorporate the characteristics of a social business, but go beyond the basics—i.e., use social business as the operational paradigm, but also use organic business networks as the mode of operating the business. The two concepts complement each other: social business is the “what,” and the organic business network is the “how.”An organic business network lets the business work go outside of traditional organizational boundaries and become the continuously adapting implementation of an optimized business strategy. Value creation can move to the optimal point in the network, depending on strategic influencers such as the economy, market dynamics, customer behavior, prospect behavior, partner behavior and needs, supply-chain dynamics, predictive business outcomes, etc.An organic business network driven company is the antithesis of a hierarchical, rigid, reactive, process-constrained, and siloed organization. Instead, the business can adapt to changing conditions, leverage assets effectively, and thrive in a hyper-connected, global competitive, information-driven environment.To hear more on this topic – I’ll be presenting in the next webcast of the Oracle Social Business Thought Leader Webcast Series - “Organic Business Networks: Doing Business in a Hyper-Connected World” this coming Thursday, June 21, 2012, 10:00 AM PDT – Register here

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Thoughts on my new template language/HTML generator?

- by Ralph

I guess I should have pre-faced this with: Yes, I know there is no need for a new templating language, but I want to make a new one anyway, because I'm a fool. That aside, how can I improve my language: Let's start with an example: using "html5" using "extratags" html { head { title "Ordering Notice" jsinclude "jquery.js" } body { h1 "Ordering Notice" p "Dear @name," p "Thanks for placing your order with @company. It's scheduled to ship on {@ship_date|dateformat}." p "Here are the items you've ordered:" table { tr { th "name" th "price" } for(@item in @item_list) { tr { td @item.name td @item.price } } } if(@ordered_warranty) p "Your warranty information will be included in the packaging." p(class="footer") { "Sincerely," br @company } } } The "using" keyword indicates which tags to use. "html5" might include all the html5 standard tags, but your tags names wouldn't have to be based on their HTML counter-parts at all if you didn't want to. The "extratags" library for example might add an extra tag, called "jsinclude" which gets replaced with something like <script type="text/javascript" src="@content"></script> Tags can be optionally be followed by an opening brace. They will automatically be closed at the closing brace. If no brace is used, they will be closed after taking one element. Variables are prefixed with the @ symbol. They may be used inside double-quoted strings. I think I'll use single-quotes to indicate "no variable substitution" like PHP does. Filter functions can be applied to variables like @variable|filter. Arguments can be passed to the filter @variable|filter:@arg1,arg2="y" Attributes can be passed to tags by including them in (), like p(class="classname"). You will also be able to include partial templates like: for(@item in @item_list) include("item_partial", item=@item) Something like that I'm thinking. The first argument will be the name of the template file, and subsequent ones will be named arguments where @item gets the variable name "item" inside that template. I also want to have a collection version like RoR has, so you don't even have to write the loop. Thoughts on this and exact syntax would be helpful :) Some questions: Which symbol should I use to prefix variables? @ (like Razor), $ (like PHP), or something else? Should the @ symbol be necessary in "for" and "if" statements? It's kind of implied that those are variables. Tags and controls (like if,for) presently have the exact same syntax. Should I do something to differentiate the two? If so, what? This would make it more clear that the "tag" isn't behaving like just a normal tag that will get replaced with content, but controls the flow. Also, it would allow name-reuse. Do you like the attribute syntax? (round brackets) How should I do template inheritance/layouts? In Django, the first line of the file has to include the layout file, and then you delimit blocks of code which get stuffed into that layout. In CakePHP, it's kind of backwards, you specify the layout in the controller.view function, the layout gets a special $content_for_layout variable, and then the entire template gets stuffed into that, and you don't need to delimit any blocks of code. I guess Django's is a little more powerful because you can have multiple code blocks, but it makes your templates more verbose... trying to decide what approach to take Filtered variables inside quotes: "xxx {@var|filter} yyy" "xxx @{var|filter} yyy" "xxx @var|filter yyy" i.e, @ inside, @ outside, or no braces at all. I think no-braces might cause problems, especially when you try adding arguments, like @var|filter:arg="x", then the quotes would get confused. But perhaps a braceless version could work for when there are no quotes...? Still, which option for braces, first or second? I think the first one might be better because then we're consistent... the @ is always nudged up against the variable. I'll add more questions in a few minutes, once I get some feedback.

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Get Your Enterprise Working With Oracle On Track Communication 1.0

- by Josh Lannin

The On Track Development team is very pleased to announce that today On Track is available for our customers to download and evaluate. To learn more about what On Track does start with our whitepaper and datasheet. If you are a developer, take a look at our documentation and samples posted to our OTN page. For this first blog post, I’ll be speaking to several notable points about our product. Graceful Escalation via Conversations: On Track addresses the “Collaboration Problem” through a single guiding principle – graceful escalation – within the construct of a Conversation. In On Track, collaboration is based on a context (called a “Conversation”) that gracefully escalates in form, structure, and content, as dictated by the particular needs of a given collaboration. Within that context, On Track provides a rich set of tools to choose from. These tools provide for communication, coordination, content management, organization, decision making, and analysis -- all essential aspects of collaboration, but not all of them are essential all of the time. Every collaborative interaction will evolve differently. Some will evolve to represent work spreading over the course of years and involving a large, distributed team, while others may involve few people and not evolve at all. Regardless, all collaborative contexts are built from the same parts, utilize the same concepts, and start the same way. The principle of graceful escalation is that you only use the tools and structure you need; so you only incur the complexity you need. Purposeful Collaboration: Through application integration, On Track Conversations bring enterprise application users the communication and collaboration capabilities required to complete business process. By association with specific processes or business objects conversations extend the possible interactions and broaden participation to internal or external non-application users and provide a sophisticated interaction experience, all the while enhancing the data set within the owning application. Purposeful collaboration not only needs to happen in the context of applications, it must support a full range of real-time and long-running interactions to provide the greatest value. Multi Client, Multi Modal: This On Track 1.0 product release includes the same day availability of multiple clients, including iPhone and iPad applications which are now available on the Apple Store, a fully capable and accessible Outlook Add-In, along with our browser web client. With each client we have sought to leverage the strengths of each unique device- our iPhone client supports picture and voice posts, the iPad is optimized for meeting room situations and document viewing, and our Outlook add-in allows you to take emails in context and bring them into On Track. In addition to supporting a diverse array of clients, On Track provides a unified multi modal experience support starting with basic messages moving through to integrated documents with live annotations, snapshots, application sharing, and voice. Next Generation Web Architecture: We believe On Track will help move the bar higher for what users can expect from all web applications, most notably ones that involve real-time activity. On Track is built from the ground up with an innovative, real-time architecture that leverages the extensive push capabilities of our server. Whether you are receiving a new message, viewing where crowds of people are collaborating, or doing live annotation on a document with a set of people, that information comes to you immediately without refreshes or moving back and forth between pages. We’ve leveraged this core architecture across the product experience and raised the user experience bar for this type of application. As well these capabilities are based on open standards and protocols, and are fully extensible by anyone- enabling sophisticated integrations to be created with a wide variety of both legacy and next-generation applications. Agile Product Development: As a product team we operate using continuous feedback and modified agile development methodologies. We have thousands of active internal Oracle users who have helped pilot our product for critical business functions, and the On Track product development team uses our product as our primary vehicle for all our collaboration. Additionally we been working with early access customers who are adopting our technology and providing us valuable feedback - which our process has rapidly realized in improvements to our software. On Track agility extends to our server as well, which is built to scale, and is very simple to install and configure. We are pleased to make this product announcement and encourage you to join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, as well as checking back here for the latest product information.

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