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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Three Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.   By [email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself. How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration? Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits. Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes.  This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants.  In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture. Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue.  The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time".  Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes.  The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving. Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record.  Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread.  This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities. Excelling in the Unstructured Future We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations.  Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise. Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.   The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached.  Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business. How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration. Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise. 

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• Using Live Data in Database Development Work

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk Newsletter... in which Phil Factor reacts with some exasperation when coming across a report that a majority of companies were still using financial and personal data for both developing and testing database applications. If you routinely test your development work using real production data that contains personal or financial information, you are probably being irresponsible, and at worst, risking a heavy financial penalty for your company. Surprisingly, over 80% of financial companies still do this. Plenty of data breaches and fraud have happened from the use of real data for testing, and a data breach is a nightmare for any organisation that suffers one. The cost of each data breach averages out at around $7.2 million in the US in notification, escalation, credit monitoring, fines, litigation, legal costs, and lost business due to customer churn, £1.9 million in the UK. 70% of data breaches are done from within the organisation. Real data can be exploited in a number of ways for malicious or criminal purposes. It isn't just the obvious use of items such as name and address, date of birth, social security number, and credit card and bank account numbers: Data can be exploited in many subtle ways, so there are excellent reasons to ensure that a high priority is given to the detection and prevention of any data breaches. You'll never successfully guess all the ways that real data can be exploited maliciously, or the ease with which it can be accessed. It would be silly to argue that developers never need access to a copy of the database containing live data. Developers sometimes need to track a bug that can only be replicated on the data from the live database. However, it has to be done in a very restrictive harness. The law makes no distinction between development and production databases when a data breach occurs, so the data has to be held with all appropriate security measures in place. In Europe, the use of personal data for testing requires the explicit consent of the people whose data is being held. There are federal standards such as GLBA, PCI DSS and HIPAA, and most US States have privacy legislation. The task of ensuring compliance and tight security in such circumstances is an expensive and time-consuming overhead. The developer is likely to suffer investigation if a data breach occurs, even if the company manages to stay in business. Ironically, the use of copies of live data isn't usually the most effective way to develop or test your data. Data is usually time-specific and isn't usually current by the time it is used for testing, Existing data doesn't help much for new functionality, and every time the data is refreshed from production, any test data is likely to be overwritten. Also, it is not always going to test all the 'edge' conditions that are likely to flush out bugs. You still have the task of simulating the dynamics of actual usage of the database, and here you have no alternative to creating 'spoofed' data. Because of the complexities of relational data, It used to be that there was no realistic alternative to developing and testing with live data. However, this is no longer the case. Real data can be obfuscated, or it can be created entirely from scratch. The latter process used to be impractical, now that there are plenty of third-party tools to choose from. The process of obfuscation isn't risk free. The process must access the live data, and the success of the obfuscation process has to be carefully monitored. Database data security isn't an exciting topic to you or I, but to a hacker it can be an all-consuming obsession, especially if there is financial or political gain involved. This is not the sort of adversary one would wish for and it is far better to accept, and work with, security restrictions that exist for using live data in database development work, especially when the tools exist to create large realistic database test data that can be better for several aspects of testing.

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• Use Case Actors - Primary versus Secondary

  - by Dave Burke

  The Unified Modeling Language (UML1) defines an Actor (from UseCases) as: An actor specifies a role played by a user or any other system that interacts with the subject. In Alistair Cockburn’s book “Writing Effective Use Cases” (2) Actors are further defined as follows: Primary Actor: The primary actor of a use case is the stakeholder that calls on the system to deliver one of its services. It has a goal with respect to the system – one that can be satisfied by its operation. The primary actor is often, but not always, the actor who triggers the use case. Supporting Actors: A supporting actor in a use case in an external actor that provides a service to the system under design. It might be a high-speed printer, a web service, or humans that have to do some research and get back to us. In a 2006 article (3) Cockburn refined the definitions slightly to read: Primary Actors: The Actor(s) using the system to achieve a goal. The Use Case documents the interactions between the system and the actors to achieve the goal of the primary actor. Secondary Actors: Actors that the system needs assistance from to achieve the primary actor’s goal. Finally, the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) concurs with the UML definition of Actors, along with Cockburn’s refinement, but OUM also includes the following: Secondary actors may or may not have goals that they expect to be satisfied by the use case, the primary actor always has a goal, and the use case exists to satisfy the primary actor. Now that we are on the same “page”, let’s consider two examples: A bank loan officer wants to review a loan application from a customer, and part of the process involves a real-time credit rating check. Use Case Name: Review Loan Application Primary Actor: Loan Officer Secondary Actors: Credit Rating System A Human Resources manager wants to change the job code of an employee, and as part of the process, automatically notify several other departments within the company of the change. Use Case Name: Maintain Job Code Primary Actor: Human Resources Manager Secondary Actors: None The first example is quite straight forward; we need to define the Secondary Actor because without the “Credit Rating System” we cannot successfully complete the Use Case. In other words, the goal of the Primary Actor is to successfully complete the Loan Application, but they need the explicit “help” of the Secondary Actor (Credit Rating System) to achieve this goal. The second example is where people sometimes get confused. Within OUM we would not include the “other departments” as Secondary Actors and therefore not include them on the Use Case diagram for the following reasons: The other departments are not required for the successful completion of the Use Case We are not expecting any response from the other departments (at least within the bounds of the Use Case under discussion) Having said that, within the detail of the Use Case Specification Main Success Scenario, we would include something like: “The system sends a notification to the related department heads (ref. Business Rule BR101)” Now let’s consider one final example. A Procurement Manager wants to place a “bid” for some goods using an On-Line Trading Community (B2B version of eBay) Use Case Name: Create Bid Primary Actor: Procurement Manager Secondary Actors: On-Line Trading Community You might wonder why the Trading Community is listed as a Secondary Actor, i.e. if all we are going to do is place a bid for a specific quantity of goods at a given price and send that off to the Trading Community, then why would the Trading Community need to “assist” in that Use Case? Well, once again, it comes back to the “User Experience” and how we want to optimize that when we think about our Use Case, and ultimately, when the developer comes to assembling some code. In this final example, the Procurement Manager cannot successfully complete the “Create Bid” Use Case until they receive an affirmative confirmation back from the Trading Community that the Bid has been accepted. Therefore, the Trading Community must become a Secondary Actor and be referenced both on the Use Case diagram and Use Case Specification. Any astute readers who are wondering about the “single sitting” rule will have to wait for a follow-up Blog entry to find out how that consideration can be factored in!!! Happy Use Case writing! (1) OMG Unified Modeling LanguageTM (OMG UML), Superstructure Version 2.4.1 (2) Cockburn, A, 2000, Writing Effective Use Case, Addison-Wesley Professional; Edition 1 (3) Cockburn, A, 2006 “Use Case fundamentals” viewed 20th March 2012, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Use+case+fundamentals

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• Windows Phone 8, possible tablets and what the latest update might mean

  - by Roger Hart

  Microsoft have just announced an update to Windows Phone 8. As one of the five, maybe six people who actually bought a WP8 handset I found this interesting. Then I read the blog post about it, and rushed off to write somewhat less than a thousand words about a single picture. The blog post announces an extra column of tiles on the start screen, and support for higher resolutions. If we ignore all the usual flummery about how this will make your life better, that (and the rotation lock) sounds a little like stage setting for tablets. Looking at the preview screenshot, I started to wonder. What it’s called Phablet_5F00_StartScreenProductivity_5F00_01_5F00_072A1240.jpg Pretty conclusive. If you can brand something a “phablet” and sleep at night you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s explicit in the post that Microsoft are expecting a broader range of form factors for WP8, but they stop short of quite calling out tablet size. The extra columns and resolution definitely back that up, so why stop at a 6 inch “phablet”? Sadly, the string of numbers there don’t really look like a Lumia model number – that would be a bit tendentious even for a speculative blog post about a single screenshot. “Productivity” is interesting too. I get into this a bit more below, but this is a pretty clear pitch for a business device. What it looks like Something that would look quite decent on a 7 inch screen, but something a bit too vertical to go toe-to-toe with the Surface. Certainly, it would look a lot better on a large-factor phone than any of the current models. Those tiles are going to get cramped and a bit ugly if the handsets aren’t getting bigger. What’s on it You have a bunch of missed calls, you rarely text, use a stocks app, and your budget spreadsheet and meeting notes are a thumb-reach away. Outlook is your main form of email. You care enough about LinkedIn to not only install its app but give it a huge live tile. There’s no beating about the bush here, the implicit persona is a corporate exec. With Nokia in the bag and Blackberry pushing daisies, that may not be a stupid play. There’s almost certainly a niche there if they can parlay their corporate credentials into filling it before BYOD (which functionally means an iPhone) reaches the late adopters. The really quite slick WP8 Office implementation ought to help here. This is the face they’ve chosen to present, the cultural milieu they’re normalizing for Windows Phone. It’s an iPhone for Serious Business Grown-ups. Could work, I guess. Does it mean anything? Is the latest WP8 update a sign that we can expect to see tablets running Windows Phone rather than WinRT? Well, WinRT tablets haven’t exactly taken off but I’m not quite going to make a leap like that just from a file name and a column of icons. I feel pretty safe, however, conjecturing that Microsoft would like to squeeze a WP8 “phablet” into the palm of every exec who’s ever grumbled about their Blackberry, and this release might get them a bit closer. If it works well incrementing up to larger devices, then that could be a fair hedge against WinRt crashing and burning any harder in the marketplace.

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• JMSContext, @JMSDestinationDefintion, DefaultJMSConnectionFactory with simplified JMS API: TOTD #213

  - by arungupta

  "What's New in JMS 2.0" Part 1 and Part 2 provide comprehensive introduction to new messaging features introduced in JMS 2.0. The biggest improvement in JMS 2.0 is introduction of the "new simplified API". This was explained in the Java EE 7 Launch Technical Keynote. You can watch a complete replay here. Sending and Receiving a JMS message using JMS 1.1 requires lot of boilerplate code, primarily because the API was designed 10+ years ago. Here is a code that shows how to send a message using JMS 1.1 API: @Statelesspublic class ClassicMessageSender { @Resource(lookup = "java:comp/DefaultJMSConnectionFactory") ConnectionFactory connectionFactory; @Resource(mappedName = "java:global/jms/myQueue") Queue demoQueue; public void sendMessage(String payload) { Connection connection = null; try { connection = connectionFactory.createConnection(); connection.start(); Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE); MessageProducer messageProducer = session.createProducer(demoQueue); TextMessage textMessage = session.createTextMessage(payload); messageProducer.send(textMessage); } catch (JMSException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (connection != null) { try { connection.close(); } catch (JMSException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } } }} There are several issues with this code: A JMS ConnectionFactory needs to be created in a application server-specific way before this application can run. Application-specific destination needs to be created in an application server-specific way before this application can run. Several intermediate objects need to be created to honor the JMS 1.1 API, e.g. ConnectionFactory -> Connection -> Session -> MessageProducer -> TextMessage. Everything is a checked exception and so try/catch block must be specified. Connection need to be explicitly started and closed, and that bloats even the finally block. The new JMS 2.0 simplified API code looks like: @Statelesspublic class SimplifiedMessageSender { @Inject JMSContext context; @Resource(mappedName="java:global/jms/myQueue") Queue myQueue; public void sendMessage(String message) { context.createProducer().send(myQueue, message); }} The code is significantly improved from the previous version in the following ways: The JMSContext interface combines in a single object the functionality of both the Connection and the Session in the earlier JMS APIs.  You can obtain a JMSContext object by simply injecting it with the @Inject annotation.  No need to explicitly specify a ConnectionFactory. A default ConnectionFactory under the JNDI name of java:comp/DefaultJMSConnectionFactory is used if no explicit ConnectionFactory is specified. The destination can be easily created using newly introduced @JMSDestinationDefinition as: @JMSDestinationDefinition(name = "java:global/jms/myQueue",        interfaceName = "javax.jms.Queue") It can be specified on any Java EE component and the destination is created during deployment. JMSContext, Session, Connection, JMSProducer and JMSConsumer objects are now AutoCloseable. This means that these resources are automatically closed when they go out of scope. This also obviates the need to explicitly start the connection JMSException is now a runtime exception. Method chaining on JMSProducers allows to use builder patterns. No need to create separate Message object, you can specify the message body as an argument to the send() method instead. Want to try this code ? Download source code! Download Java EE 7 SDK and install. Start GlassFish: bin/asadmin start-domain Build the WAR (in the unzipped source code directory): mvn package Deploy the WAR: bin/asadmin deploy <source-code>/jms/target/jms-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war And access the application at http://localhost:8080/jms-1.0-SNAPSHOT/index.jsp to send and receive a message using classic and simplified API. A replay of JMS 2.0 session from Java EE 7 Launch Webinar provides complete details on what's new in this specification: Enjoy!

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• Inspiring a co-worker to adopt better coding practices?

  - by Aaronaught

  In the Handling my antiquated coworker question, various people discussed strategies for dealing with coworkers who are unwilling to integrate their workflow with the team's. I'd like, if possible, to learn some strategies for "teaching" a coworker who is merely ignorant of modern techniques and tools, and possibly a little apathetic. I've started working with a programmer who until recently has been working in relative isolation, in a different part of the company. He has extensive domain knowledge and most importantly he has demonstrated good problem-solving skills, something which many candidates seem to lack. However, the actual (C#) code I've seen is a throwback to the VB6 days. Procedural structure, Hungarian notation, global variables (abuse of static), no interfaces, no tests, non-use of Generics, throwing System.Exception... you get the idea. This programmer is a fair bit older than I am and, by first impressions at least, doesn't actively seek positive change. I'm not going to say resistant to change, because I think that is largely an issue of how the topic gets broached, and I want to be prepared. Programmers tend to be stubborn people, and going in with guns blazing and instituting rip-it-to-shreds code reviews and strictly-enforced policies is very likely not going to produce the end result that I want. If this were a new hire, a junior programmer, I wouldn't think twice about taking a "mentor" stance, but I'm extremely wary of treating an experienced employee as a clueless newbie (which he's not - he just hasn't kept pace with certain advancements in the field). How might I go about raising this developer's code quality standard the Dale Carnegie way, through gentle persuasion and non-material incentives? What would be the best strategy for effecting subtle, gradual changes, without creating an adversarial situation? Have other people - especially lead developers - been in this type of situation before? Which strategies were successful at stimulating interest and creating a positive group dynamic? Which strategies weren't successful and would be better to avoid? Clarifications: I really feel that several people are answering based on personal feelings without actually reading all of the details of the question. Please note the following, which should have been implied but I am now making explicit: This coworker is only my "senior" by virtue of age. I never said that his title, sphere of influence, or years at the organization exceed mine, and in fact, none of those things are true. He's a LOB programmer who's been absorbed into the main development shop. That's it. I am not a new hire, junior programmer, or other naïve idiot with grand plans to transform the company overnight. I am basically in charge of the software process, but as many who've worked as "leads" will know, responsibilities don't always correlate precisely with the org chart. I'm not asking people how to get my way, come hell or high water. I could do that if I wanted to, with the net result being that this person would become resentful and/or quit. Please try to understand that I am looking for a social, cooperative method of driving change. The mention of "...global variables... no tests... throwing System.Exception" was intended to demonstrate that the problems are not just superficial or aesthetic. Practices that may work for relatively small CRUD apps do not necessarily work for large enterprise apps, and in fact, none of the code so far has actually passed the integration tests. Please, try to take the question at face value, accept that I actually know what I'm talking about, and either answer the question that I actually asked or move on. P.S. My sincerest gratitude to those who -did- offer constructive advice rather than arguing with the premise. I'm going to leave this open for a while longer as I'm hoping to hear more in the way of real-world experiences.

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• What do I need to do to set my computer as Default Gateway?

  - by Vaibhav

  We are trying to put together a box with dual LAN cards (let's say Outer and Inner), where the Inner LAN card is supposed to act as a default gateway on the network it is connected to. This box is running Ubuntu. The basic purpose for this box is to take messages generated on the inner network, do some work with them and forward them out the Outer LAN card to a server. The inner network is completely isolated with simply a regular switch connecting the Inner LAN Card with two other boxes. These other boxes either throw out multi-cast messages (which the Inner LAN Card is listening to), or send out unicast messages meant for the server which is not on this inner network. So, we need the Inner LAN Card to act as a default gateway, where these unicast messages will then be sent, and the code on the dual-LAN Card box can then intercept and forward these messages to the server. Question: 1. How do we setup the LAN Card to be default gateway (does it need some configuration on Ubuntu)? 2. Once we have this setup, is it a simple matter of listening to the interface to intercept the incoming messages? Any help (pointers in the right direction) is appreciated. Thanks.

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• OEG11gR2 integration with OES11gR2 Authorization with condition

  - by pgoutin

  Introduction This OES use-case has been defined originally by Subbu Devulapalli (http://accessmanagement.wordpress.com/).  Based on this OES museum use-case, I have developed the OEG11gR2 policy able to deal with the OES authorization with condition. From an OEG point of view, the way to deal with OES condition is to provide with the OES request some Environmental / Context Attributes.   Museum Use-Case  All painting in the museum have security sensors, an alarm goes off when a person comes too close a painting. The employee designated for maintenance needs to use their ID and disable the alarm before maintenance. You are the Security Administrator for the museum and you have been tasked with creating authorization policies to manage authorization for different paintings. Your first task is to understand how paintings are organized. Asking around, you are surprised to see that there isno formal process in place, so you need to start from scratch. the museum tracks the following attributes for each painting 1. Name of the work 2. Painter 3. Condition (good/poor) 4. Cost You compile the list of paintings  Name of Painting  Painter  Paint Condition  Cost  Mona Lisa  Leonardo da Vinci  Good  100  Magi  Leonardo da Vinci  Poor  40  Starry Night  Vincent Van Gogh  Poor  75  Still Life  Vincent Van Gogh  Good  25 Being a software geek who doesn’t (yet) understand art, you feel that price(or insurance price) of a painting is the most important criteria. So you feel that based on years-of-experience employees can be tasked with maintaining different paintings. You decide that paintings worth over 50 cost should be only handled by employees with over 20 years of experience and employees with less than 10 years of experience should not handle any painting. Lets us start with policy modeling. All paintings have a common set of attributes and actions, so it will be good to have them under a single Resource Type. Based on this resource type we will create the actual resources. So our high level model is: 1) Resource Type: Painting which has action manage and the following four attributes a) Name of the work b) Painter c) Condition (good/poor) d) Cost 2) To keep things simple lets use painting name for Resource name (in real world you will try to use some identifier which is unique, because in future we may end up with more than one painting which has the same name.) 3) Create Resources based on the previous table 4) Create an identity attribute Experience (Integer) 5) Create the following authorization policies a) Allow employees with over 20 years experience to access all paintings b) Allow employees with 10 – 20 years of experience to access painting which cost less than 50 c) Deny access to all paintings for employees with less than 10 year of experience OES Authorization Configuration We do need to create 2 authorization policies with specific conditions a) Allow employees with over 20 years experience to access all paintings b) Allow employees with 10 – 20 years of experience to access painting which cost less than 50 c) Deny access to all paintings for employees with less than 10 year of experience We don’t need an explicit policy for Deny access to all paintings for employees with less than 10 year of experience, because Oracle Entitlements Server will automatically deny if there is no matching policy. OEG Policy The OEG policy looks like the following The 11g Authorization filter configuration is similar to :  The ${PAINTING_NAME} and ${USER_EXPERIENCE} variables are initialized by the "Retrieve from the HTTP header" filters for testing purpose. That's to say, under Service Explorer, we need to provide 2 attributes "Experience" & "Painting" following the OES 11g Authorization filter described above.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-30

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Next Generation Mobile Clients for Oracle Applications & the role of Oracle Fusion Middleware | Manish Palaparthy Manish Palaparthy examines some of Oracle's mobile applications, and takes a look at the underlying technology. Master Data Management: A Foundation for Big Data Analysis | Manouj Tahiliani "Businesses that have embraced MDM to get a single, enriched and unified view of Master data by resolving semantic discrepancies and augmenting the explicit master data information from within the enterprise with implicit data from outside the enterprise like social profiles will have a leg up in embracing Big Data solutions. This is especially true for large and medium-sized businesses in industries like Retail, Communications, Financial Services, etc that would find it very challenging to get comprehensive analytical coverage and derive long-term success without resolving the limitations of the heterogeneous topology that leads to disparate, fragmented and incomplete master data." — Manouj Tahiliani Architect Day: Boston - Agenda Update Here's the latest updated information on the session schedule and content for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA on September 12, 2012. Registration is open, but seating is limited. OTN Architect Day: Boston is being held on Wednesday September 12, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., at the Boston Marriott Burlington, One Burlington Mall Road, Burlington, MA 01803. Integrating Coherence & Java EE 6 Applications using ActiveCache | Ricardo Ferreira The seamless integration between Oracle Coherence and Oracle WebLogic Server "provides a comprehensive environment to develop applications without the complexity of extra Java code to manage cache as a dependency," explains Ricardo Ferreira, "since Oracle provides a DI (Dependency Injection) mechanism for Coherence, the same DI mechanism available in standard Java EE applications. This feature is called ActiveCache." Ricardo shows you how to configure ActiveCache in WebLogic and your Java EE application. Cloud Infrastructure has a new standard from the DMTF "Unlike a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it, [Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI)] is a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body. One reason the standard took two years to create is that we factored in use cases, requirements and contributed APIs from multiple vendors. These vendors have products shipping today and as a result CIMI has a strong foundation in real world experience." Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release Launch Webcast- September 12 The new release of Oracle GoldenGate 11g is now available for major databases and platforms. Register for this webcast and live Q&A with product experts to learn about the solution's new features. September 12, 2012. 8:00am AM and 10:00AM PT. Speakers: Doug Reid (Director, Product Management, Oracle GoldenGate), Irem Radzik (Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Data Integration Products) Thought for the Day "[When] asking skilled architects…what they do when confronted with highly complex problems… [they] would most likely answer, 'Just use Common Sense.' [A] better expression than 'common sense' is 'contextual sense'—a knowledge of what is reasonable within a given context. Practicing architects through eduction, experience and examples accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they're entrusted with solving a system-level problem…" — Eberhardt Rechtin (January 16, 1926 – April 14, 2006) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - HPCM Standard Costing Generating >99 Calc Scipts

  - by Jane Story

  HPCM Standard Profitability calculation scripts are named based on a documented naming convention. From 11.1.2.2.x, the script name = a script suffix (1 letter) + POV identifier (3 digits) + Stage Order Number (1 digit) + “_” + index (2 digits) (please see documentation for more information (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_admin/apes01.html). This naming convention results in the name being 8 characters in length i.e. the maximum number of characters permitted calculation script names in non-unicode Essbase BSO databases. The index in the name will indicate the number of scripts per stage. In the vast majority of cases, the number of scripts generated per stage will be significantly less than 100 and therefore, there will be no issue. However, in some cases, the number of scripts generated can exceed 99. It is unusual for an application to generate more than 99 calculation scripts for one stage. This may indicate that explicit assignments are being extensively used. An assessment should be made of the design to see if assignment rules can be used instead. Assignment rules will reduce the need for so many calculation script lines which will reduce the requirement for such a large number of calculation scripts. In cases where the scripts generates exceeds 100, the length of the name of the 100th calculation script is different from the 99th as the calculation script name changes from being 8 characters long and becomes 9 characters long (e.g. A6811_100 rather than A6811_99). A name of 9 characters is not permitted in non Unicode applications. It is “too long”. When this occurs, an error will show in the hpcm.log as “Error processing calculation scripts” and “Unexpected error in business logic “. Further down the log, it is possible to see that this is “Caused by: Error copying object “ and “Caused by: com.essbase.api.base.EssException: Cannot put olap file object ... object name_[<calc script name> e.g. A6811_100] too long for non-unicode mode application”. The error file will give the name of the calculation script which is causing the issue. In my example, this is A6811_100 and you can see this is 9 characters in length. It is not possible to increase the number of characters allowed in a calculation script name. However, it is possible to increase the size of each calculation script. The default for an HPCM application, set in the preferences, is set to 4mb. If the size of each calculation script is larger, the number of scripts generated will reduce and, therefore, less than 100 scripts will be generated which means that the name of the calculation script will remain 8 characters long. To increase the size of the generated calculation scripts for an application, in the HPM_APPLICATION_PREFERENCE table for the application, find the row where HPM_PREFERENCE_NAME_ID=20. The default value in this row is 4194304. This can be increased e.g. 7340032 will increase this to 7mb. Please restart the profitability service after making the change.

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• Flow-Design Cheat Sheet &ndash; Part II, Translation

  - by Ralf Westphal

  In my previous post I summarized the notation for Flow-Design (FD) diagrams. Now is the time to show you how to translate those diagrams into code. Hopefully you feel how different this is from UML. UML leaves you alone with your sequence diagram or component diagram or activity diagram. They leave it to you how to translate your elaborate design into code. Or maybe UML thinks it´s so easy no further explanations are needed? I don´t know. I just know that, as soon as people stop designing with UML and start coding, things end up to be very different from the design. And that´s bad. That degrades graphical designs to just time waste on paper (or some designer). I even believe that´s the reason why most programmers view textual source code as the only and single source of truth. Design and code usually do not match. FD is trying to change that. It wants to make true design a first class method in every developers toolchest. For that the first prerequisite is to be able to easily translate any design into code. Mechanically, without thinking. Even a compiler could do it :-) (More of that in some other article.) Translating to Methods The first translation I want to show you is for small designs. When you start using FD you should translate your diagrams like this. Functional units become methods. That´s it. An input-pin becomes a method parameter, an output-pin becomes a return value: The above is a part. But a board can be translated likewise and calls the nested FUs in order: In any case be sure to keep the board method clear of any and all business logic. It should not contain any control structures like if, switch, or a loop. Boards do just one thing: calling nested functional units in proper sequence. What about multiple input-pins? Try to avoid them. Replace them with a join returning a tuple: What about multiple output-pins? Try to avoid them. Or return a tuple. Or use out-parameters: But as I said, this simple translation is for simple designs only. Splits and joins are easily done with method translation: All pretty straightforward, isn´t it. But what about wires, named pins, entry points, explicit dependencies? I suggest you don´t use this kind of translation when your designs need these features. Translating to methods is for small scale designs like you might do once you´re working on the implementation of a part of a larger design. Or maybe for a code kata you´re doing in your local coding dojo. Instead of doing TDD try doing FD and translate your design into methods. You´ll see that way it´s much easier to work collaboratively on designs, remember them more easily, keep them clean, and lessen the need for refactoring. Translating to Events [coming soon]

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• HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

  - by darrenm

  Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway).  I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'.  We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11.  One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.  The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE.  However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine  using only a single process and thread.  $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

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• Roles / Profiles / Perspectives in NetBeans IDE 7.1

  - by Geertjan

  With a check out of main-silver from yesterday, I'm able to use the brand new "role" attribute in @TopComponent.Registration, as you can see below, in the bit in bold: @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//Admin//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "AdminTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "editor", openAtStartup = true, role="admin") public final class AdminTopComponent extends TopComponent { And here's a window for general users of the application, with the "role" attribute set to "user": @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//User//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "UserTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "explorer", openAtStartup = true, role="user") public final class UserTopComponent extends TopComponent { So, I have two windows. One is assigned to the "admin" role, the other to the "user" role. In the "ModuleInstall" class, I add a "WindowSystemListener" and set "user" as the application's role: public class Installer extends ModuleInstall implements WindowSystemListener { @Override public void restored() { WindowManager.getDefault().addWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void beforeLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); WindowManager.getDefault().removeWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void afterLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void beforeSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void afterSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } } So, when the application starts, the "UserTopComponent" is shown, not the "AdminTopComponent". Next, I have two Actions, for switching between the two roles, as shown below: @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToAdminAction=Switch To Admin") public final class SwitchToAdminAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("admin"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("admin"); } } @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToUserAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToUserAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToUserAction=Switch To User") public final class SwitchToUserAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("user"); } } When I select one of the above actions, the role changes, and the other window is shown. I could, of course, add a Login dialog to the "SwitchToAdminAction", so that authentication is required in order to switch to the "admin" role. Now, let's say I am now in the "user" role. So, the "UserTopComponent" shown above is now opened. I decide to also open another window, the Properties window, as below... ...and, when I am in the "admin" role, when the "AdminTopComponent" is open, I decide to also open the Output window, as below... Now, when I switch from one role to the other, the additional window/s I opened will also be opened, together with the explicit members of the currently selected role. And, the main window position and size are also persisted across roles. When I look in the "build" folder of my project in development, I see two different Windows2Local folders, one per role, automatically created by the fact that there is something to be persisted for a particular role, e.g., when a switch to a different role is done: And, with that, we now clearly have roles/profiles/perspectives in NetBeans Platform applications from NetBeans Platform 7.1 onwards.

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• Is there a theory for "transactional" sequences of failing and no-fail actions?

  - by Ross Bencina

  My question is about writing transaction-like functions that execute sequences of actions, some of which may fail. It is related to the general C++ principle "destructors can't throw," no-fail property, and maybe also with multi-phase transactions or exception safety. However, I'm thinking about it in language-neutral terms. My concern is with correctly designing error handling in C++ functions that must be reliable. I would like to know what the concepts below are called so that I can learn more about them. I'm sorry that I can't ask the question more directly. Since I don't know this area I have provided an example to explain my question. The question is at the end. Here goes: Consider a sequence of steps or actions executed sequentially, where actions belong to one of two classes: those that always succeed, and those that may fail. In the examples below: S stands for an action that always succeeds (called "no-fail" in some settings). F stands for an action that may fail (for example, it might fail to allocate memory or do I/O that could fail). Consider a sequences of actions (executed sequentially from left to right): S->S->S->S Since each action in the sequence above succeeds, the whole sequence succeeds. On the other hand, the following sequence may fail because the last action may fail: S->S->S->F So, claim: a sequence has the no-fail (S) property if and only if all of its actions are no-fail. Now, I'm interested in action sequences that form "atomic transactions", with "failure atomicity," i.e. where either the whole sequence completes successfully, or there is no effect. I.e. if some action fails, the earlier ones must be rolled back. This requires that any successfully executed actions prior to a failing action must always be able to be rolled back. Consider the sequence: S->S->S->F S<-S<-S In the example above, the first row is the forward path of the transaction, and the second row are inverse actions (executed from right to left) that can be used to roll back if the final top row actions fails. It seems to me that for a transaction to support failure atomicity, the following invariant must hold: Claim: To support failure atomicity (either completion or complete roll-back on failure) all actions preceding the latest failable (F) action on the forward path (marked * in the example below) must have no-fail (S) inverses. The following is an example of a sequence that supports failure atomicity: * S->F->F->F S<-S<-S Further, if we want the transaction to be able to attempt cancellation mid-way through, but still guarantee either full completion or full rollback then we need the following property: Claim: To support failure atomicity and cancellation mid-way through execution, in the face of errors in the inverse (cancellation) path, all actions following the earliest failable (F) inverse on the reverse path (marked *) must be no-fail (S). F->F->F->S->S S<-S<-F<-F * I believe that these two conditions guarantee that an abortable/cancelable transaction will never get "stuck". My questions are: What is the study and theory of these properties called? are my claims correct? and what else is there to know? UPDATE 1: Updated terminology: what I previously called "robustness" is called atomicity in the database literature. UPDATE 2: Added explicit reference to failure atomicity, which seems to be a thing.

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• It happens only at Devoxx ...

  - by arungupta

  After attending several Java conferences world wide, this was my very first time at Devoxx. Here are some items I found that happens only at Devoxx ... Pioneers of theater-style seating - This not only provides comfortable seating for each attendee but the screens are very clearly visible to everybody in the room. Intellectual level of attendees is very high - Read more explanation on the Java EE 6 lab blog. In short, a lab, 1/3 of the content delivered at Devoxx 2011, could not be completed at other developer days in more than 1/3 the time. Snack box for lunches - Even though this suits well to the healthy lifestyle of multiple-snacks-during-a-day style but leaves attendees hungry sooner in the day. The longer breaks before the next snack in the evening does not help at all. Fortunately, Azure cupcakes and Android ice creams turned out to be handy. I finally carried my own apple :-) Wrist band instead of lanyard - The good part about this is that once tied to your hand then you are less likely to forget in your room. But OTOH you are a pretty much a branded conference attendee all through out the city. It was cost effective as it costed 20c as opposed to 1 euro for the lanyard. Live streaming from theater #8 (the biggest room) on parleys.com All talks recorded and released on parleys.com over next year. This allows attendees to not to miss any session and watch replay at their own leisure. Stephan promised to start sharing the sessions by mid December this year. No need to pre-register for a session - This is true for most of the conferences but bigger rooms (+ overflow room for key sessions) provide sufficient space for all those who want to attend the session. And of course all sessions are available on parleys.com anyway! Community votes on whiteboard - Devoxx attendees gets a chance to vote on topics ranging from their favorite non-Java language, operating system, or love from Oracle. Captured pictures at the end of Day 2 are shown below. Movie on the last but one night - This year it was The Adventures of Tintin and was lots of fun. Fries with mayo - This is a typical Belgian thing. Guys going in ladies room to avoid the long queues ... wow! Tweet wall everywhere and I mean literally everywhere, in rooms, hallways, front desk, and other places. The tweet picking algorithm was not very clear as I never saw my tweet appear on the wall ;-) You can also watch it at wall.devoxx.com. Cozy speaker dinner with great food and wine List of parallel and upcoming sessions displayed on the screen - This makes the information more explicit with the attendees. REST API with multiple mobile clients - This API is also used by some other conferences as well. And there always is iphone.devoxx.com. Steering committee members were recognized multiple times. The committee members were clearly identifiable wearing red hoodies. The wireless SSID was intuitive "Devoxx" but hidden to avoid some crap from Microsoft Windows. All of 9000 addresses were used up most of the times with each attendee having multiple devices. A 1 GB fibre optic cable was stretched to Metropolis to support the required network bandwidth. Stephan is already planning to upgrade the equipment and have a better infrastructure next year. Free water, soda, juice in a cooler Kinect connected to TV screens so that attendees can use their hands to browse through the list of sesssions. #devoxxblog, #devoxxwomen, #devoxxfrance, #devoxxgreat, #devoxxsuggestions And Devoxx attendees are called Devoxxians ... how cool is that ? :-) What other things do you think happen only at Devoxx ? And now the pictures from the community whiteboard: And a more complete album (including bigger pics of community votes) is available below:

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Configuring SASL support in libmemcached

  - by John Keyes

  I'm trying to build libmemcached with SASL support on OS X Mountain Lion. I have built memcached (1.4.15) with SASL support: $ memcached -S -vv Initialized SASL. slab class 1: chunk size 96 perslab 10922 ... slab class 42: chunk size 1048576 perslab 1 <17 server listening (binary) <18 server listening (binary) <19 send buffer was 9216, now 3728270 <20 send buffer was 9216, now 3728270 <19 server listening (udp) <20 server listening (udp) ... I am trying to build libmemcached with SASL support too. I have tried the following: $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --with-memcached-sasl=/usr/local/bin/memcached ... $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --with-memcached-sasl="/usr/local/bin/memcached -S" ... But the resulting configuration summary is the same for both: Configuration summary for libmemcached version 1.0.11 * Installation prefix: /usr/local * System type: apple-darwin12.2.0 * Host CPU: x86_64 * C Compiler: i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.11.00) * C Flags: -O2 -Werror -Wall -Wextra -std=c99 -Wbad-function-cast -Wmissing-prototypes -Wnested-externs -Woverride-init * C++ Compiler: i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-g++-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.11.00) * C++ Flags: -O2 -Werror -Wall -Wextra -Wpragmas -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Waddress -Wchar-subscripts -Wcomment -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wfloat-equal -Wformat=2 -Wmissing-field-initializers -Wmissing-noreturn -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wnormalized=id -Woverloaded-virtual -Wpointer-arith -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wshorten-64-to-32 -Wsign-compare -Wstrict-overflow=1 -Wswitch-enum -Wundef -Wunused-variable -Wwrite-strings -fwrapv -ggdb * CPP Flags: -I/usr/local/include * Assertions enabled: no * Debug enabled: no * Warnings as failure: no * SASL support: Am I doing something incorrectly? Thanks.

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• WiX, MSDeploy and an appealing configuration/deployment paradigm

  - by alexhildyard

  I do a lot of application and server configuration; I've done this for many years and have tended to view the complexity of this strictly in terms of the complexity of the ultimate configuration to be deployed. For example, specific APIs aside, I would tend to regard installing a server certificate as a more complex activity than, say, copying a file or adding a Registry entry.My prejudice revolved around the idea of a sequential deployment script that not only had the explicit prescription to apply a specific server configuration, but also made the implicit presumption that the server in question was in a good known state. Scripts like this fail for hundreds of reasons -- the Default Website didn't exist; the application had already been deployed; the application had already been partially deployed and failed to rollback fully, and so on. And so the problem is that the more complex the configuration activity, the more scope for error in any individual part of that activity, and therefore the greater the chance the server in question will not end up at exactly the desired configuration level.Recently I was introduced to a completely different mindset, which, for want of a better turn of phrase, I will call the "make it so" mindset. It's extremely simple both to explain and to implement. In place of the head-down, imperative script you used to use, you substitute a set of checks -- much like exception handlers -- around each configuration activity, starting with a check of the current system state. Thus the configuration logic becomes: "IF these services aren't started then start them, and IF XYZ website doesn't exist then create it, and IF these shares don't exist then create them, and IF these shares aren't permissioned in some particular way, then permission them so." This works. Really well, in my experience. Scenario 1: You want to get a system into a good known state; it's already in a good known state; you quickly realise there is nothing to do.Scenario 2: You want to get the system into a good known state; your script is flawed or the system is bust; it cannot be put into that state. You know exactly where (at least part of) the problem is and why.Scenario 3: You want to get the system into a good known state; people are fiddling around with the system just now. That's fine. You do what you can, and later you come back and try it againScenario 4: No one wants to deploy anything; they want you to prove that the previous deployment was successful. So you re-run the deployment script with the "-WhatIf" flag. It reports that there was nothing to change. There's your proof.I mentioned two technologies in the title -- MSI and MSDeploy. I am thinking specifically of the conversation that took place here. Having worked with both technologies, I think Rob Mensching's response is appropriately nuanced, and in essence the difference is this: sometimes your target is either to achieve a specific new server state, or to rollback to a known good one. Then again, your target may be to configure what you can, and to understand what you can't. Implicitly MSDeploy's "rollback" is simply to redeploy the previous version, whereas a well-crafted MSI will actively put your system into that state without further intervention. Either way, if all goes well it will leave you with a system in one of two states, whereas MSDeploy could leave your system in one of many states. The key is that MSDeploy and MSI are complementary technologies; which suits you best depends as much on Operational guidance as your Configuration remit.What I wanted to say was that I have always been for atomic, transactional-based configuration, but having worked with the "make it so" paradigm, I have been favourably impressed by the actual results. I'm tempted to put a more technical post up on this in due course.

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• ADF Mobile - Update through Web Service (with ADF Business Components)

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  In my previous blog entry I went over the basics of exposing ADF Business Components through service interfaces, and developing a simple ADF Mobile application that access and fetches data from those services. In this entry we'll dive a bit deeper  and address an update scenario through these web service interfaces. You can see the full demo video at the end of the post. In the first steps I show how to add an explicit method execution to fetch a specific record we want to update on the second page of a flow. For an update you'll be invoking a service method and passing the record you want to update as a parameter. As in many other Web services scenarios, we need to provide a complete object of specific type to the method. The ADF Web service data control helps you here by offering an object of this type that you can drag and drop into your page. The next step is to make sure to fill that object with the values you want to update. In the demo we do this through  coding in a backing bean that shows how to use the AdfmfJavaUtilities utility. The code gets the value from one field, gets a pointer to the parallel update field, and then copy from one to the other. At the end of the bean we manually execute the call to the update method on the Web service. Here is the demo: &amp;amp;amp;amp;&amp;lt;span id=&amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Here is the code used in the backing bean in the demo above. package a.mobile;import oracle.adfmf.amx.event.ActionEvent;import javax.el.MethodExpression;import javax.el.ValueExpression;import oracle.adfmf.amx.event.ActionEvent;import oracle.adfmf.framework.api.AdfmfJavaUtilities;import oracle.adfmf.framework.model.AdfELContext;public class backing {    public backing() {    }    public void copyAndUpdate(ActionEvent actionEvent) {        // Add event code here...        AdfELContext adfELContext = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getAdfELContext();        ValueExpression ve = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.DepartmentName.inputValue}", String.class);        ValueExpression ve3 =            AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.DepartmentName1.inputValue}", String.class);        ve3.setValue(adfELContext, ve.getValue(adfELContext));        ve = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.DepartmentId.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3 = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.DepartmentId1.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3.setValue(adfELContext, ve.getValue(adfELContext));        ve = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.ManagerId.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3 = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.ManagerId1.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3.setValue(adfELContext, ve.getValue(adfELContext));        ve = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.LocationId.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3 = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getValueExpression("#{bindings.LocationId1.inputValue}", int.class);        ve3.setValue(adfELContext, ve.getValue(adfELContext));        MethodExpression me = AdfmfJavaUtilities.getMethodExpression("#{bindings.updateDepartmentsView1.execute}", Object.class, new Class[] {});         me.invoke(adfELContext, new Object[] {});        }    }

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• Optimal Data Structure for our own API

  - by vermiculus

  I'm in the early stages of writing an Emacs major mode for the Stack Exchange network; if you use Emacs regularly, this will benefit you in the end. In order to minimize the number of calls made to Stack Exchange's API (capped at 10000 per IP per day) and to just be a generally responsible citizen, I want to cache the information I receive from the network and store it in memory, waiting to be accessed again. I'm really stuck as to what data structure to store this information in. Obviously, it is going to be a list. However, as with any data structure, the choice must be determined by what data is being stored and what how it will be accessed. What, I would like to be able to store all of this information in a single symbol such as stack-api/cache. So, without further ado, stack-api/cache is a list of conses keyed by last update: `(<csite> <csite> <csite>) where <csite> would be (1362501715 . <site>) At this point, all we've done is define a simple association list. Of course, we must go deeper. Each <site> is a list of the API parameter (unique) followed by a list questions: `("codereview" <cquestion> <cquestion> <cquestion>) Each <cquestion> is, you guessed it, a cons of questions with their last update time: `(1362501715 <question>) (1362501720 . <question>) <question> is a cons of a question structure and a list of answers (again, consed with their last update time): `(<question-structure> <canswer> <canswer> <canswer> and ` `(1362501715 . <answer-structure>) This data structure is likely most accurately described as a tree, but I don't know if there's a better way to do this considering the language, Emacs Lisp (which isn't all that different from the Lisp you know and love at all). The explicit conses are likely unnecessary, but it helps my brain wrap around it better. I'm pretty sure a <csite>, for example, would just turn into (<epoch-time> <api-param> <cquestion> <cquestion> ...) Concerns: Does storing data in a potentially huge structure like this have any performance trade-offs for the system? I would like to avoid storing extraneous data, but I've done what I could and I don't think the dataset is that large in the first place (for normal use) since it's all just human-readable text in reasonable proportion. (I'm planning on culling old data using the times at the head of the list; each inherits its last-update time from its children and so-on down the tree. To what extent this cull should take place: I'm not sure.) Does storing data like this have any performance trade-offs for that which must use it? That is, will set and retrieve operations suffer from the size of the list? Do you have any other suggestions as to what a better structure might look like?

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• SQL Server: Writing CASE expressions properly when NULLs are involved

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  We’ve all written a CASE expression (yes, it’s an expression and not a statement) or two every now and then. But did you know there are actually 2 formats you can write the CASE expression in? This actually bit me when I was trying to add some new functionality to an old stored procedure. In some rare cases the stored procedure just didn’t work correctly. After a quick look it turned out to be a CASE expression problem when dealing with NULLS. In the first format we make simple “equals to” comparisons to a value: SELECT CASE <value> WHEN <equals this value> THEN <return this> WHEN <equals this value> THEN <return this> -- ... more WHEN's here ELSE <return this> END Second format is much more flexible since it allows for complex conditions. USE THIS ONE! SELECT CASE WHEN <value> <compared to> <value> THEN <return this> WHEN <value> <compared to> <value> THEN <return this> -- ... more WHEN's here ELSE <return this> END Now that we know both formats and you know which to use (the second one if that hasn’t been clear enough) here’s an example how the first format WILL make your evaluation logic WRONG. Run the following code for different values of @i. Just comment out any 2 out of 3 “SELECT @i =” statements. DECLARE @i INTSELECT  @i = -1 -- first resultSELECT  @i = 55 -- second resultSELECT  @i = NULL -- third resultSELECT @i AS OriginalValue, -- first CASE format. DON'T USE THIS! CASE @i WHEN -1 THEN '-1' WHEN NULL THEN 'We have a NULL!' ELSE 'We landed in ELSE' END AS DontUseThisCaseFormatValue, -- second CASE format. USE THIS! CASE WHEN @i = -1 THEN '-1' WHEN @i IS NULL THEN 'We have a NULL!' ELSE 'We landed in ELSE' END AS UseThisCaseFormatValue When the value of @i is –1 everything works as expected, since both formats go into the –1 WHEN branch. When the value of @i is 55 everything again works as expected, since both formats go into the ELSE branch. When the value of @i is NULL the problems become evident. The first format doesn’t go into the WHEN NULL branch because it makes an equality comparison between two NULLs. Because a NULL is an unknown value: NULL = NULL is false. That is why the first format goes into the ELSE Branch but the second format correctly handles the proper IS NULL comparison.   Please use the second more explicit format. Your future self will be very grateful to you when he doesn’t have to discover these kinds of bugs.

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• Mirror your display to another computer on your network

  - by klikkamongo

  I have a computer I am using for showing media, running windows 7 (XBMC). It is hooked up with a projector. I want other computers on my network to have the opportunity to mirror their display to this computer.(without the media computer having to accept it, it should be all controlled by the sending computer.(like sending a movie with Apple's Airplay)) One scenario: I am finding a webpage with a great article (or a Word document) on my computer that i want to show to the other people in the room, i press a button, then my screen is mirrored to the media pc. I can still scroll, write etc. so everybody can see it. When i am done showing the article, I can exit the display mirroring, and the media computer display goes back to normal. This should mirror the whole screen, not only the browser like plugins can do in chrome, or sending Youtube movies like plugins for Opera. Update I found a video example of the solution I am looking for, unfortunately it looks like it will be hard making a Chromecast reciever for windows. Using the "Cast entire screen (experimentally)" button on the Chromecast plugin in Chrome is doing the exact thing I want to do, see this video.

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• MySQL Server 5.6 default my.cnf and my.ini

  - by user12626240

  We've introduced a default my.cnf / my.ini file for MySQL Server that you can now see in the 5.6.8 release candidate: # For advice on how to change settings please see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-configuration-defaults.html [mysqld] # Remove leading # and set to the amount of RAM for the most important data # cache in MySQL. Start at 70% of total RAM for dedicated server, else 10%. # innodb_buffer_pool_size = 128M   # Remove leading # to turn on a very important data integrity option: logging # changes to the binary log between backups. # log_bin   # These are commonly set, remove the # and set as required. # basedir = ..... # datadir = ..... # port = ..... # socket = ..... # server_id = .....   # Remove leading # to set options mainly useful for reporting servers. # The server defaults are faster for transactions and fast SELECTs. # Adjust sizes as needed, experiment to find the optimal values. # join_buffer_size = 128M # sort_buffer_size = 2M # read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M   sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES    There is also a template file called my-default.cnf or my-default.ini that has these lines near the start: # *** DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE. It's a template which will be copied to the # *** default location during install, and will be replaced if you # *** upgrade to a newer version of MySQL.   On Linux systems, the mysql_install_db command will copy the template file to the final location, where the server will read and use the file, removing the extra three lines. On Windows, the installer will create extra settings based on the answers you gave during installation. Neither will overwrite an existing my.cnf or my.ini file. The only initially active setting here is to change the value of  sql_mode from the server default of NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION to NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES. This strict mode changes warnings for some non-standard behaviour into errors. This can cause applications which rely on the non-standard things, like dates that aren't valid, to lose data. If we had just changed the server default, the new setting would affect all servers that lack an explicit sql_mode setting, including those where strict mode is harmful. So we did it in the default file instead because that will only affect new server installations. You should expect that in our next version after 5.6, the server default will include STRICT_TRANS_TABLES. Our Windows installer and some of our connectors already use STRICT_TRANS_TABLES by default. Strict has been our preferred setting for many years and it is good to see some development platforms are using it. If you need the old behaviour, just remove the STRICT_TRANS_TABLES setting. If you do this, please also ask your application provider to make it unnecessary. They can do that by setting the session sql_mode setting in their own connections, so the rest of the applications using the server don't have to have an undesirable default. We've kept this file as small as possible because we found that our old files were too big and confused people. We've also now removed the old my-huge and related example files. One key part of this is the link to the documentation, where we will provide an introduction to some key settings. We'd like to hear your feedback on settings that will benefit most users or are most important to call out for existing users. Please do that by commenting here or if you prefer by adding comments to this bug report.

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• Multichannel Digital Engagement: Find Out How Your Organization Measures Up

  - by Michael Snow

  This article was originally published in the September 2013 Edition of the Oracle Information InDepth Newsletter ORACLE WEBCENTER EDITION Thanks to mobile and social technologies, interactive online experiences are now commonplace. Not only that, they give consumers more choices, influence, and control than ever before. So how can you make your organization stand out? The key building blocks for delivering exceptional cross-channel digital experiences are outlined below. Also, a new assessment tool is available to help you measure your organization's ability to deliver such experiences. A clearly defined digital strategy. The customer journey is growing increasingly complex, encompassing multiple touchpoints and channels. It used to be easy to map marketing efforts to specific offline channels; for example, a direct mail piece with an offer to visit a store for a discounted purchase. Now it is more difficult to cultivate and track such clear cause-and-effect relationships. To deliver an integrated digital experience in this more complex world, organizations need a clearly defined and comprehensive digital marketing strategy that is backed up by an integrated set of software, middleware, and hardware solutions. Strong support for business agility and speed-to-market. As both IT and marketing executives know, speed-to-market and business agility are key to competitive advantage. That means marketers need solutions to support the rapid implementation of online marketing initiatives—plus the flexibility to adapt quickly to a changing marketplace. And IT needs tools with the performance, scalability, and ease of integration to support marketing efforts. Both teams benefit when business users are empowered to implement marketing initiatives on their own, with minimal IT intervention. The ability to deliver relevant, personalized content. Delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable. Customers expect you to know who they are, including their preferences and past relationship with your brand. That means delivering the most relevant content from the moment a visitor enters your site. To make that happen, you need a powerful rules engine so that marketers and business users can easily define site visitor segments and deliver content accordingly. That includes both implicit targeting that is based on the user’s behavior, and explicit targeting that takes a user’s profile information into account. Ideally, the rules engine can also intelligently weight recommendations when multiple segments apply to a specific customer. Support for social interactivity. With the advent of Facebook and LinkedIn, visitors expect to participate in and contribute to your web presence—and share their experience on their own social networks. That requires easy incorporation of user-generated content such as comments, ratings, reviews, polls, and blogs; seamless integration with third-party social networking sites; and support for social login, which helps to remove barriers to social participation. The ability to deliver connected, multichannel experiences that include powerful, flexible mobile capabilities. By 2015, mobile usage is projected to surpass that of PCs and other wired devices. In other words, mobile is an essential element in delivering exceptional online customer experiences. This requires the creation and management of mobile experiences that are optimized for delivery to the thousands of different devices that are in use today. Just as important, organizations must be able to easily extend their traditional web presence to the mobile channel and deliver highly personalized and relevant multichannel marketing initiatives while also managing to minimize the time and effort required to manage mobile sites. Are you curious to know how your organization measures up when it comes to delivering an engaging, multichannel digital experience? If so, take this brief, 15-question online assessment and see how your organization scores in the areas of digital strategy, digital agility, relevance and personalization, social interactivity, and multichannel experience.

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