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A Case for Oracle Fusion Middleware by Lucas Jellema

- by JuergenKress

An in-depth look at the interaction of people, processes, and technologies in the transition to a service-oriented architecture. Author's Note This article presents a profile of a fictitious organization, NOPERU. The story of NOPERU as told in this article is actually a collage of the events at some dozen organizations that I have been involved with over the past few years. None of these organizations sport all the characteristics of NOPERU - but all of them have gone through or are going through a similar transition as described here and all aspects of this article were taken from real life at one or usually many of these organizations. Background NOPERU (National Organization for Permits for Emissions and Resource Usage) is a public organization that continues to transform in terms of its business, organization and technology. Changing business requirements; new interaction channels; and increasing demands for more flexibility, faster throughput and lower costs drive these transformations, while technological evolution and new architecture patterns enable the change. NOPERU chose Oracle Fusion Middleware as the technology platform to implement the new architecture and required applications. This article takes a close look at NOPERU's journey from its origins in the early 1990s as a largely paper-based entity with regional databases and client-server Oracle Forms applications. Its upcoming business objectives are introduced: what is required of the organization and what the higher goals behind these requirements are. The architecture roadmap is described at a high level as well as drilled down to a service oriented design. Based on the architecture roadmap and the business requirements and NOPERU went through a technology selection to determine the technology stack with which the future would be realized in terms of IT. The article discusses that selection and details the projects subsequently planned (and executed to date). The new architecture and technology as well as the introduction of an Agile development method have had substantial consequences for the IT organization, the processes and individual staff members. The approach NOPERU has adopted with regard to the people and the organization is portrayed. Finally, the article discusses many conclusions that NOPERU has drawn that may benefit itself and other organizations. Introducing NOPERU NOPERU is a national organization charged with issuing permits for excessive emissions (i.e., carbon dioxide) and disproportionate usage of such resources as energy or water. Anyone-whether a commercial enterprise, government agency or private person--who emits or consumes more than what is considered "fair usage" requires such a permit. When someone builds an outdoor heated swimming pool, for example, or open-air terrace heating, such a permit needs to be obtained. When a company installs new, energy-intensive equipment, such as water boilers or deep freezers, it too needs to get a NOPERU permit. Government-sponsored projects at every level that involve consumption of large quantities of fresh water or production of high volumes of emissions must turn to NOPERU for a permit. Without the required license, any interested party can get a court to immediately put a stop to the disputed activity. Read the full article here. 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: Lucas Jellema,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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What's New in Oracle's EPM System?

- by jmorourke

Oracle’s EPM System R11.1.2.2 is now generally available to customers and partners on the download center. Although the release number doesn’t sound significant, this is a major release of Oracle’s Hyperion EPM Suite with new modules as well as significant enhancements across the suite. This release was announced back on April 4th as part of Oracle’s Business Analytics Strategy launch, so analytics is a key aspect of the release. But the three biggest pieces of news in this release are Oracle Hyperion Planning support for the Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the new Project Financial Planning Application and the new Account Reconciliations Manager module. The Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine was announced back in October 2011, at Oracle OpenWorld. It’s the latest installment from Oracle in a line of engineered systems that combine Oracle Sun hardware, with Oracle database and application technologies – in solutions that are designed to provide high scalability and performance for specific tasks. Exalytics is the first engineered system specifically designed for high performance analytics. Running in-memory versions of Oracle Essbase, as well as the Oracle TimesTen database and Oracle BI tools, Exalytics provides speed of thought response times for complex analytic processes with advanced visualizations. Early adopter customers have achieved 5X to 100X faster interactivity and 6X to 10X faster planning cycles. Hyperion Planning running with Oracle Exalytics will support enterprise-wide planning, budgeting and forecasting with more detailed data, with hundreds to thousands of users across an organization getting speed of thought performance. The new Hyperion Project Financial Planning application delivered with EPM 11.1.2.2 is also great news for Oracle customers. This application follows on the heels of other special-purpose planning applications that Oracle has delivered for Workforce and Capital Asset planning. It allows Project Managers to identify project-related expenses and revenues, plan and propose new projects, and track results over time. Finance Managers can evaluate and compare different projects, manage the funding process, monitor and report the actual financial results and impacts of projects and project portfolios. This new application is applicable to capital projects, contract projects and indirect projects like IT and HR projects across all industries. This application is a great complement to existing Project Management applications, and helps bridge the gap between these applications, and the financial planning and budgeting process. Account reconciliations has to be one of the biggest bottlenecks and risks in the financial close and reporting process, and many organizations rely on spreadsheets and manual processes to perform this critical process. To help address this problem, Oracle developed an Account Reconciliation Manager module that is being delivered as part of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management. This module helps automate and streamline account reconciliations and eliminates the chances for errors, omissions and fraud. But unlike standalone account reconciliation packages, it’s integrated with the rest of the Oracle Hyperion Financial Close suite, and can integrate balances from any source system. This can help alleviate a major bottleneck in the financial close process, increase accuracy and reduce risk, and can complement existing investments in Hyperion Financial Management, as well as Oracle and non-Oracle transaction processing systems. Other enhancements in this release include an enhanced Web 2.0 interface for Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), configurable dimensionality in HFM, new Predictive Planning feature in Hyperion Planning, new Detailed Profitability feature in Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, new Smart View interface for Hyperion Strategic Finance, and integration of the Hyperion applications with JD Edwards Financials. For more information about Oracle EPM System R11.1.2.2 check out the links below: Press Release: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1575775 Product Information on O.com: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/business-analytics/overview/index.html Product Information on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/epm/downloads/index.html Webcast Replay: http://www.oracle.com/us/go/index.html?Src=7317510&Act=65&pcode=WWMK11054701MPP046 Please contact me if you have any questions or need additional information – [email protected]

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Tap Into Tier 1 ERP

- by Christine Randle

By: Larry Simcox, Senior Director, Accelerate Corporate Programs Your customers aren’t satisfied with so-so customer service. Your employees aren’t happy with below average salaries. So why would you settle for second-rate or tier 2 ERP? A recent report from Nucleus Research found that usability improvements and rapid implementation tools are simplifying deployments, putting tier 1 enterprise applications well within reach for midsize companies. So how can your business tap into the power of tier 1 ERP? And what are the best ways to manage a deployment? The Reputation of ERP Implementations Overhauling internal operations and implementing ERP can be a challenging endeavor for organizations of all sizes. Midsize companies often shy away from enterprise-class ERP, fearing complexity, limited resources and perceived challenging deployments. Many forward thinking executives experienced ERP implementations in the late 90s and early 2000s and embrace a strategy to grow their business by investing in a foundation for innovation and growth via ERP modernization projects. In recent years there has been a strong consumerization of IT with enterprise applications and their delivery methods evolving to become more user-friendly. Today, usability improvements and modern implementation tools have made top-tier ERP solutions more accessible for growing companies. Nucleus found that because enterprise-class software can now be rapidly deployed, the payback is quicker, the risks are lower, the software is less disruptive and overall, companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors and achieve more success with the advantages these types of systems deliver. Tapping into the power of tier 1 ERP can be made much easier with Oracle Accelerate solutions. Created by Oracle's expert partners and reviewed by Oracle, Oracle Accelerate solutions are simple to deploy, industry-specific, packaged solutions that provide a fast time to benefit, which means getting the right solution in place quickly, inexpensively with a controlled scope and predictable returns. How are growing midsize companies successfully deploying tier 1 ERP? According to Nucleus Research, companies can increase success in their tier 1 ERP deployments by limiting customization, planning a rapid go-live, bettering communication across departments, and considering different delivery options. Oracle Accelerate solutions incorporate industry best practices and encourage rapid deployments. And even more, Nucleus found customers deploying tier 1 ERP with Oracle that had used Oracle Business Accelerators, Oracle’s rapid implementation tools, reduced the time to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite by at least 50 percent. Industrial manufacturer L.H. Dottie is one company that needed ERP with enhanced capabilities to support its growth and streamline business processes. Using out-of-the-box configuration of Oracle E-Business Suite modules (provided by Oracle Business Accelerators and delivered by Oracle Partner C3 Business Solutions), L.H. Dottie was able to speed its implementation and went live in just six and a half months. With tier 1 ERP, the company was able to grow and do its business better, automating a variety of processes, accelerating product delivery and gaining powerful data analysis capabilities that helped drive its business into further regions. See more details about their ERP implementation here. Tier 1 enterprise-class applications have proven to boost the success of Oracle’s midsize customers. As Nucleus Research iterates, companies poised for growth or seeking to compete against larger competitors absolutely can tap into the power of tier 1 ERP and position themselves as enterprise-class through leveraging Oracle Accelerate solutions. You can learn more here about The Evolving Business Case for Tier - 1 ERP in Midsize Companies in our exclusive webcast with Nucleus. ###

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Do MORE with WebCenter

- by Michael Snow

WEBCAST THURSDAY!! 03/22/12 Do you need to lower costs? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Improve Online Engagement? But you’re still stuck with Documentum? Step away from the ledge – there is hope – let us help you. Top 4 Content Imperatives · Lower Costs - Reduce labor, maintenance fees, storage and electrical consumption · Raise Productivity - Automation and integration, communication, findability · Foster Innovation - Enable collaboration, expertise location · Improve Online Engagement – enable user-driven, dynamic marketing initiatives With the coming technology wave we see four content imperatives. Every organization has had to reduce costs, cost cutting has become a way of life. Everyone is working three jobs as positions are eliminated. And so we have to reduce labor, reduce maintenance, and reduce money we are wasting on things like storing content that is redundant or no longer useful. We also, to fill that gap, need to raise productivity. Knowledge workers represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce, accounting for 40%-75% of the employees at organizations in sectors like financial services, life sciences, healthcare and retail. What’s more, their wages total 18 percent of the United States GDP. And so we can’t afford information systems that don’t let our top performers be the best they can be. We look to automate the content processes, provide ways to integrate that content into our processes, provide communication to make decisions, and to make content more findable so people can make the right decision and move the process forward. And really to get ourselves out of the current financial status, we can only cut costs so far. We have to innovate out of economic tough times – to find new products and new markets. And to enable the innovation process, we have to enable collaboration and expertise location. So much of innovation is about building on innovations that have come before. To solve problems, we have to be able to find what our organization has already created. We find that problems we need to solve have already been solved if we can find the right document, the right person. So we have to provide systems that enable us to stand on the shoulders of our organization’s accomplishments. Good content drives great marketing. Online engagement is growing as an absolute necessity for modern growing marketing organizations that require the business users be enabled for dynamic marketing content creation, updates and targeted content creation and management. Unfortunately – if you are currently stuck with Documentum, you are really lacking in your Web Experience Management capabilities. Documentum previously used FatWire for web publishing. Now FatWire is part of Oracle. Oracle provides powerful web engagement capabilities: Increase sales and loyalty by optimizing online engagement Create, manage and moderate contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experiences Optimize customer engagement across, web, mobile and social channels Manage large scale multichannel global online presence with integration to enterprise applications Enable business users to control their content and make their own updates Publish content from native files – enable navigation of project documents, procedures, policy information Enable content display and updates from existing web applications – one click to drag and drop content management functionality So you get the ability to self-publish information and make it navigable, to move the process of publishing from IT to business users, and the ability to address a whole new area of user engagement with web experience management. So… if you are still stuck with Documentum and don’t know what to do – contact us – not only will Oracle help you step away from the ledge, but also with the MoveOff Documentum program, we are offering you a way – trade-in your Documentum licenses for a 100% credit on Oracle WebCenter. How’s that for a nice bonus? It’s time to stop maintaining Documentum, and to start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. Learn More Here! To learn more about what Oracle WebCenter can offer you today – join us for a webcast – your eyes will be opened to all that’s possible. Do More with WebCenter: Extend Beyond Content Management

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Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?

- by Izzy

On a fresh started system, free reports about 1.5G used RAM (8G RAM alltogether, Ubuntu 12.04 with lightdm and plasma desktop, one konsole window started). Having the apps running I use, it still consumes not more than 2G. However, having the system running for a couple of days, more and more of my free RAM disappears -- without showing up in the list of used apps: while smem --pie=name reports less than 20% used (and 80% being available), everything else says differently. free -m for example reports on about day 7: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 7013 446 0 178 997 -/+ buffers/cache: 5836 1623 Swap: 9536 296 9240 (so you can see, it's not the buffers or the cache). Today this finally ended with the system crashing completely: the windows manager being gone, apps "hanging in the air" (frameless) -- and a popup notifying me about "too many open files". Syslog reports: kernel: [856738.020829] VFS: file-max limit 752838 reached So I closed those applications I was able to close, and killed X using Ctrl-Alt-backspace. X tried to come up again after that with failsafeX, but was unable to do so as it could no longer detect its configuration. So I switched to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F2, captured all information I could think of (vmstat, free, smem, proc/meminfo, lsof, ps aux), and finally rebooted. X again came up with failsafeX; this time I told it to "recover from my backed-up configuration", then switched to a console and successfully used startx to bring up the graphical environment. I have no real clue to what is causing this issue -- though it must have to do either with X itself, or with some user processes running on X -- as after killing X, free -m output looked like this: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 2677 4781 0 62 419 -/+ buffers/cache: 2195 5263 Swap: 9536 59 9477 (~3.5GB being freed) -- to compare with the output after a fresh start: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 1483 5975 0 63 730 -/+ buffers/cache: 689 6769 Swap: 9536 0 9536 Two more helpful outputs are provided by memstat -u. Shortly before the crash: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 200 207 616 whoopsie 1 764 740 817 2300 colord 1 3200 836 894 2156 root 62 70404 352996 382260 569920 izzy 80 177508 1465416 1519266 1851840 After having X killed: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 184 188 356 izzy 1 1400 708 739 1080 whoopsie 1 848 668 826 1772 colord 1 3204 804 888 1728 root 62 54876 131708 149950 267860 And after a restart, back in X: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 212 217 628 whoopsie 1 0 1536 1880 5096 colord 1 0 3740 4217 7936 root 54 0 148668 180911 345132 izzy 47 0 370928 437562 915056 Edit: Just added two graphs from my monitoring system. Interesting to see: everytime when there's a "jump" in memory consumption, CPU peaks as well. Just found this right now -- and it reminds me of another indicator pointing to X itself: Often when returning to my machine and unlocking the screen, I found something doing heavvy work on my CPU. Checking with top, it always turned out to be /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none. So after this long explanation, finally my questions: What could be the possible causes? How can I better identify involved processes/applications? What steps could be taken to avoid this behaviour -- short from rebooting the machine all X days? I was running 8.04 (Hardy) for about 5 years on my old machine, never having experienced the like (always more than 100 days uptime, before rebooting for e.g. kernel updates). This now is a complete new machine with a fresh install of 8.04. In case it matters, some specs: AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, using the open-source ati/radeon driver (so no fglrx installed), 8GB RAM, WDC WD1002FAEX-0 hdd (1TB), Asus F1A75-V Evo mainboard. Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with KDE4/Plasma. Apps usually open more or less permanently include Evolution, Firefox, konsole (with Midnight Commander running inside, about 4 tabs), and LibreOffice -- plus occasionally Calibre, Gimp and Moneyplex (banking software I'm already using for almost 20 years now, in a version which did fine on Hardy).

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Stuck with Documentum Still? Do MORE with Oracle WebCenter!

- by Michael Snow

WEBCAST TODAY!! 03/22/12 Do you need to lower costs? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Improve Online Engagement? But you’re still stuck with Documentum? Step away from the ledge – there is hope – let us help you. Top 4 Content Imperatives · Lower Costs - Reduce labor, maintenance fees, storage and electrical consumption · Raise Productivity - Automation and integration, communication, findability · Foster Innovation - Enable collaboration, expertise location · Improve Online Engagement – enable user-driven, dynamic marketing initiatives With the coming technology wave we see four content imperatives. Every organization has had to reduce costs, cost cutting has become a way of life. Everyone is working three jobs as positions are eliminated. And so we have to reduce labor, reduce maintenance, and reduce money we are wasting on things like storing content that is redundant or no longer useful. We also, to fill that gap, need to raise productivity. Knowledge workers represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce, accounting for 40%-75% of the employees at organizations in sectors like financial services, life sciences, healthcare and retail. What’s more, their wages total 18 percent of the United States GDP. And so we can’t afford information systems that don’t let our top performers be the best they can be. We look to automate the content processes, provide ways to integrate that content into our processes, provide communication to make decisions, and to make content more findable so people can make the right decision and move the process forward. And really to get ourselves out of the current financial status, we can only cut costs so far. We have to innovate out of economic tough times – to find new products and new markets. And to enable the innovation process, we have to enable collaboration and expertise location. So much of innovation is about building on innovations that have come before. To solve problems, we have to be able to find what our organization has already created. We find that problems we need to solve have already been solved if we can find the right document, the right person. So we have to provide systems that enable us to stand on the shoulders of our organization’s accomplishments. Good content drives great marketing. Online engagement is growing as an absolute necessity for modern growing marketing organizations that require the business users be enabled for dynamic marketing content creation, updates and targeted content creation and management. Unfortunately – if you are currently stuck with Documentum, you are really lacking in your Web Experience Management capabilities. Documentum previously used FatWire for web publishing. Now FatWire is part of Oracle. Oracle provides powerful web engagement capabilities: Increase sales and loyalty by optimizing online engagement Create, manage and moderate contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experiences Optimize customer engagement across, web, mobile and social channels Manage large scale multichannel global online presence with integration to enterprise applications Enable business users to control their content and make their own updates Publish content from native files – enable navigation of project documents, procedures, policy information Enable content display and updates from existing web applications – one click to drag and drop content management functionality So you get the ability to self-publish information and make it navigable, to move the process of publishing from IT to business users, and the ability to address a whole new area of user engagement with web experience management. So… if you are still stuck with Documentum and don’t know what to do – contact us – not only will Oracle help you step away from the ledge, but also with the MoveOff Documentum program, we are offering you a way – trade-in your Documentum licenses for a 100% credit on Oracle WebCenter. How’s that for a nice bonus? It’s time to stop maintaining Documentum, and to start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. Learn More Here! To learn more about what Oracle WebCenter can offer you today – join us for a webcast – your eyes will be opened to all that’s possible. Do More with WebCenter: Extend Beyond Content Management

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Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

- by Michelle Kimihira

Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK). For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on. Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser. These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request. There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter. Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5. This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine. The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices. Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage. Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services. However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue. The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing. For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display? You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application? Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications. However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications. For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc. In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality? For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities. If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications. Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform. Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access: If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications. Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device. Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android. (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy? A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks. Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development? What are their existing skills sets? If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy. Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively. To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle. Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat

- by techsjs2012

I been trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat... I have on VirtualBox running Scientific Linux which has httpd and tomcat 6 on it.. I made two nodes of tomcat6. I followed this guide like 10 times and still cant get the 2nd node of tomcat working.. http://www.richardnichols.net/2010/08/5-minute-guide-clustering-apache-tomcat/ Here is the lines from my http.conf file <Proxy balancer://testcluster stickysession=JSESSIONID> BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8009 min=10 max=100 route=node1 loadfactor=1 BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8109 min=10 max=100 route=node2 loadfactor=1 </Proxy> ProxyPass /examples balancer://testcluster/examples <Location /balancer-manager> SetHandler balancer-manager AuthType Basic AuthName "Balancer Manager" AuthUserFile "/etc/httpd/conf/.htpasswd" Require valid-user </Location> Now here is my server.xml from node1 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>   <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" />  <GlobalNamingResources>  <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources>  <Service name="Catalina">         <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />   <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node1">      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>  <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">     </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> now here is the server.xml file from node2 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>   <Server port="8105" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" />  <GlobalNamingResources>  <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources>  <Service name="Catalina">         <Connector port="8109" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />   <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node2">      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>  <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">     </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> I dont know what it is. but I been trying for days

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Take a chance !

- by Hartmut Wiese

Hi everybody, Later today I am going to reach out to the JDE Partner in EMEA I am already in contact with and ask for participation and collaboration within the new EMEA JDE Partner Community. I am very excited about this community and I really believe we will have much more success in the future selling and implementing JDEdwards in this large region. For those who don´t know me yet ... I am really a long time in the JDEdwards business. I have been a JDE PreSales Consultant and joined JDEdwards in 1998 in Germany. After JDEdwards/PeopleSoft was aquired by Oracle I changed my role and become responsible on an EMEA level for the Oracle Accelerate and the Oracle Business Accelerator program. A lot of you are already know me ... and hopefully believe and trust me as well. Within the last five months I talked to approx. 60 partners already face-to-face during the various events I attended. We had two PreSales Universities delievered already and I have been to one JDE Exsite event, a JDE Executive Forum, two User groups events and one JDE Partner Event. Again approximately 60+ partner discussions and everybody likes the idea of the community and how I am going to run this in the future. At the JDEdwards UK User Group event (NOV 13) there was an external speaker talking about risk. It was a very good speech. One key element of his speech was that a sequence of (small) failures might lead to a big success. He gave very good examples from the history not software related at all but as a results some of the well done individuals everybody knows today started very small and they failed several times before they become successful. But these persons did not gave up and in the long run they win and succeeded. I really spent some time reflecting this to our business as of today. My intention to write these lines is to convince each partner out there to think about investing in JDEdwards TODAY. There are currently a number of potential investment ideas on the table for you. We have a very strong and powerful ERP System. We have advantages against all our competitors. Each partner has the ability to create his own SaaS model and deliver individual services to the customers. We also have three Business Accelerators available which really speeds up the implementation by still having full flexibility to change for example any processing option if needed. A huge number of customers are on old releases globally and think about upgrading. New technology makes new business processes available (e.g. iPad). Oracle is a pretty much forward looking company and we build tools and products. In the area of JDEdwards our partners are combining the Oracle tools and products and bringing the value to the customers. At one point in time you have decided to run your business on your own and to become a JDE/PSFT/ORCL partner. This was a risk of course at that point of time. You did not fail and this is very good of course. Business has changed and Oracle has the product and tools for you to become even more successful in the future but it is a very good time for you to take a risk again. I am not able to promise you anything but the situation is very good. You might not win every deal or increase your margin immediately but I truly believe you will find new ways of doing your business in the future by adopting some of our ideas. The only person who can stop you ... is you. Please try something new/different. Success sometimes needs some time and initial failures but if you never failed - you have never lived. To get support during this phase please share your doubts, thoughts, experiences inside the new JDEdwards community and learn from others who went to similar processes. Please join here. Take care and best regards Hartmut Wiese

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Christmas in the Clouds

- by andrewbrust

I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies. And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles. But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel. Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials. And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing. Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either. But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now. The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes. It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable. Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data. And OData is everywhere. Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface. So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”). That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner. And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand. I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now. The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale. It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so. With Azure, both requirements are in place. BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server. As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS. Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up. I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster. What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good. I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies. We need to get to 2010, and fast. Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone. Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing. Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net. The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com. Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com. There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones. And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling. They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work. I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup. Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly. I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can. But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long. Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform. Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch. Support .NET 4 now. Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier. Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express. LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now. But we need more. WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great. But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively. There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is. The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely. Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year. Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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What Counts For a DBA: Replaceable

- by Louis Davidson

Replaceable is what every employee in every company instinctively strives not to be. Yet, if you’re an irreplaceable DBA, meaning that the company couldn’t find someone else who could do what you do, then you’re not doing a great job. A good DBA is replaceable. I imagine some of you are already reaching for the lighter fluid, about to set the comments section ablaze, but before you destroy a perfectly good Commodore 64, read on… Everyone is replaceable, ultimately. Anyone, anywhere, in any job, could be sitting at their desk reading this, blissfully unaware that this is to be their last day at work. Morbidly, you could be about to take your terminal breath. Ideally, it will be because another company suddenly offered you a truck full of money to take a new job, forcing you to bid a regretful farewell to your current employer (with barely a “so long suckers!” left wafting in the air as you zip out of the office like the Wile E Coyote wearing two pairs of rocket skates). I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be present at the meeting where your former work colleagues discuss your potential replacement. It is perhaps only at this point, as they struggle with the question “What kind of person do we need to replace old Wile?” that you would know your true worth in their eyes. Of course, this presupposes you need replacing. I’ve known one or two people whose absence we adequately compensated with a small rock, to keep their old chair from rolling down a slight incline in the floor. On another occasion, we bought a noise-making machine that frequently attracted attention its way, with unpleasant sounds, but never contributed anything worthwhile. These things never actually happened, of course, but you take my point: don’t confuse replaceable with expendable. Likewise, if the term “trained seal” comes up, someone they can teach to follow basic instructions and push buttons in the right order, then the replacement discussion is going to be over quickly. What, however, if your colleagues decide they’ll need a super-specialist to replace you. That’s a good thing, right? Well, usually, in my experience, no it is not. It often indicates that no one really knows what you do, or how. A typical example is the “senior” DBA who built a system just before 16-bit computing became all the rage and then settled into a long career managing it. Such systems are often central to the company’s operations and the DBA very skilled at what they do, but almost impossible to replace, because the system hasn’t evolved, and runs on processes and routines that others no longer understand or recognize. The only thing you really want to hear, at your replacement discussion, is that they need someone skilled at the fundamentals and adaptable. This means that the person they need understands that their goal is to be an excellent DBA, not a specialist in whatever the-heck the company does. Someone who understands the new versions of SQL Server and can adapt the company’s systems to the way things work today, who uses industry standard methods that any other qualified DBA/programmer can understand. More importantly, this person rarely wants to get “pigeon-holed” and so documents and shares the specialized knowledge and responsibilities with their teammates. Being replaceable doesn’t mean being “dime a dozen”. The company might need four people to take your place due to the depth of your skills, but still, they could find those replacements and those replacements could step right in using techniques that any decent DBA should know. It is a tough question to contemplate, but take some time to think about the sort of person that your colleagues would seek to replace you. If you think they would go looking for a “super-specialist” then consider urgently how you can diversify and share your knowledge, and start documenting all the processes you know as if today were your last day, because who knows, it just might be.

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Systems of Engagement

- by Michael Snow

12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Engagement Week 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This week we’ll be looking at the ever evolving topic of systems of engagement. This topic continues generating widespread discussion around how we connect with businesses, employers, governments, and extended social communities across multiple channels spanning web, mobile and human face to face contact. Earlier in our Social Business Thought Leader Webcast Series, we had AIIM President John Mancini presenting "Moving from Records to Engagement to Insight" discussing the factors that are driving organizations to think more strategically about the intersection of content management, social technologies, and business processes. John spoke about how Content Management and Enterprise IT are being changed by social technologies and how new technologies are being used to drive innovation and transform processes along and what the implications of this transformation are for information professionals. He used these two slides below to illustrate the evolution from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement. The AIIM White Paper is available for download from the AIIM website. Later this week (09/20), we'll have another session in our Social Business Thought Leader Webcast Series featuring R “Ray” Wang (@rwang0) Principal Analyst & CEO from Constellation Research presenting: "Engaging Customers in the Era of Overexposure" More info to come tomorrow on the upcoming webcast this week. ~~~~~~ In the spirit of spreading good karma - one of the first things that came to mind as I was thinking about "Engagement" was the evolution of the Marriage Proposal. Someone sent me a link to this link a couple of months ago and it raises the bar on all proposals. I hope you'll enjoy!

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Customer Interaction Group (NL) becomes the first Oracle EMEA partner that Achieves OPN Specialization for Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service

- by Richard Lefebvre

Oracle Recognizes Customer Interaction Group for Expertise in Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Customer Interaction Group, specialists in customer contact and a Gold level member of Oracle® PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced it has achieved OPN Specialized status for Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. To achieve OPN Specialized status, Oracle partners are required to meet a stringent set of requirements that are based on the needs and priorities of the customer and partner community. By achieving a Specialized distinction, Customer Interaction Group has been recognized by Oracle for its expertise in delivering services specifically around Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service through competency development, business results and proven success. “As valued Oracle partner it is very important to us to achieve this specialization. With this recognition we guarantee our customers professionalism in each project, from advisory tasks to complex implementations. This allows Customer Interaction Group not only a deepening realization towards optimizing customer interaction, but also to service delivery through various media channels. As a result, our customers are able to service their customers on a higher level” says Hanjo Huizing, CEO of Customer Interaction Group. “Oracle congratulates The Customer Interaction Group with becoming specialized Oracle RightNow partner. Oracle’s Specialization Program is a trusted status and brand, which allows our most experienced and committed partners to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and gain a competitive edge by spotlighting their strengths and special skills” said Richard Lefebvre, head of the Oracle EMEA CRM&CX Partner Community. In today’s competitive markets, successful businesses can successfully stand out by offering their customers good customer service combined with excellent accessibility. Our mission is to help businesses configure and optimize the full range of customer contact. We have the knowledge, experience and tools to develop practical and innovative solutions for customer interaction processes. Our customers as fonq.nl (web department store) and CitizenM (hotels) are working successfully with Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. They both serve their customers not only in The Netherlands but also in a lot of countries in Europe. Our focus is on the delivery of excellent customer service at a lower cost. Our objective is to increase return on customer contact and to give customers a positive experience. About Customer Interaction Group Customer Interaction Group specializes in delivering and optimizing customer interaction solutions for voice, web, and social interactions. Armed with the knowledge, experience and solutions, they provide solutions and consulting services to companies seeking to deliver superior customer experiences. The core method and approach of Customer Interaction Group is to translate business problems and processes into practical interaction solutions. Based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, The Customer Interaction Group serves customers all over Europe. Follow us on Twitter @CustIntGroup, Facebook.com/custintgroup, linkedin.com/company/customer-interaction-group or visit our website www.custintgroup.com About Oracle PartnerNetwork Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle's growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit http://www.oracle.com/partners.

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for August 19-26, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The Top 10 most popular items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of August 19-26, 2012. Now Available: Oracle SQL Developer 3.2 (3.2.09.23) The latest release of Oracle SQl Developer includes UI enhancements, 12c database support, and bug fixes. ADF Tutorial Chapter 3: Creating a Master-Detail taskflow | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena continues his ADF tutorial with a chapter devoted to view layer and using the data control to build pages that allow user to update reference data. GlassFish Community Event at JavaOne 2012 Don't miss out on this exclusive GlassFish Community Event on Sunday, September 30th from 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. in Moscone South. Register Now! Part of JavaOne 2012. Oracle BI 11g Book Authors – Podcast #9 | Art of Business Intelligence In this home-grown podcast, authors Christian Screen, Haroun Khan, and Adrian Ward talk about their new book, "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial," about their sessions at Oracle OpenWorld, and about their ORACLENERD t-shirts. Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence | Jan van Zoggel "Giving the fact that every message on our ESB has an unique messageID element in the SOAP header we could store this on disk, database or in memory,"says Jan van Zoggel. "With the help of Oracle Coherence this last option, in memory, is relatively simple." Even simpler with Jan's detailed instructions. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Boston - Sept 12 There are easier ways to increase your IT brainpower. Skip the electrodes and register for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, September 12, 2012. This free event includes 8 technical sessions, panel Q&A, roundtable discussions—and a free lunch. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at the Boston Marriott Burlington, One Burlington Mall Road, Burlington, MA 01803. Oracle BPM enable BAM | Peter Paul van de Beek "BAM enables you to make decisions based on real-time information gathered from your running processes," says Peter Paul van de Beek. "With BPMN processes you can use the standard Business Indicators that the BPM Suite offers you and use them to with BAM without much extra effort." Sample Application for Switching Application Module Data Sources | Andrejus Baranovskis A sample application and how-to guide from Oracle ACE Director and ADF expert Andrejus Baranovskis. ORCLville: Some Basic BI Thoughts "If we'd stop to consider what business intelligence really is, many of us might grow a different perspective about how we implement enterprise apps," says Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter. "What if we implemented with an eye to what kind of information we'd like to get from our enterprise apps?" Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.20 released |Oracle's Virtualization Blog Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.20 was just released at the community and Oracle download sites, reports the Fat Bloke. This is a maintenance release containing bug fixes and stability improvements. Thought for the Day "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes

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Exception Handling And Other Contentious Political Topics

- by Justin Jones

So about three years ago, around the time of my last blog post, I promised a friend I would write this post. Keeping promises is a good thing, and this is my first step towards easing back into regular blogging. I fully expect him to return from Pennsylvania to buy me a beer over this. However, it’s been an… ahem… eventful three years or so, and blogging, unfortunately, got pushed to the back burner on my priority list, along with a few other career minded activities. Now that the personal drama of the past three years is more or less resolved, it’s time to put a few things back on the front burner. What I consider to be proper exception handling practices is relatively well known these days. There are plenty of blog posts out there already on this topic which more or less echo my opinions on this topic. I’ll try to include a few links at the bottom of the post. Several years ago I had an argument with a co-worker who posited that exceptions should be caught at every level and logged. This might seem like sanity on the surface, but the resulting error log looked something like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. These were all the same exception. The problem with this approach is that the error log, if you run any kind of analytics on in, becomes skewed depending on how far up the stack trace your exception was thrown. To mitigate this problem, we came up with the concept of the “PreLoggedException”. Basically, we would log the exception at the very top level and subsequently throw the exception back up the stack encapsulated in this pre-logged type, which our logging system knew to ignore. Now the error log looked like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Much cleaner, right? Well, there’s still a problem. When your exception happens in production and you go about trying to figure out what happened, you’ve lost more or less all context for where and how this exception was thrown, because all you really know is what method it was thrown in, but really nothing about who was calling the method or why. What gives you this clue is the entire stack trace, which we’re losing here. I believe that was further mitigated by having the logging system pull a system stack trace and add it to the log entry, but what you’re actually getting is the stack for how you got to the logging code. You’re still losing context about the actual error. Not to mention you’re executing a whole slew of catch blocks which are sloooooooowwwww……… In other words, we started with a bad idea and kept band-aiding it until it didn’t suck quite so bad. When I argued for not catching exceptions at every level but rather catching them following a certain set of rules, my co-worker warned me “do yourself a favor, never express that view in any future interviews.” I suppose this is my ultimate dismissal of that advice, but I’m not too worried. My approach for exception handling follows three basic rules: Only catch an exception if 1. You can do something about it. 2. You can add useful information to it. 3. You’re at an application boundary. Here’s what that means: 1. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. We’ll start with a trivial example of a login system that uses a file. Please, never actually do this in production code, it’s just concocted example. So if our code goes to open a file and the file isn’t there, we get a FileNotFound exception. If the calling code doesn’t know what to do with this, it should bubble up. However, if we know how to create the file from scratch we can create the file and continue on our merry way. When you run into situations like this though, What should really run through your head is “How can I avoid handling an exception at all?” In this case, it’s a trivial matter to simply check for the existence of the file before trying to open it. If we detect that the file isn’t there, we can accomplish the same thing without having to handle in in a catch block. 2. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. Continuing with the poorly thought out file based login system we contrived in part 1, if the code calls a Login(…) method and the FileNotFound exception is thrown higher up the stack, the code that calls Login must account for a FileNotFound exception. This is kind of counterintuitive because the calling code should not need to know the internals of the Login method, and the data file is an implementation detail. What makes more sense, assuming that we didn’t implement any of the good advice from step 1, is for Login to catch the FileNotFound exception and wrap it in a new exception. For argument’s sake we’ll say LoginSystemFailureException. (Sorry, couldn’t think of anything better at the moment.) This gives us two stack traces, preserving the original stack trace in the inner exception, and also is much more informative to the calling code. 3. Only catch an exception if you’re at an application boundary. At some point we have to catch all the exceptions, even the ones we don’t know what to do with. WinForms, ASP.Net, and most other UI technologies have some kind of built in mechanism for catching unhandled exceptions without fatally terminating the application. It’s still a good idea to somehow gracefully exit the application in this case if possible though, because you can no longer be sure what state your application is in, but nothing annoys a user more than an application just exploding. These unhandled exceptions need to be logged, and this is a good place to catch them. Ideally you never want this option to be exercised, but code as though it will be. When you log these exceptions, give them a “Fatal” status (e.g. Log4Net) and make sure these bugs get handled in your next release. That’s it in a nutshell. If you do it right each exception will only get logged once and with the largest stack trace possible which will make those 2am emergency severity 1 debugging sessions much shorter and less frustrating. Here’s a few people who also have interesting things to say on this topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9538/Exception-Handling-Best-Practices-in-NET I know there’s more but I can’t find them at the moment.

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WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning: Part II - Thread Management

- by Gokhan Gungor

WebLogic Server, like any other java application server, provides resources so that your applications use them to provide services. Unfortunately none of these resources are unlimited and they must be managed carefully. One of these resources is threads which are pooled to provide better throughput and performance along with the fast response time and to avoid deadlocks. Threads are execution points that WebLogic Server delivers its power and execute work. Managing threads is very important because it may affect the overall performance of the entire system. In previous releases of WebLogic Server 9.0 we had multiple execute queues and user defined thread pools. There were different queues for different type of work which had fixed number of execute threads. Tuning of this thread pools and finding the proper number of threads was time consuming which required many trials. WebLogic Server 9.0 and the following releases use a single thread pool and a single priority-based execute queue. All type of work is executed in this single thread pool. Its size (thread count) is automatically decreased or increased (self-tuned). The new “self-tuning” system simplifies getting the proper number of threads and utilizing them.Work manager allows your applications to run concurrently in multiple threads. Work manager is a mechanism that allows you to manage and utilize threads and create rules/guidelines to follow when assigning requests to threads. We can set a scheduling guideline or priority a request with a work manager and then associate this work manager with one or more applications. At run-time, WebLogic Server uses these guidelines to assign pending work/requests to execution threads. The position of a request in the execute queue is determined by its priority. There is a default work manager that is provided. The default work manager should be sufficient for most applications. However there can be cases you want to change this default configuration. Your application(s) may be providing services that need mixture of fast response time and long running processes like batch updates. However wrong configuration of work managers can lead a performance penalty while expecting improvement.We can define/configure work managers at;• Domain Level: config.xml• Application Level: weblogic-application.xml • Component Level: weblogic-ejb-jar.xml or weblogic.xml(For a specific web application use weblogic.xml)We can use the following predefined rules/constraints to manage the work;• Fair Share Request Class: Specifies the average thread-use time required to process requests. The default is 50.• Response Time Request Class: Specifies a response time goal in milliseconds.• Context Request Class: Assigns request classes to requests based on context information.• Min Threads Constraint: Limits the number of concurrent threads executing requests.• Max Threads Constraint: Guarantees the number of threads the server will allocate to requests.• Capacity Constraint: Causes the server to reject requests only when it has reached its capacity. Let’s create a work manager for our application for a long running work.Go to WebLogic console and select Environment | Work Managers from the domain structure tree. Click New button and select Work manager and click next. Enter the name for the work manager and click next. Then select the managed server instances(s) or clusters from available targets (the one that your long running application is deployed) and finish. Click on MyWorkManager, and open the Configuration tab and check Ignore Stuck Threads and save. This will prevent WebLogic to tread long running processes (that is taking more than a specified time) as stuck and enable to finish the process.

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Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

- by BuckWoody

Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that. I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide. Write Software Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux. Components you can use: Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control. Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database. Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs. Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more. Use Software Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure. Components you can use: Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others. Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos. High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel. Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee. Run Software Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software. Components you can use: Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft. Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances. Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances. Decision Matrix With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use. I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions. Security, Pricing, and Other Info Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you. Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment? New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - a good roundup of those changes can be found here. Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support.

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Why We Do What We Do. (Part 3 of 5 Part Series on JDE 5G Postponed)

- by Kem Butller-Oracle

By Lyle Ekdahl - Oracle JD Edwards Sr. VP General Manager In the closing of part two of this 5 part blog series, I stated that in the next installment I would explore the expected results of the digital overdrive era and the impact it will have on our economy. While I have full intentions of writing on that topic, I am inspired today to write about something that is top of mind. It’s top of mind because it has come up several times recently conversations with my Oracle’s JD Edwards team members, with customers and our partners, plus I feel passionately about why I do what I do…. It is not what we do but why we do that thing that we do Do you know what you do? For the most part, I bet you could tell me what you do even if your work has changed over the years. My real question is, “Do you get excited about what you do, and are you fulfilled? Does your work deliver a sense of purpose, a cause to work for, and something to believe in?” Alright, I guess that was not a single question. So let me just ask, “Why?” Why are you here, right now? Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you go to work? Of course, I can’t answer those questions for you but I can share with you my POV. For starters, there are several things that drive me. As many of you know by now, I have a somewhat competitive nature but it is not solely the thrill of winning that actually fuels me. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like winning occasionally. However winning is only a potential result of competing and is clearly not guaranteed. So why compete? Why compete in business, and particularly why in this Enterprise Software business? Here’s why! I am fascinated by creative and building processes. It is about making or producing things, causing something to come into existence. With the right skill, imagination and determination, whether it’s art or invention; the result can deliver value and inspire. In both avocation and vocation I always gravitate towards the create/build processes. I believe one of the skills necessary for the create/build process is not just the aptitude but also, and especially, the desire and attitude that drives one to gain a deeper understanding. The more I learn about our customers, the more I seek to understand what makes the successful and what difficult issues cause them to struggle. I like to look for the complex, non-commodity process problems where streamlined design and modern technology can provide an easy and simple solution. It is especially gratifying to see our customers use our software to increase their own ability to deliver value to the market. What an incredible network effect! I know many of you share this customer obsession as well as the create/build addiction focused on simple and elegant design. This is what I believe is at the root of our common culture. Are JD Edwards customers on a whole different than other ERP solutions’ customers? I would argue that for the most part, yes, they are. They selected our software, and our software is different. Why? Because I believe that the create/build process will generally result in solutions that reflect who built it and their culture. And a culture of people focused on why they create/build will attract different customers than one that is based on what is built or how the solution is delivered. In the past I have referred to this idea as character of the customer, and it transcends industry, size and run rate. Now some would argue that JD Edwards has some customers who are characters. But that is for a different post. As I have told you before, the JD Edwards culture is unique, and its resulting economy is valuable and deserving of our best efforts.

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An Actionable Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture

- by TedMcLaughlan

The recent “Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture” (US Executive Office of the President, May 2 2012) is extremely timely and well-organized guidance for the Federal IT investment and deployment community, as useful for Federal Departments and Agencies as it is for their stakeholders and integration partners. The guidance not only helps IT Program Planners and Managers, but also informs and prepares constituents who may be the beneficiaries or otherwise impacted by the investment. The FEA Common Approach extends from and builds on the rapidly-maturing Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) and its associated artifacts and standards, already included to a large degree in the annual Federal Portfolio and Investment Management processes – for example the OMB’s Exhibit 300 (i.e. Business Case justification for IT investments).A very interesting element of this Approach includes the very necessary guidance for actually using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) and/or its collateral – good guidance for any organization charged with maintaining a broad portfolio of IT investments. The associated FEA Reference Models (i.e. the BRM, DRM, TRM, etc.) are very helpful frameworks for organizing, understanding, communicating and standardizing across agencies with respect to vocabularies, architecture patterns and technology standards. Determining when, how and to what level of detail to include these reference models in the typically long-running Federal IT acquisition cycles wasn’t always clear, however, particularly during the first interactions of a Program’s technical and functional leadership with the Mission owners and investment planners. This typically occurs as an agency begins the process of describing its strategy and business case for allocation of new Federal funding, reacting to things like new legislation or policy, real or anticipated mission challenges, or straightforward ROI opportunities (for example the introduction of new technologies that deliver significant cost-savings).The early artifacts (i.e. Resource Allocation Plans, Acquisition Plans, Exhibit 300’s or other Business Case materials, etc.) of the intersection between Mission owners, IT and Program Managers are far easier to understand and discuss, when the overlay of an evolved, actionable Enterprise Architecture (such as the FEA) is applied. “Actionable” is the key word – too many Public Service entity EA’s (including the FEA) have for too long been used simply as a very highly-abstracted standards reference, duly maintained and nominally-enforced by an Enterprise or System Architect’s office. Refreshing elements of this recent FEA Common Approach include one of the first Federally-documented acknowledgements of the “Solution Architect” (the “Problem-Solving” role). This role collaborates with the Enterprise, System and Business Architecture communities primarily on completing actual “EA Roadmap” documents. These are roadmaps grounded in real cost, technical and functional details that are fully aligned with both contextual expectations (for example the new “Digital Government Strategy” and its required roadmap deliverables - and the rapidly increasing complexities of today’s more portable and transparent IT solutions. We also expect some very critical synergies to develop in early IT investment cycles between this new breed of “Federal Enterprise Solution Architect” and the first waves of the newly-formal “Federal IT Program Manager” roles operating under more standardized “critical competency” expectations (including EA), likely already to be seriously influencing the quality annual CPIC (Capital Planning and Investment Control) processes. Our Oracle Enterprise Strategy Team (EST) and associated Oracle Enterprise Architecture (OEA) practices are already engaged in promoting and leveraging the visibility of Enterprise Architecture as a key contributor to early IT investment validation, and we look forward in particular to seeing the real, citizen-centric benefits of this FEA Common Approach in particular surface across the entire Public Service CPIC domain - Federal, State, Local, Tribal and otherwise. Read more Enterprise Architecture blog posts for additional EA insight!

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The Latest Major Release of AutoVue is Now Available!

- by Pam Petropoulos

Click here to read the full press release. To learn more about AutoVue 20.2, check out the What's New in AutoVue 20.2 Datasheet AutoVue 20.2 continues to set the standard for enterprise level visualization with Augmented Business Visualization, a new paradigm which reconciles information and business data from multiple sources into a single view, providing rich and actionable visual decision-making environments. The release also includes; capabilities that enhance end-to-end approval workflow; solutions to visually enable the mobile workforce; and support for the latest manufacturing and high tech formats. New capabilities in release 20.2 include: · Enhancements to the Augmented Business Visualization framework o Creation of 2D hotspots has been extended in 2D drawings, PDF and image files and can now be defined as regional boxes, rather than just text strings o New 3D Hotspot links in models and drawings. Parts or components of 3D models can be selected to create hotspot links. · Enhanced end-to-end approval workflows with digital stamping and batch stamping improvements · Solutions that visually enable the mobile workforce and extend enterprise visualization to mobile devices, including iPads through OVDI (Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) · Enhancements to AutoVue enterprise readiness: reliability and performance improvements, as well as security enhancements which adhere to Oracle’s Software Security Assurance standards · Timely support for new MCAD, ECAD, and Office formats · New 20.2 versions of AutoVue Document Print Services and Integration SDK (iSDK) · New Dutch language availability The press release also contains terrific supporting quotes from AutoVue customers and partners. “AutoVue’s stamping enhancements will greatly benefit our building permit management processes,” said Ties Kremer, Information Manager, Noordenveld Municipality, Netherlands. “The ability to batch stamp documents will speed up our approval processes, enable us to save time and money, and help us meet our regulatory compliance obligations.” “AutoVue provides our non-technical teams in marketing and sales with access to customer order requirements and supporting CAD documents and drawings,” said James Lim, Regional Technical Systems Manager at Molex Incorporated. “AutoVue 20.2 has enabled us to refine our quotation process, and reduce order errors.” “We are excited about our use of AutoVue’s Augmented Business Visualization framework, which will offer Meridian users enhanced access to related technical documentation,” said Edwin van Dijk, Director of Product Management, BlueCielo. “By including AutoVue’s new regional hotspot capabilities within BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise, the context of engineering information is carried over into the visual representation of complex assets, thereby helping us to improve productivity and operational excellence.”

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What is Devops and Why You Should Care?

- by Tanu Sood

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} According to Wikipedia, DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals. DevOps is a response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. It aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services. That definition of DevOps is the – what. The “why” is even easier. Standardized development methodology, clear communication and documented processes supported by a standards-based, proven middleware platform improves application development and management cycles, brings agility and provides greater availability and security to your IT infrastructure. Clearly, DevOps is about connecting people, products and processes. Ultimately, DevOps is about connecting IT to business. If you haven’t already seen it, do check out Bob Rhubart’s feature on DevOps in the latest issue of Oracle Magazine. And for more information on how Oracle Fusion Middleware, the #1 application infrastructure foundation, visit us on oracle.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Mastering snow and Java development at jDays in Gothenburg

- by JavaCecilia

Last weekend, I took the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg to attend and present at the new Java developer conference jDays. It was professionally arranged in the Swedish exhibition hall close to the amusement park Liseberg and we got a great deal out of the top-level presenters and hallway discussions. Understanding and Improving Your Java Process Our main purpose was to spread information on JVM and our monitoring tools for Java processes, so I held a crash course in the most important terms and concepts if you want to affect the performance of your Java process. From the beginning - the JVM specification to interpretation of heap usage graphs. For correct analysis, you also need to understand something about process memory - you need space for the Java heap (-Xms for initial size and -Xmx for max heap size), but the process memory also contain the thread stacks (to a size of -Xss), JVM internal data structures used for keeping track of Java objects on the heap, method compilation/optimization, native libraries, etc. If you get long pause times, make sure to monitor your application, see the allocation rate and frequency of pause times.My colleague Klara Ward then held a presentation on the Java Mission Control product, the profiling and diagnostics tools suite for HotSpot, coming soon. The room was packed and very appreciated, Klara demonstrated four different scenarios, e.g. how to diagnose and fix latencies due to lock contention for logging.My German colleague, OpenJDK ambassador Dalibor Topic travelled to Sweden to do the second keynote on "Make the Future Java". He let us in on the coming features and roadmaps of Java, now delivering major versions on a two-year schedule (Java 7 2011, Java 8 2013, etc). Also letting us in on where to download early versions of 8, to report problems early on. Software Development in teams Being a scout leader, I'm drilled in different team building and workshop techniques, creating strong groups - of course, I had to attend Henrik Berglund's session on building successful teams. He spoke about the importance of clear goals, autonomy and agreed processes. Thomas Sundberg ended the conference by doing live remote pair programming with Alex in Rumania and a concrete tips for people wanting to try it out (for local collaboration, remember to wash and change clothes). Memory Master Keynote The conference keynote was delivered by the Swedish memory master Mattias Ribbing, showing off by remembering the order of a deck of cards he'd seen once. He made it interactive by forcing the audience to learn a memory mastering technique of remembering ten ordered things by heart, asking us to shout out the order backwards and we made it! I desperately need this - bought the book, will get back on the subject. Continuous Delivery The most impressive presenter was Axel Fontaine on Continuous Delivery. Very well prepared slides with key images of his message and moved about the stage like a rock star. The topic is of course highly interesting, how to create an infrastructure enabling immediate feedback to developers and ability to release your product several times per day. Tomek Kaczanowski delivered a funny and useful presentation on good and bad tests, providing comic relief with poorly written tests and the useful rules of thumb how to rewrite them. To conclude, we had a great time and hope to see you at jDays next year :)

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Top 5 Reasons to Invest in Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

- by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

In 2010, Oracle's portal, content management, and collaboration solutions evolved rapidly, supported by increasingly deep integrations across Oracle Fusion Middleware and the entire Oracle stack. In light of these developments, we asked Vince Casarez, vice president of Enterprise 2.0 product management, for his top five reasons to invest in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies--including real-world examples of businesses already realizing the benefits of next-generation E2.0 technologies. 1. Provide a modern user experience As E2.0 technologies gain widespread adoption, customers and employees expect intuitive Web experiences that are both interactive and community-based. By partnering with Oracle, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group is already making that happen. With 76,000 employees and operations in more than 100 countries, the company wanted a streamlined, personalized user experience with more relevant content in fewer clicks. Working with Oracle, they created a global support portal that supports personalization and integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle E-Business Suite--and drives collaboration with tools such as wikis, blogs, and forums. Learn more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group's Global Support Portal in this Webcast. 2. Improve productivity and collaboration As E2.0 technologies mature, Oracle anticipates companies moving beyond the idea of simply creating yet another Facebook-like destination for its employees, and instead shaping work environments around specific business tasks. After rapid growth--both organic and through acquisition--construction and infrastructure services leader Balfour Beatty found itself with multiple homegrown intranet sites with very minimal content-sharing capabilities. Today, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle WebCenter Spaces, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Universal Content Management, Balfour Beatty is benefiting from collaborative workspaces, a central place to use and work with documents, and unified search across content. 3. Leverage business processes and applications Modern portals are now able to integrate users, content, and business processes in unprecedented ways. To take advantage of these new possibilities, leading dairy provider Land O'Lakes has implemented a fully integrated ERP solution together with Oracle's ECM platform. As a result, Land O'Lakes has been able to achieve better information management and compliance, increased adoption rates for enterprise tools, and increased business process efficiency thanks to more effective information sharing and collaboration. 4. Enhance customer and supplier relationships Companies have begun to move beyond the idea that E2.0 simply means enabling customer reviews or embedding chat functionality. They are taking E2.0 to the next level and providing interactive experiences for their customers. For example, to enhance customer and supplier relationships, Wind River, a global leader in device software optimization, successfully partnered with Oracle to: Integrate ERP and ECM content to provide customers the latest and most relevant support information for products they own Enable customers to personalize their support experience and receive updates regarding patches, application notes, and other relevant content Enable discussions, wikis, and blogs for more efficient collaboration 5. Increase business visibility and responsiveness By strategically embedding collaboration and communication tools into specific business contexts, companies significantly increase visibility into changing business conditions--and can respond much more agilely. Texas A&M University System--one of the largest systems of higher education in the U.S.--partnered with Oracle to create a unified repository that would enable the retrieval of research and grant data from disparate systems via an Enterprise 2.0 user interface. By enabling researchers to customize their own portals with easy-to-use tools, they have also been able to significantly reduce their reliance on the IT department. Learn how other Oracle customers are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

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What are they buying – work or value?

- by Jamie Kurtz

When was the last time you ordered a pizza like this: “I want the high school kid in the back to do the following… make a big circle with some dough, curl up the edges, then put some sauce on it using a small ladle, then I want him to take a handful of shredded cheese from the metal container and spread it over the circle and sauce, then finally I want the kid to place 36 pieces of pepperoni over the top of the cheese” ?? Probably never. My typical pizza order usually goes more like this: “I want a large pepperoni pizza”. In the world of software development, we try so hard to be all things agile. We: Write lots of unit tests We refactor our code, then refactor it some more We avoid writing lengthy requirements documents We try to keep processes to a minimum, and give developers freedom And we are proud of our constantly shifting focus (i.e. we’re “responding to change”) Yet, after all this, we fail to really lean and capitalize on one of agile’s main differentiators (from the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto): “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” That is, we foolishly commit to delivering tasks instead of features and bug fixes. Like my pizza example above, we fall into the trap of signing contracts that bind us to doing tasks – rather than delivering working software. And the biggest problem here… by far the most troubling outcome… is that we don’t let working software be a major force in all the work we do. When teams manage to ruthlessly focus on the end product, it puts them on the path of true agile. It doesn’t let them accidentally write too much documentation, or spend lots of time and money on processes and fancy tools. It forces early testing that reveals problems in the feature or bug fix. And it forces lots and lots of customer interaction. Without that focus on the end product as your deliverable… by committing to a list of tasks instead of a list features and bug fixes… you are doomed to NOT be agile. You will end up just doing stuff, spending time on the keyboard, burning time on timesheets. Doing tasks doesn’t force you to minimize documentation. It makes it much harder to respond to change. And it will eventually force you and the client into contract haggling. Because the customer isn’t really paying you to do stuff. He’s ultimately paying for features and bug fixes. And when the customer doesn’t get what they want, responding with “well, look at the contract - we did all the tasks we committed to” doesn’t typically generate referrals or callbacks. In short, if you’re trying to deliver real value to the customer by going agile, you will most certainly fail if all you commit to is a list of things you’re going to do. Give agile what it needs by committing to features and bug fixes – not a list of ToDo items. So the next time you are writing up a contract, remember that the customer should be buying this: Not this:

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New PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition provides a complete set of IT services at a low, predictable monthly cost

- by Robbin Velayedam

At Oracle Open World last month, Oracle announced that we are extending our On Demand offerings with the general availability of PeopleSoft On Demand Standard Edition. Standard Edition represents Oracle’s commitment to providing customers a choice of solutions, technology, and deployment options commensurate with their business needs and future growth. The Standard Edition offering complements the traditional On Demand offerings (Enterprise and Professional Editions) by focusing on a low, predictable monthly cost model that scales with the size of your business. As part of Oracle's open cloud strategy, customers can freely move PeopleSoft licensed applications between on premise and the various on demand options as business needs arise. In today’s business climate, aggressive and creative business objectives demand more of IT organizations. They are expected to provide technology-based solutions to streamline business processes, enable online collaboration and multi-tasking, facilitate data mining and storage, and enhance worker productivity. As IT budgets remain tight in a recovering economy, the challenge becomes how to meet these demands with limited time and resources. One way is to eliminate the variable costs of projects so that your team can focus on the high priority functions and better predict funding and resource needs two to three years out. Variable costs and changing priorities can derail the best laid project and capacity plans. The prime culprits of variable costs in any IT organization include disaster recovery, security breaches, technical support, and changes in business growth and priorities. Customers have an immediate need for solutions that are cheaper, predictable in cost, and flexible enough for long-term growth or capacity changes. The Standard Edition deployment option fulfills that need by allowing customers to take full advantage of the rich business functionality that is inherent to PeopleSoft HCM, while delegating all application management responsibility – such as future upgrades and product updates – to Oracle technology experts, at an affordable and expected price. Standard Edition provides the advantages of the secure Oracle On Demand hosted environment, the complete set of PeopleSoft HCM configurable business processes, and timely management of regular updates and enhancements to the application functionality and underlying technology. Standard Edition has a convenient monthly fee that is scalable by number of employees, which helps align the customer’s overall cost of ownership with its size and anticipated growth and business needs. In addition to providing PeopleSoft HCM applications' world class business functionality and Oracle On Demand's embassy-grade security, Oracle’s hosted solution distinguishes itself from competitors by offering customers the ability to transition between different deployment and service models at any point in the application ownership lifecycle. As our customers’ business and economic climates change, they are free to transition their applications back to on-premise at any time. HCM On Demand Standard Edition is based on configurability options rather than customizations, requiring no additional code to develop or maintain. This keeps the cost of ownership low and time to production less than a month on average. Oracle On Demand offers the highest standard of security and performance by leveraging a state-of-the-art data center with dedicated databases, servers, and secured URL all within a private cloud. Customers will not share databases, environments, platforms, or access portals with other customers because we value how mission critical your data are to your business. Oracle’s On Demand also provides a full breadth of disaster recovery services to provide customers the peace of mind that their data are secure and that backup operations are in place to keep their businesses up and running in the case of an emergency. Currently we have over 50 PeopleSoft customers delegating us with the management of their applications through Oracle On Demand. If you are a customer interested in learning more about the PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Standard Edition and how it can help your organization minimize your variable IT costs and free up your resources to work on other business initiatives, contact Oracle or your Account Services Representative today.

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