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• Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact,  you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   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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• Top Tweets SOA Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community ?SOA Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p10C8u-o0 Marc ?Reading through the #OFM 11.1.1.6 , patchset 5 documentation. What is the best way to upgrade your whole dev…prd street. SOA Community Thanks for the successful and super interesting #sbidays ! Wonderful discussions around the Integration, case management and security tracks Torsten Winterberg Schon den neuen Opitz Technology-Blog gebookmarked? The Cattle Crew bit.ly/yLPwBD wird ab sofort regelmäßig Erkenntnisse posten. OTNArchBeat ? Unit Testing Asynchronous BPEL Processes Using soapUI | @DanielAmadei bit.ly/x9NsS9 Rolando Carrasco ?Video de Human Task en BPM 11g. Por @edwardo040. bit.ly/wki9CA cc @OracleBPM @OracleSOA @soacommunity View video Marcel Mertin SOA Security Hands-On by Dirk Krafzig and Mamoon Yunus at #sbidays is also great! SOA Community Workshop day #sbidays #BPMN2.0 by Volker Stiehl from #SAP great training – now I can model & execute in #bpmsuite #soacommunity Simone Geib ?Just updated our advanced #soasuite #otn page with a number of very interesting @orclateamsoa blog posts: bit.ly/advancedsoasui… OTNArchBeat ? Start Small, Grow Fast: SOA Best Practices article by @biemond, @rluttikhuizen, @demed bit.ly/yem9Zv Steffen Miller ? Nice new features in SOA Suite Business Rules #PS5 Testing rules with scenarios and output validation bit.ly/zj64Q3 @SOACOMMUNITY OTNArchBeat ? Reply SOA Blackbelt training by David Shaffer, April 30th–May 4th 2012 bit.ly/xGdC24 OTNArchBeat ? What have BPM, big data, social tools, and business models got in common? | Andy Mulholland bit.ly/xUkOGf SOA Community ? Live hacking at #sbidays – cheaper shopping, bias cracking, payment systems, secure your SOA! pic.twitter.com/y7YaIdug SOA Community Future #BPM & #ACM solutions can make use of ontology’s, based on #sqarql #sbidays pic.twitter.com/xLb1Z5zs Simone Geib ? @soacommunity: SOA Blackbelt training by David Shaffer, April 30th–May 4th 2012 wp.me/p10C8u-nX Biemond Changing your ADF Connections in Enterprise Manager with PS5: With Patch Set 5 of Fusion Middleware you can fina… bit.ly/zF7Rb1 Marc ? HUGE (!) CPU and Heap improvement on Oracle Fusion Middleware tinyurl.com/762drzp @wlscommunity @soacommunity #OSB #SOA #WLS SOA Community ?Networking @ SOA & BPM Partner Community blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/e… #soacommunity #otn #opn #oracle SOA Community ?Published the SOA Partner Community newsletter February edition – READ it. Not yet a member? oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity #otn #opn AMIS, Oracle & Java Blog by Lucas Jellema: "Book Review: Do More with SOA Integration: Best of Packt (december 2011, various authors)" bit.ly/wq633E Jon petter hjulstad @SOASimone Excellent summary! Lots of new features! Simone Geib ?Do you want to know what’s new in #soasuite #PS5? Go to bit.ly/xBX06f and let me know what you think SOA Community ? Unit Testing Asynchronous BPEL Processes Using soapUI oracle.com/technetwork/ar… #soacommunity #soa #otn #oracle #bpel Retweeted by SOA Community View media Retweeted by SOA Community Eric Elzinga ? Oracle Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum Malage, The Overview, bit.ly/AA9BKd #ofmforum SOA&Cloud Symposium ? The February issue of the Service Technology Magazine is now published. servicetechmag.com SOA Community ? Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management – must read! oracle.com/technetwork/da… #soacommunity #soa #purging demed ? Have you exposed internal processes to mobile devices using #oraclesoa? Interested in an article? DM me! #osb #rest #multichannel #mobile orclateamsoa ? A-Team SOA Blog: Enhanced version of Thread Dump Analyzer (TDA A-Team) ow.ly/1hpk7l SOA Community Reply BPM Suite #PS5 (11.1.1.6) available for download soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/soa… Send us your feedback! #soacommunity #bpmsuite #opn SOA Community ? SOA Suite #PS5 (11.1.1.6) available for download soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/soa… Send us your feedback! #soacommunity #soasuite SOA Community BPM Suite #PS5 1(1.1.1.6) available for download. List of new BPM features blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/e… #soacommunity #bpm #bpmsuite #opn OracleBlogs BPM in Utilties Industry ow.ly/1hC3fp Retweeted by SOA Community OTNArchBeat ? Demystifying Oracle Enterprise Gateway | Naresh Persaud bit.ly/xtDNe2 OTNArchBeat ? Architect’s Guide to Big Data; Test BPEL Processes Using SoapUI; Development Debate bit.ly/xbDYSo Frank Nimphius ? Finished my book review of "Do More with SOA Integration: Best of Packt ". Here are my review comments: bit.ly/x2k9OZ Lucas Jellema ? That is my one stop-and-go download center for #PS5 : edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/g… Lucas Jellema ? Interesting piece of documentation: Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – docs.oracle.com/cd/E15586_01/f… source for design time @ run time inspira Lucas Jellema ? Strongly improved support for testing Business Rules at Design Time in #PS5 see docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/u… Lucas Jellema ? SOA Suite 11gR1 PS5: new BPEL Component testing – docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? PS5 available for CEP (Complex Event Processing) – a personal favorite of mine : oracle.com/technetwork/mi… Lucas Jellema ?What’s New in Fusion Developer’s Guide 11gR1 PS5: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/w… Lucas Jellema ? BPMN Correlation (FMW 11gR1 PS5): docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? Modifying running BPM Process instances (FMW 11gR1 PS5): docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? SOA Suite 11gR1 PS5 – new aggregation pattern: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… routing multiple messages to same instance Melvin van der Kuijl ? Automating Testing of SOA Composite Applications in PS5. docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Cato Aune ? SOA suite PS5 Enterprise Deployment Guide is available in ePub docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… . Much better than pdf on Galaxy Note SOA Community ?JDeveloper 11.1.1.6 is available for download bit.ly/wGYrwE #soacommunity SOA Community ? Your first experience #PS5 – let us know @soacommunity – send us your tweets and blog posts! #soacommunity Jon petter hjulstad ? WLS 10.3.6 New features, ex better logging of jdbc use: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/w… Heidi Buelow ? Get it now! RT @soacommunity: BPM Suite PS5 11.1.1.6 available for download bit.ly/AgagT5 #bpm #soacommunity Jon petter hjulstad ?SOA Suite PS5 EDG contains OSB! docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… Jon petter hjulstad ? Testing Oracle Rules from JDeveloper is easier in PS5: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/u… Biemond® ? What’s New in Oracle Service Bus 11.1.1.6.0 oracle.com/technetwork/mi… Jon petter hjulstad ? Adminguide New and Changed Features for PS5, ex GridLink data sources: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… Retweeted by SOA Community Andreas Koop ? Unbelievable! #OFM Doc Lib growth from 11gPS4->11gPS5 by 1.2G! View media SOA Community ?ODI PS5 is available oracle.com/technetwork/mi… #odi #soacommunity 22 Feb View media SOA Community Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/ser… #osb #soacommunity #ace #opn View media For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity,twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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• I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

  - by George Clingerman

  One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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• .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the betas for .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8 shipping many people will be installing .NET 4.5 and hacking away on it. There are a number of great enhancements that are fairly transparent, but it's important to understand what .NET 4.5 actually is in terms of the CLR running on your machine. When .NET 4.5 is installed it effectively replaces .NET 4.0 on the machine. .NET 4.0 gets overwritten by a new version of .NET 4.5 which - according to Microsoft - is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. While 100% backwards compatible sounds great, we all know that 100% is a hard number to hit, and even the aforementioned blog post at the Microsoft site acknowledges this. But there's so much more than backwards compatibility that makes this awkward at best and confusing at worst. What does ‘Replacement’ mean? When you install .NET 4.5 your .NET 4.0 assemblies in the \Windows\.NET Framework\V4.0.30319 are overwritten with a new set of assemblies. You end up with overwritten assemblies as well as a bunch of new ones (like the new System.Net.Http assemblies for example). The following screen shot demonstrates system.dll on my test machine (left) running .NET 4.5 on the right and my production laptop running stock .NET 4.0 (right):   Clearly they are different files with a difference in file sizes (interesting that the 4.5 version is actually smaller). That’s not all. If you actually query the runtime version when .NET 4.5 is installed with with Environment.Version you still get: 4.0.30319 If you open the properties of System.dll assembly in .NET 4.5 you'll also see: Notice that the file version is also left at 4.0.xxx. There are differences in build numbers: .NET 4.0 shows 261 and the current .NET 4.5 beta build is 17379. I suppose you can use assume a build number greater than 17000 is .NET 4.5, but that's pretty hokey to say the least. There’s no easy or obvious way to tell whether you are running on 4.0 or 4.5 – to the application they appear to be the same runtime version. And that is what Microsoft intends here. .NET 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade. Compile to 4.5 run on 4.0 – not quite! You can compile an application for .NET 4.5 and run it on the 4.0 runtime – that is until you hit a new feature that doesn’t exist on 4.0. At which point the app bombs at runtime. Say you write some code that is mostly .NET 4.0, but only has a few of the new features of .NET 4.5 like aync/await buried deep in the bowels of the application where it only fires occasionally. .NET will happily start your application and run everything 4.0 fine, until it hits that 4.5 code – and then crash unceremoniously at runtime. Oh joy! You can .NET 4.0 applications on .NET 4.5 of course and that should work without much fanfare. Different than .NET 3.0/3.5 Note that this in-place replacement is very different from the side by side installs of .NET 2.0 and 3.0/3.5 which all ran on the 2.0 version of the CLR. The two 3.x versions were basically library enhancements on top of the core .NET 2.0 runtime. Both versions ran under the .NET 2.0 runtime which wasn’t changed (other than for security patches and bug fixes) for the whole 3.x cycle. The 4.5 update instead completely replaces the .NET 4.0 runtime and leaves the actual version number set at v4.0.30319. When you build a new project with Visual Studio 2011, you can still target .NET 4.0 or you can target .NET 4.5. But you are in effect referencing the same set of assemblies for both regardless which version you use. What's different is the compiler used to compile and link your code so compiling with .NET 4.0 gives you just the subset of the functionality that is available in .NET 4.0, but when you use the 4.5 compiler you get the full functionality of what’s actually available in the assemblies and extra libraries. It doesn’t look like you will be able to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop .NET 4.5 applications. Good news – Bad news Microsoft is trying hard to experiment with every possible permutation of releasing new versions of the .NET framework apparently. No two updates have been the same. Clearly updating to a full new version of .NET (ie. .NET 2.0, 4.0 and at some point 5.0 runtimes) has its own set of challenges, but doing an in-place update of the runtime and then not even providing a good way to tell which version is installed is pretty whacky even by Microsoft’s standards. Especially given that .NET 4.5 includes a fairly significant update with all the aysnc functionality baked into the runtime. Most of the IO APIs have been updated to support task based async operation which significantly affects many existing APIs. To make things worse .NET 4.5 will be the initial version of .NET that ships with Windows 8 so it will be with us for a long time to come unless Microsoft finally decides to push .NET versions onto Windows machines as part of system upgrades (which currently doesn’t happen). This is the same story we had when Vista launched with .NET 3.0 which was a minor version that quickly was replaced by 3.5 which was more long lived and practical. People had enough problems dealing with the confusing versioning of the 3.x versions which ran on .NET 2.0. I can’t count the amount support calls and questions I’ve fielded because people couldn’t find a .NET 3.5 entry in the IIS version dialog. The same is likely to happen with .NET 4.5. It’s all well and good when we know that .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement, but administrators and IT folks not intimately familiar with .NET are unlikely to understand this nuance and end up thoroughly confused which version is installed. It’s hard for me to see any upside to an in-place update and I haven’t really seen a good explanation of why this approach was decided on. Sure if the version stays the same existing assembly bindings don’t break so applications can stay running through an update. I suppose this is useful for some component vendors and strongly signed assemblies in corporate environments. But seriously, if you are going to throw .NET 4.5 into the mix, who won’t be recompiling all code and thoroughly test that code to work on .NET 4.5? A recompile requirement doesn’t seem that serious in light of a major version upgrade.  Resources http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2011/09/26/compatibility-of-net-framework-4-5.aspx http://www.devproconnections.com/article/net-framework/net-framework-45-versioning-faces-problems-141160© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET   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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• Building Great-Looking, Usable Apps: A two-day workshop applying Oracle’s best UX practices in ADF

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceI have been with Oracle for more than 12 years. It is a company that has granted me extraordinary creative freedom to help deliver compelling experiences for customers.I am beyond proud to talk about one of the experiences we just took for a test drive. Recently, we delivered a first-of-its-kind, three-team collaboration, train-the-trainer event in Reading, U.K., on building great-looking, usable apps based on Oracle Fusion Applications -- using the ADF tool kit. A new kind of workshopKevin Li, Platform Product Director, asked the Oracle Applications User Experience VP, Jeremy Ashley, if the team had anything to help partners and customers build applications that looked like Fusion. He was receiving this request from European partners and customers.Some quick conversations ensued, and the idea for the workshop was born: We would conduct an experiment.  We would work with feedback from the key Platform Technology Solutions (PTS) trainers under Andre Pavanello, Director, Platform Technology Solutions, in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We would partner with the ADF team lead by Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, title> and leverage the Applications UX expertise in Ashley’s team.The goal: Create a pilot workshop that in two days would explain to an ADF developer how to leverage the next-generation user experience best-practices developed for Fusion Apps. Why? Customers who need integrations with Oracle Fusion Applications, who are looking for custom applications that need to co-exist with Fusion, or who quite simply want a next-generation design for a custom app, need their solutions to reflect the next-generation research and design.Building an event for an ADF developerThe biggest hurdle was figuring out where to start.  How far into user experience country do you take an ADF developer? How far into ADF do you need to go if you are a UX professional?After some time in the UX kitchen, the workshop recipe looked like this: Mix equal parts: Fusion user experience design principles and functional design patterns The art and science behind UX How to wireframe designs that you can build in Fusion How to translate those designs into an ADF application Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, explaining the trouble ticket wireframe design exerciseLynn Munsinger, Senior Group Product Manager, explaining the follow-on trouble ticket ADF coding exercise For spice, add:•    Debra Lilley, Fujitsu and ACE director, showcasing some of the latest ADF design work in the new face of Fusion Applications •    Partner show-and-tell of example apps they have built with FMW and ADF that are dynamic, beautiful, and interactive.Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director and Fujitsu Fusion Champion on the new face of Fusion built with ADF and Fusion extensibility with composers as a window into “the possible”?The taste testThis first go-round of the workshop was aimed squarely at ADF developers and partners.  We were privileged to have participation and feedback from:•    Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger S. A., Denmark•    John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, UK•    Josef Huber, Primus Delphi Group, Munich•    Thaddaus Weindl, Primus Delphi, Group , Munich•    Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Balaji Kamepalli, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Mexico•    Yannick Ongena, infoMENTUM, UK•    Jakub Ciszek, infoMENTUM, UK•    Mauro Flores, infoMENTUM, UK•    Matteo Formica, infoMENTUM, UKRichard Bingham, Oracle, Mauro Flores and Matteo Formica, infoMENTUMWhy is this so exciting?  Oracle has invested heavily in the research and development of the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. This investment has been and continues to be applied across the product lines. Now, we finally get to teach customers and partners how to take advantage of this investment for custom solutions.This event was a pilot to test-drive the content, as well as a train-the-trainer event that our EMEA colleagues will be using with partners who want to build with Fusion Apps design patterns.What did attendees think?"I liked most the science stuff, like eye-tracking, design patterns and best-practice (color, contrast),” Josef Huber said. “It was a very good introduction to UI design, and most developers and project managers are very bad in that.  So this course would be good for all developers and even project managers." Team Anonymous: John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, Flavius Sana, Oracle, Josef Huber, infoMENTUM, Mireille Duroussaud, Oracle. Winners of the wireframing design exercise.  Sten Vesterli, of Scott/Tiger, said he attended to learn techniques he could use in his own projects. He wants to ensure that his applications better meet the needs of his users, and he said sessions during the workshop on user interface design and wireframing were most useful to him.  “Go to this event to learn the art and science of good user interfaces from people who really know how to do it,” he said.Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger, Angelo Santagata, Oracle Plinio Arbizu said the workshop fulfilled his goals, thanks to the recommendations given in how to design user interfaces to facilitate the adoption of applications among the final users. “The workshop combined these recommendations with an exercise that improved the technical comprehension, permitting the usage of JDeveloper to set forth our solutions,” he said. He added: “The first session that I really enjoyed was the five Fusion design principles. It was incredible to discover how these simple principles were included in an inherit manner in Fusion Applications, and I had been using many of them applying only ADF components.  Another topic that I enjoyed a lot was the eight recommendations about the visual design of UIs. The issues that were raised in that lesson are unknown to the developers and of great value to achieve an attractive presentation layer to the end users.  Participate in this workshop, and include these usability features in your projects and in this manner not only to facilitate and improve the user productivity, but also to distinguish you as a professional who takes advantage fully of the functionalities offered by Oracle technology. Praveen Pillalamarri came to the workshop to learn about the difficulties faced in UI and UX development, and how this can be resolved with the help of ADF.  He also appreciated the opportunity to talk with other individuals who came to the workshop. Pillalmarri said, “The way we looked at things in terms of work and projects were sharpened.  UI and UX design knowledge shared by you was quite interesting, especially the minute things which we ignored in the UI or UX design.” Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, & Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS TechnologiesReady to spread the wordIn EMEA, Oracle customers and partners have access to three world-class trainers via Platform Technology Solutions: Mireille Duroussaud, Flavius Sana, and Angelo Santagata. Contact Andre Pavanello if you like to experience this workshop firsthand, or you have customers or partners who would benefit from the training.We are looking to bring the event to the U.S. in spring 2013. If you have interest in this kind of a workshop, leave a comment below. For those who want to follow the action, join the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group run by Oracle’s Chris Muir. Ask questions and continue with the conversation in this forum, or check blogs.oracle.com/usableapps for topics emerging from the workshop.

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• At the Java DEMOgrounds - JavaFX

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaFX has made rapid progress in the last year, as is evidenced by the wealth of demos on display. A few questions appear to be prominent in the minds of JavaFX enthusiasts. Here are some questions with answers provided by Oracle’s JavaFX team.When will the rest of the JavaFX code be available in open source?Oracle has started to open source JavaFX. The existing platform code will finish being committed to OpenJFX by the end of the year.Why should I use JavaFX instead of HTML5?We see JavaFX as complementary to HTML5, and most companies we talk to react positively once they understand how they can benefit from a hybrid solution. As most HTML5 developers will tell you, the biggest obstacle to deploying HTML5 applications is fragmentation. JavaFX offers a convenient way to render HTML and JavaScript within its WebView component, which provides the same level of quality and features across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additionally, JavaScript in WebView can make calls into the Java code, and vice versa, allowing developers to tap into the best of both worlds.What is the market penetration of JavaFX? It is currently limited, as we've just made available JavaFX on Mac and Linux in August, but we expect JavaFX to be present on millions of desktop-type systems now that JavaFX is included as part of the JRE. We have also significantly lowered the level of effort required to deploy an application bundling the JRE and JavaFX runtime libraries. Finally, we are seeing a lot of interest by companies operating in the embedded market, who have found it hard to develop compelling UIs with existing technologies.Below are summaries of JavaFX Demos on display at JavaOne 2012:JavaFX EnsembleEnsemble is a collection of over 100 JavaFX samples packaged as a JavaFX application. This demo is especially useful to those new to JavaFX, or those not familiar with its latest features (e.g. canvas, color picker). Ensemble is the reference for getting familiar with JavaFX functionality. Each sample can be run from within Ensemble, and the API for each sample, as well as the source code are available alongside the sample.The samples source code can be saved as a NetBeans project for convenience purposes, or can be copied as is in any other Java IDE. The version of Ensemble shown is packaged as a native Windows application, including the JRE and JavaFX libraries. It was created with the JavaFX packager, which provides multiple packaging options, and frees developers from the cumbersome and error-prone process of packaging a Java application.FX Experience ToolsFX Experience Tools is a JavaFX application that provides different utilities to create new skins for your JavaFX applications. One of the most powerful features of JavaFX is the ability to skin applications via CSS. Since not all Java developers are familiar with CSS, these utilities are a great starting point to create custom skins. JavaFX allows developers to easily customize the look and feel of their applications through CSS. FX Experience Tools makes it easy to create new themes for JavaFX applications, even if you are not familiar with CSS. FX Experience Tools is a JavaFX application packaged as a native application including the JRE and JavaFX runtime libraries. FX Experience tools shows how this type of deployment simplifies the packaging of Java applications without requiring developers to master the intricacies of Java application packaging. The download site for FX Experience Tools is http://fxexperience.com/2012/03/announcing-fx-experience-tools/ JavaFX Scene BuilderJavaFX Scene Builder is a visual layout tool that lets users quickly design the UI of your JavaFX application, without coding. Users can drag and drop UI components, modify their properties, apply style sheets, and the FXML code they create for the layout is automatically generated in the background. The result is an FXML file that can then be combined with a Java project by binding the UI to the application’s logic. Developers can easily create user interfaces for their application, as well as separate the application’s UI from the application logic for easier maintenance. Attendees can get this app by going to javafx.com and checking the link at top of the “Overview” page.Scene Builder allows developers to easily layout JavaFX UI controls, charts, shapes, and containers, so that you can quickly prototype user interfaces. It generates FXML, an XML-based markup language that enables users to define an application’s user interface, separately from the application logic. Scene Builder can be used in combination with any Java IDE, but is more tightly integrated with NetBeans IDE. It is written as a JavaFX application, with native desktop integration on Windows and Mac OS X. It’s a perfect example of a JavaFX application packages as a native application.Scene Builder is available for your preferred development platform. Besides the GA release on Windows and Mac, a Developer Preview of Scene Builder for Linux has just been made available.Scenic ViewScenic View is a tool that can be used to understand the current state of your application UI, and to also easily manipulate properties of the scenegraph without having to keep editing your code. Creating UIs is a complex process, and it can be hard and tedious detecting these issues, editing the code, and then compiling it to test the app again. Scenic View is a great diagnostics tool that helps developers identify these issues and correct them at runtime.Attendees can get Scenic View by going to javafx.com, selecting the “Community” tab, and clicking the link under the “Third Party Tools and Utilities” section.Scenic View allows developers to easily examine the state of a JavaFX application scenegraph while the application is running. Some of the latest features added to Scenic View include event monitoring, javadoc browsing, and contextual menus. The download site for Scenic View is available here: http://fxexperience.com/scenic-view/ Conference TourConference Tour is an application that lets users discover some of the major Java conferences throughout the world. The Conference Tour application shows how simple it is to mix JavaFX and HTML5 into a single, interactive application. Attendees get Conference Tour here.JavaFX includes a Web engine based on Webkit that provides a consistent web interface to render HTML5 across operating systems, within a JavaFX application. JavaFX features a bi-directional bridge that allows Java APIs to call JavaScript within WebView, or allows JavaScript to make calls to Java APIs. This allows developers to leverage the best of both worlds.Java EE developers can take advantage of WebView and the JavaScript-Java bridge to allow their HTML clients to seamlessly bypass Web browser’s sandbox to access native system resources, providing a richer user experience.FXMediaPlayerFXMediaPlayer is an application that lets developers check different media functionality in JavaFX, such as synthesizer or support for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). This demo shows how developers can embed video content in their Java applications. JavaFX leverages the underlying video (e.g., H.264) and audio (e.g., AAC) codecs on the user’s computer. JavaFX APIs allow developers to interact with the video content (e.g. play/pause, or programmable markers). Some of the latest media features introduced in JavaFX 2.2 include HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Obviously there is a lot for JavaFX enthusiasts to chew on!

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• Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Prototyping Applications with SketchFlow

  - by T

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/10/blend-for-visual-studio-2013-prototyping-applications-with-sketchflow.aspxSketchFlow enables rapid creating of dynamic interface mockups very quickly. The SketchFlow workspace is the same as the standard Blend workspace with the inclusion of three panels: the SketchFlow Feedback panel, the SketchFlow Animation panel and the SketchFlow Map panel. By using SketchFlow to prototype, you can get feedback early in the process. It helps to surface possible issues, lower development iterations, and increase stakeholder buy in. SketchFlow prototypes not only provide an initial look but also provide a way to add additional ideas and input and make sure the team is on track prior to investing in complete development. When you have completed the prototyping, you can discard the prototype and just use the lessons learned to design the application from or extract individual elements from your prototype and include them in the application. I don’t recommend trying to transition the entire project into a development project. Objects that you add with the SketchFlow style have a hand-sketched look. The sketch style is used to remind stakeholders that this is a prototype. This encourages them to focus on the flow and functionality without getting distracted by design details. The sketchflow assets are under sketchflow in the asset panel and are identifiable by the postfix “–Sketch”. For example “Button-Sketch”. You can mix sketch and standard controls in your interface, if required. Be creative, if there is a missing control or your interface has a different look and feel than the out of the box one, reuse other sketch controls to mimic the functionality or look and feel. Only use standard controls if it doesn’t distract from the idea that this is a prototype and not a standard application. The SketchFlow Map panel provides information about the structure of your application. To create a new screen in your prototype: Right-click the map surface and choose “Create a Connected Screen”. Name the screens with names that are meaningful to the stakeholders. The start screen is the one that has the green arrow. To change the start screen, right click on any other screen and set to start screen. Only one screen can be the start screen at a time. Rounded screen are component screens to mimic reusable custom controls that will be built into the final application. You can change the colors of all of the boxes and should use colors to create functional groupings. The groupings can be identified in the SketchFlow Project Settings. To add connections between screens in the SketchFlow Map panel. Move the mouse over a screen in the SketchFlow and a menu will appear at the bottom of the screen node. In the menu, click Connect to an existing screen. Drag the arrow to another screen on the Map. You add navigation to your prototype by adding connections on the SketchFlow map or by adding navigation directly to items on your interface. To add navigation from objects on the artboard, right click the item then from the menu, choose “Navigate to”. This will expose a sub-menu with available screens, backward, or forward. When the map has connected screens, the SketchFlow Player displays the connected screens on the Navigate sidebar. All screens show in the SketchFlow Player Map. To see the SketchFlow Player, run your SketchFlow prototype. The Navigation sidebar is meant to show the desired user work flow. The map can be used to view the different screens regardless of suggested navigation in the navigation bar. The map is able to be hidden and shown. As mentioned, a component screen is a shared screen that is used in more than one screen and generally represents what will be a custom object in the application. To create a component screen, you can create a screen, right click on it in the SketchFlow Map and choose “Make into component screen”. You can mouse over a screen and from the menu that appears underneath, choose create and insert component screen. To use an existing screen, select if from the Asset panel under SketchFlow, Components. You can use Storyboards and Visual State animations in your SketchFlow project. However, SketchFlow also offers its own animation technique that is simpler and better suited for prototyping. The SketchFlow Animation panel is above your artboard by default. In SketchFlow animation, you create frames and then position the elements on your interface for each frame. You then specify elapsed time and any effects you want to apply to the transition. The + at the top is what creates new frames. Once you have a new Frame, select it and change the property you want to animate. In the example above, I changed the Text of the result box. You can adjust the time between frames in the lower area between the frames. The easing and effects functions are changed in the center between each frame. You edit the hold time for frames by clicking the clock icon in the lower left and the hold time will appear on each frame and can be edited. The FluidLayout icon (also located in the lower left) will create smooth transitions. Next to the FluidLayout icon is the name of that Animation. You can rename the animation by clicking on it and editing the name. The down arrow chevrons next to the name allow you to view the list of all animations in this prototype and select them for editing. To add the animation to the interface object (such as a button to start the animation), select the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction from the SketchFlow behaviors in the Assets menu and drag it to an object on your interface. With the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction that you just added selected in the Objects and Timeline, edit the properties to change the EventName to the event you want and choose the SketchFlowAnimation you want from the drop down list. You may want to add additional information to your screens that isn’t really part of the prototype but is relevant information or a request for clarification or feedback from the reviewer. You do this with annotations or notes. Both appear on the user interface, however, annotations can be switched on or off at design and review time. Notes cannot be switched off. To add an Annotation, chose the Create Annotation from the Tools menu. The annotation appears on the UI where you will add the notes. To display or Hide annotations, click the annotation toggle at the bottom right on the artboard . After to toggle annotations on, the identifier of the person who created them appears on the artboard and you must click that to expand the notes. To add a note to the artboard, simply select the Note-Sketch from Assets ->SketchFlow ->Styles ->Sketch Styles. Drag and drop it to the artboard and place where you want it. When you are ready for users to review the prototype, you have a few options available. Click File -> Export and choose one of the options from the list: Publish to Sharepoint, Package SketchFlowProject, Export to Microsoft Word, or Export as Images. I suggest you play with as many of the options as you can to see what they do. Both the Sharepoint and Packaged SketchFlowProject allow you to collect feedback from one or more users that you can import into the project. The user can make notes on the UI and in the Feedback area in the bottom left corner of the player. When the user is done adding feedback, it is exported from the right most folder icon in the My Feedback panel. Feeback is imported on a panel named SketchFlow Feedback. To get that panel to show up, select Window -> SketchFlow Feedback. Once you have the panel showing, click the + in the upper right of the panel and find the notes you exported. When imported, they will show up in a list and on the artboard. To document your prototype, use the Export to Microsoft Word option from the File menu. That should get you started with prototyping.

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Dashboard http://ow.ly/1mcJvp SOA Community ?Lost in Translation &ndash; Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns &ndash; Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite @ SOA, Cloud & Service… ServiceTechSymposium Matthias Zieger, Accenture just added to the agenda to co-present: "Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns" http://ow.ly/ddu7A ServiceTechSymposium ?Newly updated session title and abstract: "Big Data and its impact on SOA", by Demed L'Her, Oracle. http://ow.ly/diOq2 Deepak Arora ?To PaaS or SaaS - the latest discussions with customers using SOA Suite - what are your thoughts #soa #soacommunity SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-august-2012/ … #soacommunity Sandor Nieuwenhuijs Checkout the BeNeLux Architectural Networking Event during Oracle Open World - meet your peers and the experts http://www.ddg-servicecenter.com/networkmanager/oow/architect/default.aspx … SOA Community ?top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; August 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-uf SOA Community ?Follow SOA Community on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?New Service to promote Your SOA & BPM events at http://oracle.com/events for SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! #soacommunity #opn #oracle Jan van Zoggel ?Hotel check, flight check, overview of sessions to visit check http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/soa-cloud-servicetech-symposium/ … I'm ready for SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium SOA Community SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your SOA & BPM Events at http://oracle.com/events http://wp.me/p10C8u-sH SOA Community Call for content for the next community newsletter. Do you want to publish your success & best practice? Send it @soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community SOA Adoption in the Brazilian Ministry of Health - Case Study by Ricardo Puttini, University of Brasilia @ SOA, Cloud & Service… Jan van Zoggel ?Just registered for the 5th International SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium in London. Looking forward to it. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ OTNArchBeat ?Want to prepare for Oracle SOA Specialization? @t_winterberg offers a suggestion. http://pub.vitrue.com/5Hqu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle BPM enable BAM | @deltalounge http://pub.vitrue.com/BCwj SOA Community Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback http://wp.me/p10C8u-sF Emiel Paasschens Nice! Pdf document on how to use a #Oracle #SOA Suite Domain Value Map (DVM) in the OSB: http://bit.ly/RzyS9w #yam OracleBlogs ?Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL http://ow.ly/1m4lz7 demed ?Free VIP pass for @techsymp if you are in London Sep. 24-25. Be the first one to retweet this and I'll DM you details! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/speaker_bios.php?id=demed_lher … Jan van Zoggel blogpost: Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Oracle Coherence caching http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/osb-duplicate-message-with-coherence/ … OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence | @jvzoggel http://pub.vitrue.com/ckY8 Oracle UPK & Tutor Synaptis and Oracle Present: Leveraging UPK Throughout the Project Lifecycle: Leveraging UPK throughout the Proj... http://bit.ly/OS2Rbg Rolando Carrasco ?New entry @ oracleradio http://bit.ly/SEvwwS @soacommunity @oracleace How to identify duplicated messages on Oracle SOA SUITE? SOA Community ?Business Driven Development (BDD) Demo Now Available! http://wp.me/p10C8u-sf OTNArchBeat ?Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux | @lonnekedikmans http://pub.vitrue.com/BEyD OTNArchBeat ?Best practices for Oracle real-time data integration | Frank Ohlhorst http://pub.vitrue.com/1fH1 ServiceTechSymposium ?New OTN podcast featuring speakers Thomas Erl, Tim Hall and Demed L’Her just published. Tune into 1st 3 parts here: http://ow.ly/d1RRn OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 4 of 4 - Best selling SOA author Thomas Erl talks about the latest title... http://ow.ly/1m0txY SOA Community Win a free conference pass for the SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium &ndash; become a soacommunity facebook fan!… Lonneke Dikmans VENNSTER BLOG: Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterpris... http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/08/installing-oracle-soa-suite-10g-on.html?spref=tw … PeterPaul vande Beek published a blog on exporting Oracle #BPM metrics to a #DWH http://www.deltalounge.net/wpress/2012/08/export-oracle-bpm-metrics-to-a-data-warehouse/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Do you follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity C2B2 Consulting ?Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting @ SOA, Cloud &amp; Service … http://wp.me/p10C8u-sv via @soacommunity Gertjan van het Hof Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/fonnegra-storing-sca-metadata-1715004.html?msgid=3-6903117805 … arjankramer ?Encrypted OSB Service account passwords http://dlvr.it/20hbNV Richard van Tilborg BPM the Battle http://lnkd.in/yFAJaW OTNArchBeat Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL | @RahejaRajesh http://pub.vitrue.com/YDCD SOA Proactive ?Webcast: Introduction to SOA Human Workflow, 8/23, 10 AM EDT. Register @ http://bit.ly/Nx77sY Lucas Jellema ?Programmatically admnistration of OSB using JXM & MBeans. Interesting example is given in https://blogs.oracle.com/ateamsoab2b/entry/automatic_disabling_proxy_service_when … orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB http://ow.ly/1lXGKV Atul_Kumar ?Oracle Enterprise Gateway – OEG 11gR1 (11.1.1.*) for beginners http://goo.gl/fb/EJboE Estafet Limited Advanced SOA Boot camp @soacommunity in Munich was excellent.@wlscommunity Learnt a lot and liked the format. SOA Community Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers by Ultan O'Broin http://wp.me/p10C8u-sd SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Top tweets SOA Partner Community – October 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community Deploying Fusion Order Demo on 11.1.1.6 by Antony Reynolds http://wp.me/p10C8u-vA leonsmiers ?Cant wait to test it >> 't waiRT @OracleSOA: Case Management patterns, session coverage from #OOW #OracleBPM #ACM #BPM http://bit.ly/OdcZL6 Danilo Schmiedel Bye bye San Francisco. #oow was a great conference in a wonderful city! Thanks! @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/lcYSe9xC OPITZ CONSULTING ?The Journey towards #Oracle #BPM @OpenWorld 2012 - Slides by @t_winterberg & H. Normann: http://ow.ly/edkWE #oow demed Full house at the SOA Customer Advisory Board! #oow12 http://instagr.am/p/QX9B8eLMLS/ Danilo Schmiedel "@whitehorsesnl: Had some great talks with the BPM guys at the DEMOgrounds. It is one of the best things at #oow" -> I agree!! @soacommunity Mark Simpson ?Fusion Middleware Global Innovation Awards: nice to pick up a soa and bpm with our customer. #oow Mark Simpson ?RT @SOASimone: #oraclesoa #oow hands on lab fully booked pic.twitter.com/pwI94Ew7 <--quick, provision some more compute power on the cloud! Oracle SOA ?Join us for BPM and Analytics: Process Dashboards. BAM, and Intelligent OptimizationMoscone South - 308#OracleBPM #OOW Oracle SOA ?Real-time public safety demo! License plate recognition and processing in London via Oracle Event Processing. #oow pic.twitter.com/WufesDBq Marc ?Nice session on customer success stories on #SOA11g on with @SOASimone Pro and cons and architectural overview. #oow pic.twitter.com/bzuhsujm Lucas Jellema Full length Keynote on Middleware #oow : http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/1873556035001 … #oow_amis OracleBlogs ?Why Fusion Middleware matters to Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications customers? http://ow.ly/2stVQ0 OracleBlogs ?Open World Session - BPM, SOA and ADF Combined:Patterns learned from Fusion Applications http://ow.ly/2suhzf Ronald Luttikhuizen ?VENNSTER BLOG | Presentations at OpenWorld 2012 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/10/presentations-at-openworld-2012.html … Andrejus Baranovskis @dschmied @soacommunity next OOW for sure, and may be SOA community event ! @soacommunity Danilo Schmiedel ?@andrejusb Thanks Andrejus - I really enjoyed having a session with you at #oow. When is next time :-) ? @soacommunity Lionel Dubreuil ?@soacommunity #oow12 Today-1:15pm-Marriott Marquis Salon 7 Jump-starting Integration with Oracle Foundation Pack http://bit.ly/QKKJzF Ronald Luttikhuizen ?Impression from our fault handling session in OSB and SOA Suite from the audience @soacommunity @gschmutz #oow pic.twitter.com/WSg1Z89E Marc Nice session on Oracle Virtual Assembly for #SOA11g, @soacommunity Works with #exalogic but not required SOA Community ?Send your #soacommunity #oow pictures and blog posts @soacommunity or http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity Enjoy OOW ;-) Jon petter hjulstad Oracle BPM- Big leap forward in 11.1.1.7 ! Whitehorses ?Common BPM Use Cases from Oracle #bpm #oow pic.twitter.com/ofOv04EF Whitehorses ?Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 top new features. Interesting #oow #oowbenelux pic.twitter.com/HY9QN5un SOA Community Industrialized SOA - topic of Business Technology Magazine http://wp.me/p10C8u-vi orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: The curious case of SOA Human tasks' automatic completion http://ow.ly/1mq6YU Simone Geib Look for this sign #oow #oraclesoa pic.twitter.com/MJsPV4PO Lucas Jellema My summary of Larry Ellison's keynote at #oow on the AMIS Blog: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/10/01/oow-2012-larry-ellisons-keynote-announcements-exa-cloud-database/ … #oow_amis gschmutz ?Join my #oow session "Five Cool Use Cases for the Spring Component" to see the power of Spring and SOA Suite combined! Moscone 310 - 3:15 PM Ronald Luttikhuizen Thanks to @soacommunity for great SOA/BPM dinner event yesterday night! #oow pic.twitter.com/v7x3i0DC OracleBlogs ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL http://ow.ly/2sq6B2 OracleBlogs ?Cloud and On-Premises Applications Integration using Oracle Integration Adapters http://ow.ly/2sqiDy OracleBlogs ?Adapters, SOA Suite and More @Openworld 2012 http://ow.ly/2srdTg Eric Elzinga ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL - Part 3, http://see.sc/JodzEx #oracleservicebus Donatas Valys interesting articles about soa industrialization to read #soa #industrialization http://it-republik.de/business-technology/bt-magazin-ausgaben/Industrialized-SOA-000516.html … gschmutz ?“@techsymp: 2012 Symposium Presentation Download Page Now Available! 75% of presentations published. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com ” find mine there.. Oracle BPM Customer Experience and BPM – From Efficiency to Engagement #bpm #oraclebpm #processmanagement #socialbpm http://pub.vitrue.com/Tahi SOA Community ?@soacommunity SOA Community Newsletter September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wa SOA Community again again again.... it is Oracle Open World 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wk OracleBlogs ?SOA Proactive support http://ow.ly/2smrSJ demed ?@gschmutz on NoSQL at @techsymp http://lockerz.com/s/247601661 demed ?Just finished "#BigData and its impact on #SOA" talk @techsymp. Really enjoyed getting out of beaten path. #london #oep http://lockerz.com/s/247636974 OTNArchBeat ?Need help selling SOA to business stakeholders? Give them this free eBook. #soasuite http://pub.vitrue.com/hsQY SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-vc SOA Community Move Data into the grid for scalable, predictable response times http://wp.me/p10C8u-vv ServiceTechSymposium ?The September issue of the Service Technology Magazine is now published with six new items! Read them at http://www.servicetechmag.com Marc ?Reviewed @Packt_OracleFMW new book on SOA11g administration! Very good ! http://tinyurl.com/8pzd5ww SOA Community ?BPM Solution Catalogue&ndash;promote your process templates http://wp.me/p10C8u-vt OTNArchBeat ?BPM ADF Task forms: Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane | @ChrisKarlChan http://pub.vitrue.com/aPMG OTNArchBeat ?Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | @JoeMcKendrick http://pub.vitrue.com/hNPv Simon Haslam ?Looking for "oak style"(!) advanced content but you're a middleware specialist? See #ukoug2012 #middlewaresunday http://2012.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=9355 … Simon Haslam ?The #ukoug2012 agenda is "go, go, go!" (as Murray would say!) http://2012.ukoug.org/agendagrid Germán Gazzoni SOA Spezial II verfügbar – Industralized SOA: Die überarbeitete und ergänzte Neuauflage des SOA Spezial Sonderhe... http://bit.ly/PAWwN9 Oracle SOA ?Flip thru new interactive "Oracle SOA Suite eBook-In the Customers Words" #middleware #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/NzFZ SOA Community Follow SOA Community on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity #opn SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• New OFM versions released SOA Suite 11.1.1.4 &amp; BPM 11.1.1.4 &amp; JDeveloper 11.1.1.4 WebLogic on JRockit 10.3.4 feedback from the community

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Oracle SOA Suite 11g Installations This is the latest release of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Please see the Documentation tab for Release Notes, Installation Guides and other release specific information. Please also see the List of New Features and Samples provided for this release. Release 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) Microsoft Windows (32-bit JVM) Linux (32-bit JVM) Generic Oracle JDeveloper 11g Rel 1 (11.1.1.x) (JDeveloper + ADF) Integrated development environment certified on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. License is free (read the Pricing FAQ). Studio Edition for Windows (1.2 GB) | Studio Edition for Linux (1.3 GB) | See All See Additional Development Tools Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Rel 1 (10.3.4) Installers The WebLogic Server installers include Oracle Coherence and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and supports development with other Fusion Middleware products . The zip includes WebLogic Server only and is intended for WebLogic Server development only. Linux x86 (1.1 GB) | Windows x86 (1 GB) Zip for Windows x86, Linux x86, Mac OS X (316 MB) | See All Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.4) on JRockit Virtual Edition Download For additional downloads please visit the Oracle Fusion Middleware Products Update Center Share your feedback with the @soacommunity on twitter SOASimone Simone Geib SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) has just been released: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/downloads/index.html gschmutz gschmutz My new blog post: WebLogic Server, JDev, SOA, BPM, OSB and CEP 11.1.1.4 (PS3) available! - http://tinyurl.com/4negnpn simon_haslam Simon Haslam I'm very pleased to see WLS 10.3.4 for JRockit VE launched at the same time as the rest of PS3 http://j.mp/gl1nQm (32bit anyway) lucasjellema Lucas Jellema See http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@otn/documents/webcontent/156082.xml for PS3 extension downloads BPM, SOA Editor, WebCenter demed demed List of new features in @OracleSOA 11gR1 PS3: http://bit.ly/fVRwsP is not extremely long but huge release by # of bugs fixed. Go! biemond Edwin Biemond WebLogic 10.3.4 new features http://bit.ly/f7L1Eu Exalogic Elastic Cloud , JPA2 , Maven plugin, OWSM policies on WebLogic SCA applications JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF JDeveloper and Oracle ADF 11g Release 1 Patch Set 3 (11.1.1.4.0): New Features and Bug Fixes http://bit.ly/feghnY simon_haslam Simon Haslam WebLogic Server 10.3.4 (i.e. 11gR1 PS3) available now too http://bit.ly/eeysZ2 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Share your impressions on the new JDeveloper 11g Patchset 3 release that came out today! Download it here: http://bit.ly/dogRN8 VikasAatOracle Vikas Anand SOA Suite 11gR1PS3 is Hotpluggable ...see list of features that @Demed posted..#soa #soacommunity   New versions of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.x)  include: Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 (10.3.4) Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Business Process Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Complex Event Processing 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Service Bus 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Enterprise Repository 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Identity Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle WebCenter 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) - coming soon Oracle Forms, Reports, Portal & Discoverer 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle Repository Creation Utility 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Oracle JDeveloper & Application Development Runtime 11g R1 (11.1.1.4.0) Resources Download  (OTN) Certification Documentation   New Features in Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.4.0) Updated: January, 2011 Go to Oracle SOA Suite 11g Doc Introduction Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.4.0) includes both bug fixes as well as new features listed below - click on the title of each feature for more details. Downloads, documentation links and more information on the Oracle SOA Suite available on the SOA Suite OTN page and as always, we welcome your feedback on the SOA OTN forum. New in Oracle SOA Suite in this release BPEL Component BPEL 2.0 support in JDeveloper The BPEL editor in JDeveloper now generates BPEL 2.0 code and introduces several new activities. Augmented XML variables auto-initialization capabilities The XML variable auto-initialization capabilities have been enhanced to support two need additional use cases: to initialize the to-spec node if it doesn't exist during the rule and to initialize array elements. New Assign Activity dialog The new Assign Activity supports the same drag & drop paradigm used for the XSLT mapper, greatly streamlining the task of assigning multiple variables. Mediator Component Time window parameter for the resequencer This new parameter lets users initiate a best-effort resequencing based on a time window rather than a number of messages. Support for attachments in the Mediator assign dialog The Mediator assign dialog now supports attachment, enabling usage of the Mediator to transmit attachments even if source and target schemas are different. Adapters & Bindings ChunkSize property added to the File Adapter header properties The ChunkSize property of the File Adapter is now available as a header property, allowing in-process modification of the value for this property. Improved support for distributed WLS JMS topics though automatic rebalancing of listeners The JMS Adapter has been enhanced to subscribe to administrative events from WLS JMS. Based on these events, it dynamically rebalances listeners when there are changes to the members of a local or remote WLS JMS distributed destination. JDeveloper configuration wizard for custom JCA adapters A new wizard is available in JDeveloper to configure custom-built adapters Administration & Enterprise Manager Enhanced purging capabilities to manage database growth Historical instance data can now be purged using three different strategies: batch script, scheduled batch script or data partitioning. Asynchronous bulk instance deletion in Enterprise Manager Bulk deletion of instances in Enterprise Manager now executes as an asynchronous operation in Enterprise Manager, returning control to the user as soon as the action has been submitted and acknowledged. B2B Ability to schedule partner downtime This feature allows trading partners to notify each other about planned downtime and to delay delivery of messages during that period. Message sequencing B2B now supports both inbound and outbound message sequencing. Simplified BAM integration with B2B B2B ships with various pre-configured artifacts to simplify monitoring in BAM. Instance Message Java API for B2B The new instance message Java API supports programmatic access to B2B instance message data. Oracle Service Bus (OSB) Certification of the File and FTP JCA Adapters The File and FTP JCA adapters are now certified for use with Oracle Service Bus (in addition to the native transports). Security enhancements Oracle Service Bus now supports SAML 2.0 as well as the OWSM authorization policies. Check the Oracle Service Bus 11.1.1.4 Release Notes for a complete list of new features. Installation, Hot-Pluggability & Certifications Ability to run Oracle SOA Suite on IBM WebSphere Application Server Oracle SOA Suite can now be deployed on IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (ND) 7.0.11 and IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0.11. Single JVM developer installation template Oracle SOA Suite can now be targeted to the WebLogic admin server - there is no requirement to also have a managed server. This topology is intended to minimize the memory foorprint of development environments. This is in addition to the list of supported browsers, operating systems and databases already certified in prior releases. Complex Event Processing (CEP) IDE enhancements This release introduces several enhancements to the development IDE, such as adapter wizards and event-type repository. CQL enhancements CQL enhancements include JDBC data cartridges and parametrized queries. Tracing and injecting events in the Event Processing Network (EPN) In the development environment you can now trace and inject events. Check the Oracle CEP 11.1.1.4 Release Notes for a complete list of new features. SOA Suite page on OTN For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Suite 11.1.1.4,JDeveloper 11.1.1.4,WebLogic 10.3.4,JRockit 10.3.4,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,SOA,Simone Geib,Guido Schmutz,Edwin Biemond,Lucas Jellema,Simon Haslam,Demed,Vikas Anand,Jürgen Kress

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• Portal And Content - Content Integration - Best Practices

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have seen an increase in projects that have failed to either get user friendly content integration or non satisfactory performance. Our intention is to mitigate any knowledge gap that our previous post might have left you with, therefore this post will repeat some recommendation or reference back to old useful post. Moreover this post will help you understand ground up how to design, architect and implement business enabled, responsive and performing portals with complex requirements on business centric information publishing. Design the Information Model The key to successful portal deployments is Information modeling, it's a key task to understand the use case you designing for, therefore I have designed a set of question you need to ask yourself or your customer: Question: Who will own the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Who will publish the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Will there be multiple publishers? Answer: YesQuestion: Are the publishers computer scientist?Answer: NoQuestion: How often do the information changes, daily, weekly, monthly?Answer: Daily, weekly If your answers to the questions matches at least 2, we strongly recommend you design your content with following principles: Divide your pages in to logical sections, where each section is marked with its purpose Assign capabilities to each section, does it contain text, images, formatting and/or is it static and is populated through other contextual information Select editor/design element type WYSIWYG - Rich Text Plain Text - non-format text Image - Image object Static List - static list of formatted informationDynamic Data List - assembled information from multiple data files through CMIS query The result of such design map could look like following below examples: Based on the outcome of the required elements in the design column 3 from the left you will now simply design a data model in WebCenter Content - Site Studio by creating a Region Definition structure matching your design requirements.For more information on how to create a Region definition see following post: Region Definition Post - note see instruction 7 for details. Each region definition can now be used to instantiate data files, a data file will hold the actual data for each element in the region definition. Another way you can see this is to compare the region definition as an extension to the metadata model in WebCenter Content for each data file item. Design content templates With a solid dependable information model we can now proceed to template creation and page design, in this phase focuses on how to place the content sections from the region definition on the page via a Content Presenter template. Remember by creating content presenter templates you will leverage the latest and most integrated technology WebCenter has to offer. This phase is much easier since the you already have the information model and design wire-frames to base the logic on, however there is still few considerations to pay attention to: Base the template on ADF and make only necessary exceptions to markup when required Leverage ADF design components for Tabs, Accordions and other similar components, this way the design in the content published areas will comply with other design areas based on custom ADF taskflows There is no performance impact when using meta data or region definition based data All data access regardless of type, metadata or xml data it can be accessed via the Content Presenter - Node. See below for applied examples on how to access data Access metadata property from Document - #{node.propertyMap['myProp'].value}myProp in this example can be for instance (dDocName, dDocTitle, xComments or any other available metadata) Access element data from data file xml - #{node.propertyMap['[Region Definition Name]:[Element name]'].asTextHtml}Region Definition Name is the expect region definition that the current data file is instantiatingElement name is the element value you like to grab from the data file I recommend you read following  useful post on content template topic:CMIS queries and template creation - note see instruction 9 for detailsStatic List template rendering For more information on templates:Single Item Content TemplateMulti Item Content TemplateExpression Language Internationalization Considerations When integrating content assets via content presenter you by now probably understand that the content item/data file is wired to the page, what is also pretty common at this stage is that the content item/data file only support one language since its not practical or business friendly to mix that into a complex structure. Therefore you will be left with a very common dilemma that you will have to either build a complete new portal for each locale, which is not an good option! However with little bit of information modeling and clear naming convention this can be addressed. Basically you can simply make sure that all content item/data file are named with a predictable naming convention like "Content1_EN" for the English rendition and "Content1_ES" for the Spanish rendition. This way through simple none complex customizations you will be able to dynamically switch the actual content item/data file just before rendering. By following proposed approach above you not only enable a simple mechanism for internationalized content you also preserve the functionality in the content presenter to support business accessible run-time publishing of information on existing and new pages. I recommend you read following useful post on Internationalization topics:Internationalize with Content Presenter Integrate with Review & Approval processes Today the Review and approval functionality and configuration is based out of WebCenter Content - Criteria Workflows. Criteria Workflows uses the metadata of the checked in document to evaluate if the document is under any review/approval process. So for instance if a Criteria Workflow is configured to force any documents with Version = "2" or "higher" and Content Type is "Instructions", any matching content item version on check in will now enter the workflow before getting released for general access. Few things to consider when configuring Criteria Workflows: Make sure to not trigger on version one for Content Items that are Data Files - if you trigger on version 1 you will not only approve an empty document you will also have a content presenter pointing to a none existing document - since the document will only be available after successful completion of the workflow Approval workflows sometimes requires more complex criteria, the recommendation if that is the case is that the meta data triggering such criteria is automatically populated, this can be achieved through many approaches including Content Profiles Criteria workflows are configured and managed in WebCenter Content Administration Applets where you can configure one or more workflows. When you configured Criteria workflows the Content Presenter will support the editors with the approval process directly inline in the "Contribution mode" of the portal. In addition to approve/reject and details of the task, the content presenter natively support the user to view the current and future version of the change he/she is approving. See below for example: Architectural recommendation To support review&approval processes - minimize the amount of data files per page Each CMIS query can consume significant time depending on the complexity of the query - minimize the amount of CMIS queries per page Use Content Presenter Templates based on ADF - this way you minimize the design considerations and optimize the usage of caching Implement the page in as few Data files as possible - simplifies publishing process, increases performance and simplifies release process Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages increases performance vs. querying for data Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages enables business centric page creation and publishing and reduces the need for IT department interaction Summary Just because one architectural decision solves a business problem it doesn't mean its the right one, when designing portals all architecture has to be in harmony and not impacting each other. For instance the most technical complex solution is not always the best since it will most likely defeat the business accessibility, performance or both, therefore the best approach is to first design for simplicity that even a non-technical user can operate, after that consider the performance impact and final look at the technology challenges these brings and workaround them first with out-of-the-box features, after that design and develop functions to complement the short comings.

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• How I do VCS

  - by Wes McClure

  After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

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• Windows Azure Myths

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure  - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you.   So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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• Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

  - by Rick Strahl

  This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access  still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml    Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different  problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC   IIS7   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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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity. Please feel free to send us your news! Lucas Jellema ?Getting started with Java EE 7: The Tutorial http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/7/tutorial/doc/home.htm … Simon Haslam I'm looking forward to starting a "WLS on ODA" proof of concept - some ideas for testing: http://www.veriton.co.uk/roller/fmw/entry/virtualised_oda_proof_of_concept … Frank Munz ?It's not too late - I just submitted two presentations about #OracleWebLogic and #Coherence for the @DOAGeV conference in Nürnberg. Did you? Arun Gupta ?Tyrus 1.0 User Guide: https://tyrus.java.net/documentation/1.0/user-guide.html … #WebSocket #JavaEE7 #GlassFish Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 Launch Webinar Technical Breakout replays on Youtube: http://bit.ly/12uUicT JSON 1.0 , EJB .2, Batch 1.0 more coming! OracleBlogs ?FREE Virtual Developer Day: Java SE, Java EE, Java Emebedded on Jun 19th and 25th http://ow.ly/2xBkwV Markus Eisele #Oracle #JavaSE Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement - June 2013 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpujun2013-1899847.html … #security OracleSupport_WLS ?Simple Custom #JMX MBeans with #WebLogic 12c and #Spring http://pub.vitrue.com/3kEr Oracle Technet Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 - 4pm - Grand Ballroom Salon A/B #qconnewyork WebLogic Community Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g (11.1.1.7) Starter Kit available & Customizable Demos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BK Oracle Technet #Java EE 7: Moving Java Forward for the Enterprise | @java http://pub.vitrue.com/tHiM OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project | @AndrejusB http://pub.vitrue.com/lZPR WebLogic Community ?ExaLogic In Memory Applications & Whitepapers Building Large Scale E-Commerce Platforms & Rethink the Entire Application Lifecycle… WebLogic Community ?Coherence YouTube videos http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BG Arun Gupta ?WARNING: Next 2 days are going to be loaded with #JavaEE7 launch related tweets, and offline next week! JDeveloper & ADF Using Contextual Event in Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/3Vpybr Oracle WebLogic Check out new blog on #hybrid_cloud & why choice is important http://bit.ly/1b1QGhL Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization Reference - Convero (AMEC) Project http://fb.me/1M9iWNmAw WebLogic Community WebLogic on Oracle Database Appliance by Frances Zhao http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BE OTNArchBeat ?New: A-Team Chronicles >> A great resource for technical content covering Oracle Fusion Middleware / Fusion Apps http://pub.vitrue.com/qbzS Oracle for Partners ?Take Java To The Edge: Java Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 http://bit.ly/19fGlSX Adam Bien ?Looking forward to tomorrow's #javaee7 + #angularjs #html5 marriage at #jpoint. See you there: http://www.jpoint.nl/meetingpoint/editie-2013#sessie-1 … shay shmeltzer ?There is a new patch for the #Oracle #ADF Mobile extension - use help->check for updates to get it. Frank Munz ?Not using @OracleWebLogic 12c yet? Australia does! Reviews from my @AUSOUG workshops in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. http://goo.gl/BfVc4 Arun Gupta ?WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, #JavaEE7 sessions accepted at #jaxlondon ... that's gonna be at least third trip to London this year! WebLogic Community SPARC T5-8 Delivers Best Single System SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark running WebLogic 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BC WebLogic Community The Ultimate Java EE Event - 16 Power Workshops mit allen wichtigen Java-EE-Themen http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BY Oracle WebLogic ?@OracleWebLogic 7 Jun New Blog Post: Using try-with-resources with JDBC objects http://ow.ly/2xryb5 JDeveloper & ADF Switching Lists of Values http://dlvr.it/3PbCkw WebLogic Community ?YouTube channel Learning Oracle's ADF http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zA Markus Eisele [GER] RT @heisedc: #Java-Entwicklung in #Oracles Public #Cloud http://heise.de/-1866388/ftw OracleBlogs ?Coherence Incubator & Community Source Code & Release Documentation http://ow.ly/2x2fXK chriscmuir ?New blog post: Migrating ADF Mobile apps from 1.0 to 1.1 https://blogs.oracle.com/onesizedoesntfitall/entry/migrating_adf_mobile_apps_from … JDeveloper & ADF ?ADF JavaScript Partitioning for Performance http://dlvr.it/3Trw15 WebLogic Community WebLogic Server Security Workshop June 27th 2013 Germany http://wp.me/p1LMIb-C7 WebLogic Community Oracle Optimized Solution for WebLogic Server 12c http://wp.me/p1LMIb-BA WebLogic Community Virtualize and Run Your Forms Applications in the Cloud - Now On Demand http://wp.me/p1LMIb-By Lucas Jellema Innteresting presentation on various aspects of end user assistance in Fusion Applications (ADF based): http://www.slideshare.net/uobroin/ouag-ireland-final2012slideshare … Adam Bien ?Summer Of JavaEE Workshops And Gigs: Free Hacking night:11.06.2013, Utrecht JavaEE 7 Meets HTML 5 and AngularJ... http://bit.ly/11XRjt4 WebLogic Community ?Real World ADF Design & Architecture Principles Trainings Germany, Poland & Portugal http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bw Oracle for Partners ?JAVA Virtual Developer Day – June 19 & June 25 - Watch educational content and engage with Oracle experts online https://oracle.6connex.com/portal/java2013/login/?langR=en_US&mcc=OPNNSL … Markus Eisele ?[blog] Java EE 7 is final. Thoughts, Insights and further Pointers. http://dlvr.it/3SrxnB #javaee7 WebLogic Community Oracle takes the top spot for market share in the Application Server Market Segment for 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle ACE Director @LucasJellema is "very pleasantly surprised" with the new ADF Academy. http://pub.vitrue.com/8fad chriscmuir ?Sell out crowd for our ADF architecture course in Munich #adfarch pic.twitter.com/zhNtQJ25JV Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Java 7 Update 21 Security Improvements http://dlvr.it/3Sc8V9 #java #heise #security Markus Eisele ?[blog] New German Article: Oracle Java Cloud Service http://dlvr.it/3Sc20V #java #heise #OracleCloud OracleSupport_WLS ?Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic - Developer Webcast now available on #Youtube http://pub.vitrue.com/GSOy Andrejus Baranovskis New ADF Academy - Impressive Concept for ADF eLearning http://fb.me/2kYSMKKR5 OracleSupport_WLS ?Removing a #weblogic domain properly http://pub.vitrue.com/ZndM WebLogic Community WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-Bp Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: Troubleshooting tools Part 3- Heap Dumps #Oracle #WebLogic Read the series http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: #WebLogic_Server on #Oracle_Database_Appliance- How to conjure a WebLogic cluster- http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Check out new cool features in Oracle Traffic Director- http://bit.ly/11fbz9h WebLogic Community Additional new material WebLogic Community April 2013 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zM WebLogic Community New WebLogic references - we want yours http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zK OracleSupport_WLS ?#Weblogic Session Replication jsession ID and F5 http://pub.vitrue.com/dWZp OracleBlogs ?top tweets WebLogic Partner Community May 2013 http://ow.ly/2xc8M5 WebLogic Community Welcome to the Spring edition of Oracle Scene http://wp.me/p1LMIb-zE Andreas Koop ?[blog post] ADF: Static Values View Object does not show any values (solved) http://bit.ly/14RDZ8p OracleBlogs ?ADF Mobile - accessing the SQLite database http://ow.ly/2x85r0 OracleSupport_WLS Youtube channel- Troubleshooting and Tuning with #WebLogic.#JRockit #SOAP #JRF http://pub.vitrue.com/qMxu Arun Gupta Next Java Magazine is all about #JavaEE7...productivity, HTML5, WebSocket, Batch & more. Subscribe http://ow.ly/lkD5D (@Oraclejavamag) Oracle WebLogic How to configure a #WebLogic cluster on #Oracle_Database_Appliance? It’s easy, read how. http://bit.ly/11fciHA Oracle WebLogic ?Blog: How to use Heap Dumps to troubleshooting memory leaks- #Oracle #WebLogic_Server http://bit.ly/14CQSD2 OracleBlogs ?Over 100 Images To Be Added to NetBeans Platform Showcase http://ow.ly/2x7Fvp Lucas Jellema A new release of the ADF EMG Task Flow Tester is now available for both JDeveloper 11 R1 and R2. https://java.net/projects/adf-task-flow-tester/pages/GettingStarted … WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Windows Azure Myths

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure  - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you.   So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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• The Shift: how Orchard painlessly shifted to document storage, and how it’ll affect you

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems. Document databases, unfortunately, are still a tough sell in many places that prefer the more familiar relational model. Being able to x-copy Orchard to hosters has also been a basic constraint in the design of Orchard. Combine those with the necessity at the time to run in medium trust, and with license compatibility issues, and you’ll find yourself with very few reasonable choices. So we went, a little reluctantly, for relational SQL stores, with the dream of one day transitioning to document storage. We have played for a while with the idea of building our own document storage on top of SQL databases, and Sébastien implemented something more than decent along those lines, but we had a better way all along that we didn’t notice until recently… In Orchard, there are fields, which are named properties that you can add dynamically to a content part. Because they are so dynamic, we have been storing them as XML into a column on the main content item table. This infoset storage and its associated API are fairly generic, but were only used for fields. The breakthrough was when Sébastien realized how this existing storage could give us the advantages of document storage with minimal changes, while continuing to use relational databases as the substrate. public bool CommercialPrices { get { return this.Retrieve(p => p.CommercialPrices); } set { this.Store(p => p.CommercialPrices, value); } } This code is very compact and efficient because the API can infer from the expression what the type and name of the property are. It is then able to do the proper conversions for you. For this code to work in a content part, there is no need for a record at all. This is particularly nice for site settings: one query on one table and you get everything you need. This shows how the existing infoset solves the data storage problem, but you still need to query. Well, for those properties that need to be filtered and sorted on, you can still use the current record-based relational system. This of course continues to work. We do however provide APIs that make it trivial to store into both record properties and the infoset storage in one operation: public double Price { get { return Retrieve(r => r.Price); } set { Store(r => r.Price, value); } } This code looks strikingly similar to the non-record case above. The difference is that it will manage both the infoset and the record-based storages. The call to the Store method will send the data in both places, keeping them in sync. The call to the Retrieve method does something even cooler: if the property you’re looking for exists in the infoset, it will return it, but if it doesn’t, it will automatically look into the record for it. And if that wasn’t cool enough, it will take that value from the record and store it into the infoset for the next time it’s required. This means that your data will start automagically migrating to infoset storage just by virtue of using the code above instead of the usual: public double Price { get { return Record.Price; } set { Record.Price = value; } } As your users browse the site, it will get faster and faster as Select N+1 issues will optimize themselves away. If you preferred, you could still have explicit migration code, but it really shouldn’t be necessary most of the time. If you do already have code using QueryHints to mitigate Select N+1 issues, you might want to reconsider those, as with the new system, you’ll want to avoid joins that you don’t need for filtering or sorting, further optimizing your queries. There are some rare cases where the storage of the property must be handled differently. Check out this string[] property on SearchSettingsPart for example: public string[] SearchedFields { get { return (Retrieve<string>("SearchedFields") ?? "") .Split(new[] {',', ' '}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); } set { Store("SearchedFields", String.Join(", ", value)); } } The array of strings is transformed by the property accessors into and from a comma-separated list stored in a string. The Retrieve and Store overloads used in this case are lower-level versions that explicitly specify the type and name of the attribute to retrieve or store. You may be wondering what this means for code or operations that look directly at the database tables instead of going through the new infoset APIs. Even if there is a record, the infoset version of the property will win if it exists, so it is necessary to keep the infoset up-to-date. It’s not very complicated, but definitely something to keep in mind. Here is what a product record looks like in Nwazet.Commerce for example: And here is the same data in the infoset: The infoset is stored in Orchard_Framework_ContentItemRecord or Orchard_Framework_ContentItemVersionRecord, depending on whether the content type is versionable or not. A good way to find what you’re looking for is to inspect the record table first, as it’s usually easier to read, and then get the item record of the same id. Here is the detailed XML document for this product: <Data> <ProductPart Inventory="40" Price="18" Sku="pi-camera-box" OutOfStockMessage="" AllowBackOrder="false" Weight="0.2" Size="" ShippingCost="null" IsDigital="false" /> <ProductAttributesPart Attributes="" /> <AutoroutePart DisplayAlias="camera-box" /> <TitlePart Title="Nwazet Pi Camera Box" /> <BodyPart Text="[...]" /> <CommonPart CreatedUtc="2013-09-10T00:39:00Z" PublishedUtc="2013-09-14T01:07:47Z" /> </Data> The data is neatly organized under each part. It is easy to see how that document is all you need to know about that content item, all in one table. If you want to modify that data directly in the database, you should be careful to do it in both the record table and the infoset in the content item record. In this configuration, the record is now nothing more than an index, and will only be used for sorting and filtering. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to mix record-backed properties and record-less properties on the same part. It really depends what you think must be sorted and filtered on. In turn, this potentially simplifies migrations considerably. So here it is, the great shift of Orchard to document storage, something that Orchard has been designed for all along, and that we were able to implement with a satisfying and surprising economy of resources. Expect this code to make its way into the 1.8 version of Orchard when that’s available.

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• MVC Portable Area Modules *Without* MasterPages

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Portable Areas from MvcContrib provide a great way to build modular and composite applications on top of MVC. In short, portable areas provide a way to distribute MVC binary components as simple .NET assemblies where the aspx/ascx files are actually compiled into the assembly as embedded resources. I’ve blogged about Portable Areas in the past including this post here which talks about embedding resources and you can read more of an intro to Portable Areas here. As great as Portable Areas are, the question that seems to come up the most is: what about MasterPages? MasterPages seems to be the one thing that doesn’t work elegantly with portable areas because you specify the MasterPage in the @Page directive and it won’t use the same mechanism of the view engine so you can’t just embed them as resources. This means that you end up referencing a MasterPage that exists in the host application but not in your portable area. If you name the ContentPlaceHolderId’s correctly, it will work – but it all seems a little fragile. Ultimately, what I want is to be able to build a portable area as a module which has no knowledge of the host application. I want to be able to invoke the module by a full route on the user’s browser and it gets invoked and “automatically appears” inside the application’s visual chrome just like a MasterPage. So how could we accomplish this with portable areas? With this question in mind, I looked around at what other people are doing to address similar problems. Specifically, I immediately looked at how the Orchard team is handling this and I found it very compelling. Basically Orchard has its own custom layout/theme framework (utilizing a custom view engine) that allows you to build your module without any regard to the host. You simply decorate your controller with the [Themed] attribute and it will render with the outer chrome around it: 1: [Themed] 2: public class HomeController : Controller Here is the slide from the Orchard talk at this year MIX conference which shows how it conceptually works:   It’s pretty cool stuff.  So I figure, it must not be too difficult to incorporate this into the portable areas view engine as an optional piece of functionality. In fact, I’ll even simplify it a little – rather than have 1) Document.aspx, 2) Layout.ascx, and 3) <view>.ascx (as shown in the picture above); I’ll just have the outer page be “Chrome.aspx” and then the specific view in question. The Chrome.aspx not only takes the place of the MasterPage, but now since we’re no longer constrained by the MasterPage infrastructure, we have the choice of the Chrome.aspx living in the host or inside the portable areas as another embedded resource! Disclaimer: credit where credit is due – much of the code from this post is me re-purposing the Orchard code to suit my needs. To avoid confusion with Orchard, I’m going to refer to my implementation (which will be based on theirs) as a Chrome rather than a Theme. The first step I’ll take is to create a ChromedAttribute which adds a flag to the current HttpContext to indicate that the controller designated Chromed like this: 1: [Chromed] 2: public class HomeController : Controller The attribute itself is an MVC ActionFilter attribute: 1: public class ChromedAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute 2: { 3: public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) 4: { 5: var chromedAttribute = GetChromedAttribute(filterContext.ActionDescriptor); 6: if (chromedAttribute != null) 7: { 8: filterContext.HttpContext.Items[typeof(ChromedAttribute)] = null; 9: } 10: } 11:   12: public static bool IsApplied(RequestContext context) 13: { 14: return context.HttpContext.Items.Contains(typeof(ChromedAttribute)); 15: } 16:   17: private static ChromedAttribute GetChromedAttribute(ActionDescriptor descriptor) 18: { 19: return descriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ChromedAttribute), true) 20: .Concat(descriptor.ControllerDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ChromedAttribute), true)) 21: .OfType<ChromedAttribute>() 22: .FirstOrDefault(); 23: } 24: } With that in place, we only have to override the FindView() method of the custom view engine with these 6 lines of code: 1: public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache) 2: { 3: if (ChromedAttribute.IsApplied(controllerContext.RequestContext)) 4: { 5: var bodyView = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, viewName); 6: var documentView = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, "Chrome"); 7: var chromeView = new ChromeView(bodyView, documentView); 8: return new ViewEngineResult(chromeView, this); 9: } 10:   11: // Just execute normally without applying Chromed View Engine 12: return base.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, masterName, useCache); 13: } If the view engine finds the [Chromed] attribute, it will invoke it’s own process – otherwise, it’ll just defer to the normal web forms view engine (with masterpages). The ChromeView’s primary job is to independently set the BodyContent on the view context so that it can be rendered at the appropriate place: 1: public class ChromeView : IView 2: { 3: private ViewEngineResult bodyView; 4: private ViewEngineResult documentView; 5:   6: public ChromeView(ViewEngineResult bodyView, ViewEngineResult documentView) 7: { 8: this.bodyView = bodyView; 9: this.documentView = documentView; 10: } 11:   12: public void Render(ViewContext viewContext, System.IO.TextWriter writer) 13: { 14: ChromeViewContext chromeViewContext = ChromeViewContext.From(viewContext); 15:   16: // First render the Body view to the BodyContent 17: using (var bodyViewWriter = new StringWriter()) 18: { 19: var bodyViewContext = new ViewContext(viewContext, bodyView.View, viewContext.ViewData, viewContext.TempData, bodyViewWriter); 20: this.bodyView.View.Render(bodyViewContext, bodyViewWriter); 21: chromeViewContext.BodyContent = bodyViewWriter.ToString(); 22: } 23: // Now render the Document view 24: this.documentView.View.Render(viewContext, writer); 25: } 26: } The ChromeViewContext (code excluded here) mainly just has a string property for the “BodyContent” – but it also makes sure to put itself in the HttpContext so it’s available. Finally, we created a little extension method so the module’s view can be rendered in the appropriate place: 1: public static void RenderBody(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper) 2: { 3: ChromeViewContext chromeViewContext = ChromeViewContext.From(htmlHelper.ViewContext); 4: htmlHelper.ViewContext.Writer.Write(chromeViewContext.BodyContent); 5: } At this point, the other thing left is to decide how we want to implement the Chrome.aspx page. One approach is the copy/paste the HTML from the typical Site.Master and change the main content placeholder to use the HTML helper above – this way, there are no MasterPages anywhere. Alternatively, we could even have Chrome.aspx utilize the MasterPage if we wanted (e.g., in the case where some pages are Chromed and some pages want to use traditional MasterPage): 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> 2: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 3: <% Html.RenderBody(); %> 4: </asp:Content> At this point, it’s all academic. I can create a controller like this: 1: [Chromed] 2: public class WidgetController : Controller 3: { 4: public ActionResult Index() 5: { 6: return View(); 7: } 8: } Then I’ll just create Index.ascx (a partial view) and put in the text “Inside my widget”. Now when I run the app, I can request the full route (notice the controller name of “widget” in the address bar below) and the HTML from my Index.ascx will just appear where it is supposed to.   This means no more warnings for missing MasterPages and no more need for your module to have knowledge of the host’s MasterPage placeholders. You have the option of using the Chrome.aspx in the host or providing your own while embedding it as an embedded resource itself. I’m curious to know what people think of this approach. The code above was done with my own local copy of MvcContrib so it’s not currently something you can download. At this point, these are just my initial thoughts – just incorporating some ideas for Orchard into non-Orchard apps to enable building modular/composite apps more easily. Additionally, on the flip side, I still believe that Portable Areas have potential as the module packaging story for Orchard itself.   What do you think?

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• Agile Like Jazz

  - by Jeff Certain

  (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference. First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side Back to the conference. The main topics for us are: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c Adaptive Case management (ACM) Big Data Fast Data Cloud Mobile Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are: Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!) Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates) EM as a single monitoring console OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!) Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive. Adaptive Case Management Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested Big Data Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself. From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post. Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of: Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data. Fast Data Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be. One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered. Cloud Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services. In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner. As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference! Links: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/first-impressions-from-oracle-open-world-2013 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: cattleCrew,Sven Bernhard,OOW2013,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• H1 Visa interview tips–What you must know before attending the interview?

  - by Gopinath

  USA’s H1 visa allows highly qualified professionals from other countries to work in America. Many IT professionals in India aspire to go to USA on H1 and work for their clients. Recently I had a chance to study H1 visa process to help one of my friends and I would like to share what I learned. With the assumption that your H1 petition is approved and you got an interview scheduled at US Embassy for your visa stamping, here are tips you must know before attending the interview Dress Code – Formals Say no to casuals or any fancy dress when you attend the interview. It’s not a party or friends home you are visiting. Consider H1 Visa interview as your job interview and dress up in formals. There is no option B for your, you must be in formals. A plain formal shirt with a matching pant is suggested for men. Tie and Suit would not be required, but if you are a professional at management level you can consider wearing suit. Women can wear either formal Salwar or formal pant-shirt. Avoid heavy jewellery, wear what is must as per your tradition or culture. Body Language -  Smile on your face Your body language reflects what you are and what’s going on in your mind. Don’t be nervous or restless, be relaxed and wear a beautiful smile on your face. A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. When you are called for the interview, greet the interviewer with a beautiful smile. Say Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening depending on time you are visiting them. Whenever appropriate say Thank You. Generally American professionals are very friendly people and they reciprocate for your greetings. Make sure that you make them comfortable to start the interview. Carry original documents in a separate folder I don’t want to talk much about the documents that are required for your H1B interview as it’s big subject on it’s own and it requires a separate post. I assume that your consultant or employer helped you in gathering all the required documents like – petition, DS 160 forms, education & job related documents, resume, interview call letters, client letters, etc. For all the documents you are going to submit at the interview make sure that you have originals in a separate folder.  If required interviewer may ask you show the originals of any of the document you submitted for visa processing. Don’t mix the original documents with the documents you need to submit for interview. Have a separate folder for them. For those who are going to stamping along with their spouse and children, they need to carry few extra original documents like – marriage certificate, marriage photos(30 numbers)/album, birth certificates, passports, education and profession related certificates of the spouse and children. Know your role & responsibilities The interviewer will ask you questions on your roles and responsibilities at client location. Be clear what is your day to day tasks at client place and prepared to face detailed questions on the same. When asked explain clearly and also make sure what you say is inline with what is mentioned in your petition and client invitation letter. At times they may ask you questions specific to the project/technology you are going to work. So doing some homework in this area will help you easily answer the questions. Failing to answer basic questions on your role & responsibilities may result in rejection. You work for your Employer at Client location but NOT FOR CLIENT One of the important things to keep in mind that you work for your employer and you are being deputed to client location on a work visa.  Your employer is going to be solely responsible for your salary, work, promotion, pay hikes or what so ever during your stay at USA. Your client will not be responsible for anything. Lets say you are employed with Company X in India and they are applying for H1B to work at your client(ex: Microsoft) in USA, you must keep in my mind that Microsoft is not your employer. Microsoft will not pay your salaries or responsible for any employment related activities. Company X will be solely responsible for all your employer related activities. If you don’t get this correctly and say to Visa interviewer that your client is responsible, then you may get into troubles. Know your client It’s always good to know the clients with whom you are going to work in USA and their business. If your client is a well know organisation then you may not get many questions from interviewer else you need to be well prepared to provide details like – nature of business, location, size of the organisation, etc.  Get to know the basic details about your client and be confident while providing those details to the interviewer. Also make sure that you never talk about any confidential details of your client projects and business. Revealing confidential details of your client may land your job itself in soup. Make sure that your spouse is also in sync with you If you’ve applied a H4 visa for your spouse along with your H1, make sure that spouse is in sync with you. Your spouse also should know the basic details of your job, your employer, client and location where you will be travelling. Your spouse should also be prepared to answers questions related to marriage, their profession(if working), kids, education, etc. Interviewers will try to asses your spouse communication skills, whereabouts while staying in USA and would they prefer to work USA or not. On H4, which is a dependent visa, your spouse is not allowed to work in USA and at any point your spouse should not show the intentions to search for work in USA. Less luggage more comfort You would have definitely heard that there are lot of restrictions on what you can carry along with you to an US Embassy while attending the interview. To be frank it’s not good to say there are many restrictions, but there are a hell a lot of restrictions. There are unbelievable restrictions and it’s for the safety of everyone. You are not allowed to carry mobile phones, CD/DVDs, USBs, bank cards, cameras, cosmetics, food(except baby food), water, wallets, backpacks, sealed covers, etc. Trust me most of the things we carry with us regularly every day are not allowed inside. As there are 100s of restrictions, it would be easier if you understand what you can carry along with you and just carry them alone. Ask your employer/consultant to provide you a checklist of items that you can carry. Most what you would require are H1B related documents provided by the employer/consultant Photographs All original documents supporting your H1B Passports Some cash for your travel expenses (avoid coins) Any important phone number / details written in a paper(like your cab driver number, etc.) If you carry restricted stuff then you will be stopped at security checks, you have to find people who can safely keep all the restricted items. Due to heavy restrictions in and around the US Embassy you will not find any  place to keep your luggage. So just carry the bare minimum things required so that you feel more comfortable. Useful Links THE U.S. NON IMMIGRANT VISA APPLICATION PROCESS U.S VISA SECURITY REGULATIONS GENERAL FAQS Hope this information is helpful to you and best of luck for your interview. Creative commons Image credit: Flickr/ alexfrance, vinothchandar. hughelectronic, architratan, striatic

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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• Experiences with learning Chinese

  - by Greg Low

  I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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• Nginx Subdomain Problem

  - by user292299

  i can't access my subdomain on localhost. my localdomain is localhost.dev and it's work.but i want to auto subdomain for php script (username.localhost.dev) i try this server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost.dev ***.localhost.dev**; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } it's not working.i change server_name for testing server_name localhost.dev asd.localhost.dev; i can't access asd.localhost.dev and i try this double server{} section # You may add here your # server { # ... # } # statements for each of your virtual hosts to this file ## # You should look at the following URL's in order to grasp a solid understanding # of Nginx configuration files in order to fully unleash the power of Nginx. # http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls # http://wiki.nginx.org/QuickStart # http://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration # # Generally, you will want to move this file somewhere, and start with a clean # file but keep this around for reference. Or just disable in sites-enabled. # # Please see /usr/share/doc/nginx-doc/examples/ for more detailed examples. ## server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost.dev; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } ############################### server { access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name asd.localhost.dev; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration # #server { # listen 8000; # listen somename:8080; # server_name somename alias another.alias; # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # # location / { # try_files $uri $uri/ =404; # } #} # HTTPS server # #server { # listen 443; # server_name localhost; # # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # # ssl on; # ssl_certificate cert.pem; # ssl_certificate_key cert.key; # # ssl_session_timeout 5m; # # ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; # ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv3:+EXP; # ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; # # location / { # try_files $uri $uri/ =404; # } #} i can't success

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