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• jetty - javax.naming.InvalidNameException: A flat name can only have a single component

  - by Dinesh Pillay

  I have been breaking my head against this for too much time now. I'm trying to get maven + jetty + jotm to play nice but it looks like its too much to ask for :( Below is my jetty.xml:- <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Jetty//Configure//EN" "http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/configure.dtd"> <Configure id="Server" class="org.mortbay.jetty.Server"> <New id="jotm" class="org.objectweb.jotm.Jotm"> <Arg type="boolean">true</Arg> <Arg type="boolean">false</Arg> <Call id="tm" name="getTransactionManager" /> <Call id="ut" name="getUserTransaction" /> </New> <New class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource"> <Arg /> <Arg>javax.transaction.TransactionManager</Arg> <Arg><Ref id="ut" /></Arg> </New> <New id="tx" class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Transaction"> <Arg><Ref id="ut" /></Arg> </New> <New class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource"> <Arg>myxadatasource</Arg> <Arg> <New id="myxadatasourceA" class="org.enhydra.jdbc.standard.StandardXADataSource"> <Set name="DriverName">org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver</Set> <Set name="Url">jdbc:derby:protodb;create=true</Set> <Set name="User"></Set> <Set name="Password"></Set> <Set name="transactionManager"> <Ref id="tm" /> </Set> </New> </Arg> </New> <New id="protodb" class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource"> <Arg>jdbc/protodb</Arg> <Arg> <New class="org.enhydra.jdbc.pool.StandardXAPoolDataSource"> <Arg> <Ref id="myxadatasourceA" /> </Arg> <Set name="DataSourceName">myxadatasource</Set> </New> </Arg> </New> And this is the maven plugin configuration:- <plugin> <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds> <stopKey>ps</stopKey> <stopPort>7777</stopPort> <webAppConfig> <contextPath>/ps</contextPath> </webAppConfig> <connectors> <connector implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.nio.SelectChannelConnector"> <port>7070</port> <maxIdleTime>60000</maxIdleTime> </connector> </connectors> <jettyConfig>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jetty.xml</jettyConfig> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <id>start-jetty</id> <phase>pre-integration-test</phase> <goals> <goal>run</goal> </goals> <configuration> <scanIntervalSeconds>0</scanIntervalSeconds> <daemon>true</daemon> </configuration> </execution> <execution> <id>stop-jetty</id> <phase>post-integration-test</phase> <goals> <goal>stop</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.derby</groupId> <artifactId>derby</artifactId> <version>10.6.1.0</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>jotm</groupId> <artifactId>jotm</artifactId> <version>2.0.10</version> <exclusions> <exclusion> <groupId>javax.resource</groupId> <artifactId>connector</artifactId> </exclusion> </exclusions> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>com.experlog</groupId> <artifactId>xapool</artifactId> <version>1.5.0</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>javax.resource</groupId> <artifactId>connector-api</artifactId> <version>1.5</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>javax.transaction</groupId> <artifactId>jta</artifactId> <version>1.0.1B</version> </dependency> <!-- <dependency> <groupId>javax.jts</groupId> <artifactId>jts</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> </dependency> --> </dependencies> </plugin> I am using maven-jetty-plugin-6.1.24 cause I couldn't get the later one's to work either. When I execute this I get the following exception:- 2010-06-16 09:03:13.423:WARN::Config error at javax.transaction.TransactionManager java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [ERROR] BUILD ERROR [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Failure A flat name can only have a single component [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Caused by: javax.naming.InvalidNameException: A flat name can only have a single component at javax.naming.NameImpl.addAll(NameImpl.java:621) at javax.naming.CompoundName.addAll(CompoundName.java:442) at org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.NamingEntryUtil.makeNamingEntryName(NamingEntryUtil.java:136) at org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.NamingEntry.save(NamingEntry.java:196) at org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.NamingEntry.(NamingEntry.java:58) at org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource.(Resource.java:34) ... 31 more Help!

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• NRF Online Merchandising Workshop: Where Online Retailers Are Focusing for Holiday and Beyond

  - by Rose Spicer-Oracle

  0 0 1 1204 6863 Oracle Corporation 57 16 8051 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Last month we attended the NRF Online Merchandising Workshop in LA, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with our customers, meet new retailers, and hear some great presentations from VF Corporation, Zazzle, Julep Beauty, Backcountry, eBags and more. The one-on-one conversations with Merchants and the keynote presentations carry the same themes across companies of all sizes and across verticals. With only 125 days left (and counting) until Black Friday, these conversations provided some great insight in to what’s top of mind for retailers during the most stressful time of their year, and a sneak peek in to what they will deliver this holiday season.  Some of the most popular topics were: When to start promoting for holiday: seems like a funny conversation to have in July, but a number of retailers said they already had their holiday shopping gift guides live on their site, and it was attracting a significant portion of their onsite traffic. When it comes to timing, most retailers were questioning when to begin their holiday promotions -- carefully balancing when to release pricing and specials, and knowing that customers are holding out for last-minute deals and price drops. Many retailers noted the frustrations around transparent pricing by Amazon and a few other mega-retailers last year, publishing their “lowest prices of the season” as early as October – ensuring shoppers that those prices were the best they could get all season long. Many retailers felt their hands were forced to drop prices. Others kept their set pricing with negative customer reaction, causing some to miss their holiday goals. The pressure is on, and most retailers identified November 1 as their target start date for the holiday promotions blitz. Some are even waiting for the big guys to release their “lowest prices of the season” guides and will then follow suit.      Attribution is tough – and a huge focus: understanding the path to conversion is a tough nut to crack, especially in the new omnichannel world where consumers use multiple touchpoints to make a single purchase, and internal management wants to know hard data. This has lead many retailers to invest in attribution; carefully tracking their online marketing efforts to determine what gets “credit” for the sale, instead of giving credit to the “last click.” Retailers noted that it is very difficult to determine the numbers when online and offline worlds collide – like when a shopper uses digital channels for research and then makes a purchase in a store. As one of the presenters from The North Face mentioned in her keynote, a key to enabling better customer service and satisfaction when it comes to converged online and offline sales is training the in-store staff, and creating a culture where it eventually “doesn’t matter what group gets the credit” if they all add to the sale. No doubt, the area of attribution will be a big area of retail investment in the coming years.      How to plan for the converged world: planning to ensure inventory gets where it needs to be was another concern. In conversations with retailers, we advised them to analyze customer patterns: where shoppers purchase items, where the items were sourced from and even where items are returned. This analysis is very valuable in determining inventory plans. From there, retailers can more accurately plan and allocate inventory to support both the online and offline customer behavior. As we head into the holiday season, the need for accurate enterprise-wide inventory visibility, and providing that information to associates, is even more critical to the brand-wide customer experience.       Improving the search / navigation / usability of the site(s): Aside from some of the big ideas and standard holiday pricing pressure, most conversations we had centered around continuing to improve the basics of the site. Reinvesting in search and navigation came up time and time again (FitForCommerce blogged about what a big topic it was at the event as well). Obviously getting shoppers on their path quickly and allowing them to find what they need fast is critical, but it was definitely interesting to hear just how much effort is still going in to honing the search and navigation experience. Adding new elements to search and navigation like typeahed, inventive navigation refinements, and new navigation categories like gift guides, specialized boutiques and flash sales were top of mind, in addition to searchandising and making search-driven product recommendations. (Oracle can help!)       Reducing cart abandonment: always a hot topic that is top of mind for every online retailer. Getting shoppers to the cart is often less then half the battle; getting them to click “buy” and complete the transaction is much more difficult. While retailers carefully study the checkout process and where shoppers tend to bounce, they know that how they design their checkout page is critical. We’re all online shoppers in our personal lives and we know how frustrating it can be when total prices are not transparent (i.e. shipping, processing, taxes is not included until the very last possible screen before clicking that buy button). Online retailers are struggling with where in the checkout process to surface the total price to be charged to reduce cart abandonment, while not showing the total figure too early in the process that it keeps shoppers from getting to checkout altogether. Recent research shows that providing total pricing prior to the checkout process dramatically reduces cart abandonment – as it serves as a filter to those shopping within a specific price band. Much of the cart abandonment discussion leads us to…       The free shipping / free returns question: it’s no secret that because of Amazon and programs like Prime, consumers expect free shipping, much to the chagrin of the smaller retailer. The reality is that if you’re not a mega-retailer, shipping is an expensive part of doing business that doesn’t allow most retailers to keep their prices low and offer free shipping. This has many retailers venturing out on the “free returns” path, especially in apparel. A number of retailers we spoke with are testing a flat rate shipping fee with free returns to see if they can crack the price threshold where shoppers are willing to pay for shipping with an added service. But, free shipping remains king.      Social ads and retargeting: they are working, but do they turn off consumers? That’s the big question. Every retailer we spoke with during a roundtable on the topic said that social ads and retargeting (where that pair of boots you’re been eyeing on a site magically follows you around the Internet) work and are meeting campaign goals. The larger question many retailers are asking is if this type of tactic is turning off a large number of shoppers, even if these campaigns are meeting their early goals. Retailers also mentioned that Facebook ads are working very well for them, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition, serving as a complimentary a channel to SEO when it comes to engaging new customers. While there are always new things to experiment with in retail, standard challenges are top of mind as retailers scramble to get ready for holiday. It will undoubtedly be another record-breaking online shopping season, but as retailers get more and more advanced with each Black Friday, expect some exciting things. This excitement needs to be backed by sound solutions and optimized operations. Then again, consumers are expecting more than ever, so I don’t doubt that retailers are already thinking about the possibilities of holiday 2015… and beyond. Customers who read this article, also found value in the following stories: Personalization for Retail: http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/personalization_for_retailShop Direct User Experience Focus Drives Sales:https://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/shop_direct_user_experience_focusMaking Waves: Australian Online Retailer SurfStitch: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleretail/entry/surf_stitchWhat’s new in Oracle Commerce v11.1 for RetailWhat the Content+Commerce Equation is Missing

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• Managed Service Architectures Part I

  - by barryoreilly

  Instead of thinking about service oriented architecture, a concept that is continually defined, redefined, abused and mistreated, perhaps it is time to drop the acronym and consider what we actually need to get the job done.   ‘Pure’ SOA involves the modeling of an organisation’s processes, the so called ‘Top Down’ approach, followed by the implementation of these processes as services.     Another approach, more commonly seen in the wild, is the bottom up approach. This usually involves services that simply start popping up in the organization, and SOA in this case is often just an attempt to rein in these services. Such projects, although described as SOA projects for a variety of reasons, have clearly little relation to process driven architecture. Much has been written about these two approaches, with many deciding that a hybrid of both methods is needed to succeed with SOA.   These hybrid methods are a sensible compromise, but one gets the feeling that there is too much focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’. Organisations who focus too much on bottom up development, or who waste too much time and money on top down approaches that don’t produce results, are often recommended to attempt an ‘agile’(Erl) or ‘middle-out’ (Microsoft) approach in order to succeed with SOA.  The problem with recommending this approach is that, in most cases, succeeding with SOA isn’t the aim of the project. If a project is started with the simple aim of ‘Succeeding with SOA’ then the reasons for the projects existence probably need to be questioned.   There are a number of things we can be sure of: ·         An organisation will have a number of disparate IT systems ·         Some of these systems will have redundant data and functionality ·         Integration will give considerable ROI ·         Integration will already be under way. ·         Services will already exist in the organisation ·         These services will be inconsistent in their implementation and in their governance   So there are three goals here: 1.       Alignment between the business and IT 2.     Integration of disparate systems 3.     Management of services.   2 and 3 are going to happen,  in fact they must happen if any degree of return is expected from the IT department. Ignoring 1 is considered a typical mistake in SOA implementations, as it ignores the business implications. However, the business implication of this approach is the money saved in more efficient IT processes. 2 and 3 are ongoing, and they will continue happening, even if a large project to produce a SOA metamodel is started. The result will then be an unstructured cackle of services, and a metamodel that is already going out of date. So we get stuck in and rebuild our services so that they match the metamodel, with the far reaching consequences that this will have on all our LOB systems are current. Lets imagine that this actually works ( how often do we rip and replace working software because it doesn't fit a certain pattern? Never -that's the point of integration), we will now be working with a metamodel that is out of date, and most likely incomplete if the organisation is large.      Accepting that an object can have more than one model over time, with perhaps more than one model being  at any given time will help us realise the limitations of the top down model. It is entirely normal , and perhaps necessary, for an organisation to be able to view an entity from different perspectives.   So, instead of trying to constantly force these goals in a straight line, why not let them happen in parallel, and manage the changes in each layer.     If  company A has chosen to model their business processes and create a business architecture, there will be a reason behind this. Often the aim is to make the business more flexible and able to cope with change, through alignment between the business and the IT department.   If company B’s IT department recognizes the problem of wild services springing up everywhere, and decides to do something about it, by designing a platform and processes for the introduction of services, is this not a valid approach?   With the hybrid approach, it is recommended that company A begin deploying services as quickly as possible. Based on models that are clearly incomplete, and which will therefore change rapidly and often in the near future. Natural business evolution will also mean that the models can be guaranteed to change in the not so near future. To ‘Succeed with SOA’ Company B needs to go back to the drawing board and start modeling processes and objects. So, in effect, we are telling business analysts to start developing code based on a model they are unsure of, and telling programmers to ignore the obvious and growing problems in their IT department and start drawing lines and boxes.     Could the problem be that there are two different problem domains? And the whole concept of SOA as it being described by clever salespeople today creates an example of oft dreaded ‘tight coupling’ between these two domains?   Could it be that we have taken two large problem areas, and bundled the solution together in order to create a magic bullet? And then convinced ourselves that the bullet actually exists?   Company A wants to have a closer relationship between the business and its IT department, in order to become a more flexible organization. Company B wants to decrease the maintenance costs of its IT infrastructure. If both companies focus on succeeding with SOA, then they aren’t focusing on their actual goals.   If Company A starts building services from incomplete models, without a gameplan, they will end up in the same situation as company B, with wild services. If company B focuses on modeling, they could easily end up with the same problems as company A.   Now we have two companies, who a short while ago had one problem each, that now have two problems each. This has happened because of a focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’, rather than solving the problem at hand.   This is not to suggest that the two problem domains are unrelated, a strategy that encompasses both will obviously be good for the organization. But only if the organization realizes this and can develop such a strategy. This strategy cannot be bought in a box.       Anyone who has worked with SOA for a while will be used to analyzing the solutions to a problem and judging the solution’s level of coupling. If we have two applications that each perform separate functions, but need to communicate with each other, we create a integration layer between them, perhaps with a service, but we do all we can to reduce the dependency between the two systems. Using the same approach, we can separate the modeling (business architecture) and the service hosting (technical architecture).     The business architecture describes the processes and business objects in the business domain.   The technical architecture describes the hosting and management and implementation of services.   The glue that binds these together, the integration layer in our analogy, is the service contract, where the operations map the processes to their technical implementation, and the messages map business concepts to software objects in the implementation.   If we reduce the coupling between these layers, we should be able to allow developers to develop services, and business analysts to develop models, without the changes rippling through from one side to the other.   This would allow company A to carry on modeling, and company B to develop a service platform, each achieving their intended goal, without necessarily creating the problems seen in pure top down or bottom up approaches. Company B could then at a later date map their service infrastructure to a unified model, and company A could carry on modeling, insulating deployed services from changes in the ongoing modeling.   How do we do this?  The concept of service virtualization has been around for a while, and is instantly realizable in Microsoft’s Managed Services Engine. Here we can create a layer of virtual services, which represent the business analyst’s view, presenting uniform contracts to the outside world. These services can then transform and route messages to the actual service implementations. I like to think of the virtual services with their beautifully modeled interfaces as ‘SOA services’, and the implementations as simple integration ‘adapter’ services providing an interface to a technical implementation. The Managed Services Engine also provides policy based control over services, regardless of where they are deployed, simplifying handling of security, logging, exception handling etc.   This solves a big problem. The pressure to deliver services quickly is always there in projects. It is very important to quickly show value when implementing service architectures. There is also pressure to deliver quality, and you can’t easily do both at the same time. This approach allows quick delivery with quality increasing over time, allowing modeling and service development to occur in parallel and independent of each other. The link between business modeling and service implementation is not one that is obvious to many organizations, and requires a certain maturity to realize and drive forward. It is also completely possible that a company can benefit from one without the other, even if this approach is frowned upon today, there are many companies doing so and seeing ROI.   Of course there are disadvantages to this. The biggest one being the transformations necessary between the virtual interfaces and the service implementations. Bad choices in developing the services in the service implementation could mean that it is impossible to map the modeled processes to the implementation with redevelopment of the service. In many cases the architect will not have a choice here anyway, as proprietary systems are often delivered with predeveloped services. The alternative is to wait until the model is finished and then build the service according the model. However, if that approach worked we wouldn’t be having this discussion! And even when it does work, natural business evolution will mean that the two concepts (model and implementation) will immediately start to drift away from each other, so coupling them tightly together so that they are forever bound to the model that only applies at the time of the modeling work will not really achieve a great deal. Architecture is all about trade offs, and here a choice has to be made. The choice is between something will initially be of low quality but will work, or something that may well be impossible to achieve in most situations.         In conclusion, top-down is a natural approach for business analysts, and bottom-up  is a natural approach for developers. Instead of trying to force something on both that neither want, and which has not shown itself to be successful,  why not let them get on with their jobs, and let an enterprise architect coordinate the processes?

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• How to get maven gwt 2.0 build working

  - by Pieter Breed

  EDIT: Added some of the output of the mvn -X -e commands at the end My company is developing a GWT application. We've been using maven 2 and GWT 1.7 successfully for quite a while. We recently decided to upgrade to GWT 2.0. We've already updated the eclipse project and we are able to successfully run the application in dev-mode. We are struggling to get the application built using maven though. I'm hoping somebody can tell me what I'm doing wrong here since I'm running out of time on this. The exacty bit of the output that worries me is the 'GWT compilation skipped' message: [INFO] Copying 119 resources [INFO] [compiler:compile {execution: default-compile}] [INFO] Compiling 704 source files to K:\iCura\assessor\target\classes [INFO] [gwt:compile {execution: default}] [INFO] using GWT jars for specified version 2.0.0 [INFO] establishing classpath list (scope = compile) [INFO] com.curasoftware.assessor.Assessor is up to date. GWT compilation skipped [INFO] [jspc:compile {execution: jspc}] [INFO] Built File: \index.jsp I'm pasting the gwt-maven-plugin section below. If you need anything else please ask. <plugin> <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId> <artifactId>gwt-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.2</version> <configuration> <localWorkers>1</localWorkers> <warSourceDirectory>${basedir}/war</warSourceDirectory> <logLevel>ALL</logLevel> <module>${cura.assessor.module}</module> <!-- use style OBF for prod --> <style>OBFUSCATED</style> <extraJvmArgs>-Xmx2048m -Xss1024k</extraJvmArgs> <gwtVersion>${version.gwt}</gwtVersion> <disableCastChecking>true</disableCastChecking> <soyc>false</soyc> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <goals> <!-- plugin goals --> <goal>clean</goal> <goal>compile</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> I executed mvn clean install -X -e and this is some of the output that I get: [DEBUG] Configuring mojo 'org.codehaus.mojo:gwt-maven-plugin:1.2:compile' --> [DEBUG] (f) disableCastChecking = true [DEBUG] (f) disableClassMetadata = false [DEBUG] (f) draftCompile = false [DEBUG] (f) enableAssertions = false [DEBUG] (f) extra = K:\iCura\assessor\target\extra [DEBUG] (f) extraJvmArgs = -Xmx2048m -Xss1024k [DEBUG] (f) force = false [DEBUG] (f) gen = K:\iCura\assessor\target\.generated [DEBUG] (f) generateDirectory = K:\iCura\assessor\target\generated-sources\gwt [DEBUG] (f) gwtVersion = 2.0.0 [DEBUG] (f) inplace = false [DEBUG] (f) localRepository = Repository[local|file://K:/iCura/lib] [DEBUG] (f) localWorkers = 1 [DEBUG] (f) logLevel = ALL [DEBUG] (f) module = com.curasoftware.assessor.Assessor [DEBUG] (f) project = MavenProject: com.curasoftware.assessor:assessor:3.5.0.0 @ K:\iCura\assessor\pom.xml [DEBUG] (f) remoteRepositories = [Repository[gwt-maven|http://gwt-maven.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mavenrepo/], Repository[main-maven|http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/], Repository[central|http://repo1.maven.org/maven2]] [DEBUG] (f) skip = false [DEBUG] (f) sourceDirectory = K:\iCura\assessor\src [DEBUG] (f) soyc = false [DEBUG] (f) style = OBFUSCATED [DEBUG] (f) treeLogger = false [DEBUG] (f) validateOnly = false [DEBUG] (f) warSourceDirectory = K:\iCura\assessor\war [DEBUG] (f) webappDirectory = K:\iCura\assessor\target\assessor [DEBUG] -- end configuration -- and then this: [DEBUG] SOYC has been disabled by user [DEBUG] GWT module com.curasoftware.assessor.Assessor found in K:\iCura\assessor\src [INFO] com.curasoftware.assessor.Assessor is up to date. GWT compilation skipped [DEBUG] com.curasoftware.assessor:assessor:war:3.5.0.0 (selected for null) [DEBUG] com.curasoftware.dto:dto-gen:jar:3.5.0.0:compile (selected for compile) ... It's finding the correct sourceDirectory. That folders has a 'com' folder within which ultimately is the source of the application organized in folders as per the package structure.

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• Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman

  - by Pinal Dave

  Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon.  He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents.  Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Batman has the distinct advantage that his alter ego, Bruce Wayne is a millionaire (or billionaire in today’s reboots).  This means that he can spend his time working on his athletic abilities, building a secret lair, and investing his money in cool tools.  This might not be true for developers (well, most developers), but I still think there are many parallels. So how are developers like Batman? Well, read on my list of reasons. Develop Skills Batman works on his skills.  He didn’t get the strength to scale Gotham’s skyscrapers by inheriting his powers or suffering an industrial accident.  Developers also hone their skills daily.  They might not be doing pull-ups and scaling buldings, but I think their skills are just as impressive. Clear Goals Batman is driven to build a better Gotham.  He knows that the criminal who killed his parents was a small-time thief, not a super villain – so he has larger goals in mind than simply chasing one villain.  He wants his city as a whole to be better.  Developers are also driven to make things better.  It can be easy to get hung up on one problem, but in the end it is best to focus on the well-being of the system as a whole. Ultimate Teamplayers Batman is the hero Gotham needs – even when that means appearing to be the bad guys.  Developers probably know that feeling well.  Batman takes the fall for a crime he didn’t commit, and developers often have to deliver bad news about the limitations of their networks and servers.  It’s not always a job filled with glory and thanks, but someone has to do it. Always Ready Batman and the Boy Scouts have this in common – they are always prepared.  Let’s add developers to this list.  Batman has an amazing tool belt with gadgets and gizmos, and let’s not even get into all the functions of the Batmobile!  Developers’ skills might be the knowledge and skills they have developed, not tools they can carry in a utility belt, but that doesn’t make them any less impressive. 100% Dedication Bruce Wayne cultivates the personality of a playboy, never keeping the same girlfriend for long and spending his time partying.  Even though he hides it, his driving force is his deep concern and love for his friends and the city as a whole.  Developers also care a lot about their company and employees – even when it is driving them crazy.  You do your best work when you care about your job on a personal level. Quality Output Batman believes the city deserves to be saved.  The citizens might have a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne, and employees might not always appreciate developers.  Batman and developers, though, keep working for the best of everyone. I hope you are all enjoying reading about developers-as-superheroes as much as I am enjoying writing about them.  Please tell me how else developers are like Superheroes in the comments – especially if you know any developers who are faster than a speeding bullet and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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• Book Reviews: Art of Community and Eyetracking Web Usability

  - by ultan o'broin

  Holidays time offers a chance to catch up on some user experience and user assistance related material. So, two short book reviews (which I considered using my new Tumblr blog for. More about that another time) coming up. The Art of Community by Jono Bacon Excellent starting point for anyone wanting to get going in the community software (FLOSS, for example) space or understand how to set up, manage, and leverage the collective intelligence of communities for whatever ends. The book is a little too long in my opinion, and of course, usage of what Jono is recommending needs to be nuanced and adapted for enterprise applications space (hardly surprising there is a lot about Ubuntu, Lug Radio, and so on given Jono's interests). Shame there wasn't more information on international, non-English community considerations too. Still, some great ideas and insight into setting up and managing communities that I will leverage (watch out for the results on this blog, later in 2011). One section, on collaborative writing really jumped out. It reinforced the whole idea that to successful community initiatives are based on instigators knowing what makes the community tick in the first place. How about this for insight into user profiles for people who write community user assistance (OK then, "doc") and what tools they might use (in this case, we're talking about Jokosher): "Most people who write documentation for open source software projects would fall into the category of power user. They are technology enthusiasts who are not interested in the super-technical avenues of programming, but want to help out. Many of these people have good writing skills and a good knowledge of using the software, so the documentation fit is natural. With Jokosher we wanted to acknowledge this profile of user. As such, instead of focussing on complex text processing tools, we encouraged our documentation contributors to use a wiki." The book is available for free here, and well as being available from usual sources. Eyetracking Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Prentice Another fine book by established experts. I have some field experience of eyetracking studies myself --in the user assistance for enterprise applications space--though Jakob and Kara concentrate on websites for their research here. I would caution how much about websites transfers easily to the applications space, especially enterprise applications, as claimed in the book too. However, Jakob and Kara do make the case very well that understanding design goals (for example, productivity improvement in the case of applications) and the context of the software use is critical. Executing a study using eyetracking technology requires that you know what you want to test, can set up realistic tasks for testing by representative testers, and then analyze the results. Be precise, as lots of data will be generated (I think the authors underplay the effort in analyzing data too). What I found disappointing was the lack of emphasis on eyetracking as only part of the usability solution. It's really for fine-tuning designs in my opinion, and should be used after other design reviews. I also wasn't that crazy about the level of disengagement between the qualitative and quantitative side of this kind of testing that the book indicated. I think it is useful to have testers verbalize their thoughts and for test engineers to prompt, intervene, or guide as necessary. More on cultural or international aspects to usability testing might have been included too (websites are available to everyone). To conclude, I enjoyed the book, took on board some key takeaways about methodologies and found the recommendations sensible and easy to follow (for example about Forms layouts). Applying enterprise applications requirements such as those relating to user profiles, design goals, and overall context of use in conjunction with what's in this book would be the way to go here. It also made me think of how interesting it would be to compare eyetracking findings between website and enterprise applications usage.

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• Oracle Fusion Procurement Designed for User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Procurement Design Goals In Oracle Fusion Procurement, we set out to create a streamlined user experience based on the way users do their jobs. Oracle has spent hundreds of hours with customers to get to the heart of what users need to do their jobs. By designing a procurement application around user needs, Oracle has crafted a user experience that puts the tools that people need at their fingertips. In Oracle Fusion Procurement, the user experience is designed to provide the user with information that will drive navigation rather than requiring the user to find information. One of our design goals for Oracle Fusion Procurement was to reduce the number of screens and clicks that a user must go through to complete frequently performed tasks. The requisition process in Oracle Fusion Procurement (Figure 1) illustrates how we have streamlined workflows. Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement brings together billing metrics, descriptions of the order, justification for the order, a breakdown of the components of the order, and the amount—all in one place. Previous generations of procurement software required the user to navigate to several different pages to gather all of this information. With Oracle Fusion, everything is presented on one page. The result is that users can complete their tasks in less time. The focus is on completing the work, not finding the work. Figure 1. Creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement is a consumer-like shopping experience. Will Oracle Fusion Procurement Increase Productivity? To answer this question, Oracle sought to model how two experts working head to head—one in an existing enterprise application and another in Oracle Fusion Procurement—would perform the same task. We compared Oracle Fusion designs to corresponding existing applications using the keystroke-level modeling (KLM) method. This method is based on years of research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and research labs like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The KLM method breaks tasks into a sequence of operations and uses standardized models to evaluate all of the physical and cognitive actions that a person must take to complete a task: what a user would have to click, how long each click would take (not only the physical action of the click or typing of a letter, but also how long someone would have to think about the page when taking the action), and user interface changes that result from the click. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time is calculated. Task times from the model enable researchers to predict end-user productivity. For the study, we focused on modeling procurement business process task flows that were considered business or mission critical: high-frequency tasks and high-value tasks. The designs evaluated encompassed tasks that are currently performed by employees, professional buyers, suppliers, and sourcing professionals in advanced procurement applications. For each of these flows, we created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task, conducted task walk-throughs in both the Oracle Fusion design and the existing application, analyzed and documented the steps and actions required to complete each task, and applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate overall task completion times. The Results The KLM method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Procurement designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 13 percent to 38 percent, with an overall productivity gain of 22.5 percent. These performance gains can be attributed to a reduction in the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. For example, creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Procurement takes a user through only two screens, while ordering the same item in a previous version requires six screens to complete the task. Modeling user productivity has resulted not only in advances in Oracle Fusion applications, but also in advances in other areas. We leveraged lessons learned from the KLM studies to establish products like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). New user experience features in EBS 12.1.3, such as navigational improvements to the main menu, a Google-type search using auto-suggest, embedded analytics, and an in-context list of values tool help to reduce clicks and improve efficiency. For more information about KLM, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.

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• Oracle WebCenter: Extending Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} -- 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-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter extends Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications.When we talk about the new release of Oracle WebCenter, we really emphasize to customers that they can leverage their existing investments and benefit from WebCenter’s Complete, Open and Integrated platform. To summarize what we mean here, Oracle WebCenter is:COMPLETEComprehensive platform for Portals/Websites, Composite Applications with integrated Social/Collaboration services and Content Management infrastructureOPENStandards support improves reuse of existing resources and extends the value of existing systemsINTEGRATEDImplicit integration with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Applications & other enterprise applicationsWith all the existing enterprise applications in Oracle’s application portfolio, in the new release of WebCenter we’ve got a set of pre-built catalogs that customers can use directly to get at all the portlet resources certified and available from Oracle.  It provides customers with a ready-to-use view of their application resources.  And since WebCenter provides seamless support for building these portlets/components in a professional IDE like JDeveloper or from within a Browser, developers and business analysts can quickly assemble the information they require for their existing application investment.  In addition, we’ve taken all the user flows and patterns that we’ve learned in building Fusion Applications and focused on making it dramatically easier to use tools to create reusable application UI components. In this way, one team in the organization using an application can share their components with other teams.  And more importantly, the new team can make changes to the component without breaking the original component.  When tied to enterprise applications, this capability is extremely powerful.  This is what Oracle means when they talk about Enterprise Mashups.  And finally, we’ve provided an innovative way to go well beyond traditional “on the glass” integration by enabling business transactions for the existing applications direct integration using activity streams. This delivers aggregated and “on time” delivery of information to the business users based on what‘s happening in the enterprise that is relevant to their particular job function.  Most importantly, it ties into the personalization interactions discussed earlier so that it can help target information to you directly based on past interactions.  Application integration is key to making businesses function more efficiently with these new Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how WebCenter is the most complete, open and integrated modern user experience platform and show key ways WebCenter can extend Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications.

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• Oracle WebCenter: Common User Experience Architecture

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  You may remember that the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  In previous weeks we've provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals and this week, we'll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter delivers a Common User Experience Architecture.When Oracle talks about a Common User Experience Architecture, it really focuses on a core set of areas.  First, the way that information is accessed needs to be consistent and extensible so that as requirements change, the applications don't need to be rewritten for every change. Second, this information access layer needs to be securely accessible to any application, site, or any other channel that needs to leverage this information.  Third, there needs to be a consistent presentation layout, Oracle calls it a UI shell, so that all resources can fit together in a useable, productive way.  Fourth, there needs to be a common set of design patterns for how different menus, features, and services fit into this UI Shell for broad and productive usability.  Fifth, there needs to be a set of design patterns for the individual services that plug into this UI shell so that end users can move from one module of the application to another without new learning.  Finally, all of these layers need to be customizable in an easy way that insulates IT from patching and upgrading problems and allows the business owners the agility to quickly change with the market conditions.As Oracle has already announced, we will release our next generation of enterprise applications called Oracle Fusion Applications.  We have thousands of developers building these applications that all had different programming tool experience and UI design experience.  We've educated over 6,000 developers building Oracle Fusion Applications to leverage these Common User Experience Architecture patterns to speed their learning curve of the new Java standards as well as SOA principles to deliver a revolutionary new set of applications.  You could imagine the big challenge with getting all these developers with different backgrounds and different UI design skills to deliver a completely integrated application user experience.  This is why Oracle invested heavily in designing this Common User Experience Architecture, based on Oracle WebCenter and the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).  It pulls together the best practices and design patterns that Oracle development required in order to bring Fusion Applications to market and Oracle WebCenter is the user experience layer that all of this is surfaced through.  In this way, customers can quickly brand a deployment for new partnerships without having to redevelop a new site.  Or they can quickly add new options to the UI Shell to enable their line of business managers to quickly adapt to a new competitive product.  And with the core integration of the activities to produce a Business Activity Stream, customers are able to stay on top of all their key business actions when they happen as they happen and more importantly, the system can recommend actions or resources to help act on these activities.And we've authored this whole set of design patterns for Oracle development to take advantage of in delivering Fusion Applications.  We're also applying these design patterns to our existing eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards applications so that they can tie in the exact same way that Fusion Applications has been brought together.  This will provide customers with a complete Common User Experience Architecture for their entire ecosystem of applications within their enterprise whether they are from Oracle, another vender, or custom built applications. And this is all provided in the new release of Oracle WebCenter.  These design patterns cover elements around delivering a complete, aggregated menu of all the capabilities that their role allows independent of which application they are trying to access.   It means that as they move from one application to another, they will have a consistent user experience.  And if they are using an Oracle application, any customizations that are made to the application are preserved and managed through upgrades and patches.Be sure to check back this week as we share more information and resources on Oracle's Common User Experience Architecture.

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• Protecting Consolidated Data on Engineered Systems

  - by Steve Enevold

  In this time of reduced budgets and cost cutting measures in Federal, State and Local governments, the requirement to provide services continues to grow. Many agencies are looking at consolidating their infrastructure to reduce cost and meet budget goals. Oracle's engineered systems are ideal platforms for accomplishing these goals. These systems provide unparalleled performance that is ideal for running applications and databases that traditionally run on separate dedicated environments. However, putting multiple critical applications and databases in a single architecture makes security more critical. You are putting a concentrated set of sensitive data on a single system, making it a more tempting target.  The environments were previously separated by iron so now you need to provide assurance that one group, department, or application's information is not visible to other personnel or applications resident in the Exadata system. Administration of the environments requires formal separation of duties so an administrator of one application environment cannot view or negatively impact others. Also, these systems need to be in protected environments just like other critical production servers. They should be in a data center protected by physical controls, network firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, etc Exadata also provides unique security benefits, including a reducing attack surface by minimizing packages and services to only those required. In addition to reducing the possible system areas someone may attempt to infiltrate, Exadata has the following features: 1.    Infiniband, which functions as a secure private backplane 2.    IPTables  to perform stateful packet inspection for all nodes               Cellwall implements firewall services on each cell using IPTables 3.    Hardware accelerated encryption for data at rest on storage cells Oracle is uniquely positioned to provide the security necessary for implementing Exadata because security has been a core focus since the company's beginning. In addition to the security capabilities inherent in Exadata, Oracle security products are all certified to run in an Exadata environment. Database Vault Oracle Database Vault helps organizations increase the security of existing applications and address regulatory mandates that call for separation-of-duties, least privilege and other preventive controls to ensure data integrity and data privacy. Oracle Database Vault proactively protects application data stored in the Oracle database from being accessed by privileged database users. A unique feature of Database Vault is the ability to segregate administrative tasks including when a command can be executed, or that the DBA can manage the health of the database and objects, but may not see the data Advanced Security  helps organizations comply with privacy and regulatory mandates by transparently encrypting all application data or specific sensitive columns, such as credit cards, social security numbers, or personally identifiable information (PII). By encrypting data at rest and whenever it leaves the database over the network or via backups, Oracle Advanced Security provides the most cost-effective solution for comprehensive data protection. Label Security  is a powerful and easy-to-use tool for classifying data and mediating access to data based on its classification. Designed to meet public-sector requirements for multi-level security and mandatory access control, Oracle Label Security provides a flexible framework that both government and commercial entities worldwide can use to manage access to data on a "need to know" basis in order to protect data privacy and achieve regulatory compliance  Data Masking reduces the threat of someone in the development org taking data that has been copied from production to the development environment for testing, upgrades, etc by irreversibly replacing the original sensitive data with fictitious data so that production data can be shared safely with IT developers or offshore business partners  Audit Vault and Database Firewall Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall serves as a critical detective and preventive control across multiple operating systems and database platforms to protect against the abuse of legitimate access to databases responsible for almost all data breaches and cyber attacks.  Consolidation, cost-savings, and performance can now be achieved without sacrificing security. The combination of built in protection and Oracle’s industry-leading data protection solutions make Exadata an ideal platform for Federal, State, and local governments and agencies.

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• On The Road with the HR Community

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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• The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

  - by user769227

  John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

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• Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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• Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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• Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

  - by Salil Ravindran

  Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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• Four Easy Ways to Save a Rocky CRM Relationship

  - by Divya Malik

   Today, I am pleased to introduce our guest blogger Luke Christianson. Luke is  an Application Sales rep based out of Minneapolis, MN.  You can find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter. In any relationship, sooner or later, the excitement fades away.  The honeymoon period gives way to the old routines you had, before you committed to each other and you eventually begin doing things apart from one another.  I’m not talking about a marriage…  Well, I guess I am.Commitment to a CRM tool and building a deep and lasting relationship is not much different than the basics of a traditional love story.  After your controlled CRM pilot program, and maybe the National Sales Meeting where you couldn’t escape those three wonderful letters, CRM, you will soon find that if you haven’t designed an environment where it’s going to enable your reps to make more money, the relationship is doomed.   . If you’re currently in a dysfunctional CRM relationship, here are 4 simple tips to re-engaging users and getting that spark back. Shadow a Sales Rep:   Chances are you can find out exactly what is preventing your sales reps from using the application by simply watching how they go about their day.  Sales reps are driven by money, not by additional administrative duties.  Your system needs to be setup so that they can get the information they need quickly, facilitate making key updates and run their business out of one easy-to-use application.  Increase your sales team’s productivity by 5% automatically:    Cancel the weekly forecast calls with your reps and require them update their opportunities in CRM.  Something else that I’ve seen work extremely well, is when you do Monthly or Quarterly reviews, do not let your sales reps bring anything into the room with them; no spreadsheets, notebooks, or computers.  Everything they need to tell you should be able to be put into CRM and fully accessible by the Sales Manager at any time.  Tool time:      Make sure the tools that you have selected meet both your short-term goals and your long term goals.   You need tools that can adapt like your business does.  You probably can’t wait two months for an update to a picklist value or for the addition of a simple workflow rule.  Do you feel the tools that are in place can create the experience you want for your users? and finally, if all else fails... Keep It Simple, Stupid:     Do you really need to require 15 fields to create an Opportunity?  Do you need to clutter the interface with different reports that don’t add daily value?  Most CRM systems on the market today are flexible enough today that your admin could clean up most of the unnecessary interface ‘noise’ in a few hours.  If they're not, see #3. Every strong relationship can be tedious at times, you’ll fight and eventually make amends, you may even threaten to upgrade to a newer model…  But be patient and think about what you want to achieve and you’ll find a partner for life.

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• Changes in the Maven Embedded GlassFish plugin

  - by Romain Grecourt

  The plugin changed its Maven coordinates (a.k.a GAV) over time:  version <= 3.1.1 available under org.glassfish:maven-glassfish-embedded-plugin version >= 3.1.2 available under org.glassfish.embedded:maven-glassfish-embedded-plugin The goal “glassfish-embedded:run” has changed its way of reading the deployment configuration in the latest version: 4.0.Projects using previous versions of the plugin will stop working with this goal. Here is an example of the “old behavior”: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 <plugin> <groupId>org.glassfish.embedded</groupId> <artifactId>maven-embedded-glassfish-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.1.2.2</version> <configuration> <app>target/${project.build.finalName}.war</app> <contextRoot>/</contextRoot> <goalPrefix>embedded-glassfish</goalPrefix> <autoDelete>true</autoDelete> <port>8080</port> </configuration> </plugin> The new behavior is as follow: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 <plugin> <groupId>org.glassfish.embedded</groupId> <artifactId>maven-embedded-glassfish-plugin</artifactId> <version>4.0</version> <configuration> <goalPrefix>embedded-glassfish</goalPrefix> <autoDelete>true</autoDelete> <port>8080</port> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>deploy</goal> </goals> <configuration> <app>target/${project.build.finalName}.war</app> <contextRoot>/</contextRoot> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> The new version looks for execution of the deploy goal and the associated configuration, when running the goal ‘run’. Both would allow you to run the latest version of the glassfish-embedded jar, you’d only need to add it as a plugin dependency: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 <plugin> [...] <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.glassfish.main.extras</groupId> <artifactId>glassfish-embedded-all</artifactId> <version>4.0</version> </dependency> </dependencies> </plugin>

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• properties-maven-plugin: Error loading properties-file

  - by yournamehere

  I want to extract all the properties from my pom.xml into a properties-file. These are the common properties like dependency-versions, plugin-versions and directories. I'm using the properties-maven-plugin, but its not working as i want it to. The essential part of my pom.xml: <plugin> <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId> <artifactId>properties-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.0-alpha-1</version> <executions> <execution> <phase>initialize</phase> <goals> <goal>read-project-properties</goal> </goals> <configuration> <files> <file>${basedir}/pom.properties</file> </files> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> Now when i run "mvn properties:read-project-properties" i get the following error: [INFO] One or more required plugin parameters are invalid/missing for 'properties:read-project-properties' [0] Inside the definition for plugin 'properties-maven-plugin' specify the following: <configuration> ... <files>VALUE</files> </configuration>. The pom.properties-file is located in the same dir as the pom.xml. What can i do to let the properties-maven-plugin read my properties-file?

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• How to configure hbm2java and hbm2dao to add packagename to generated classes

  - by mmm

  Hi, I'm trying to configure hbm2java with maven to generate POJO classes and DAO objects. One of the issues I'm dealing with is package names aren't generated. I'm using the following pom for that: <execution> <id>hbm2java</id> <phase>generate-sources</phase> <goals> <goal>hbm2java</goal> </goals> <inherited>false</inherited> <configuration> <components> <component> <name>hbm2java</name> <implementation>configuration</implementation> </component> </components> <componentProperties> <packagename>package.name</packagename> <configurationfile>target/hibernate3/generated-mappings/hibernane.cfg.xml</configurationfile> </componentProperties> </configuration> </execution> Yet the generated code begins with the following: // default package // Generated 2010-05-17 13:11:51 by Hibernate Tools 3.2.2.GA /** * Messages generated by hbm2java */ public class Messages implements java.io.Serializable { Is there a way to force maven to generate the package part as defined in packagename?

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• C++ JSON parser

  - by pollux

  Dear reader, I'm working on a twitter client which uses the twitter streaming json api. Twitter advices JSON as XML version is deprecated. I'm looking for a good JSON parser which can parse the json data below. I'm receiving this JSON which I want to be able to read/parse using a JSON parser. { "in_reply_to_status_id": null, "text": "Home-plate umpire Crawford gets stung http://tinyurl.com/27ujc86", "favorited": false, "coordinates": null, "in_reply_to_user_id": null, "source": "<a href=\"http://apiwiki.twitter.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\">API</a>", "geo": null, "created_at": "Fri Jun 18 15:12:06 +0000 2010", "place": null, "user": { "profile_text_color": "333333", "screen_name": "HostingViral", "time_zone": "Pacific Time (US & Canada)", "url": "http://bit.ly/1Way7P", "profile_link_color": "228235", "profile_background_image_url": "http://s.twimg.com/a/1276654401/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif", "description": "Full time Internet Marketer - Helping other reach their Goals\r\nhttp://wavemarker.com", "statuses_count": 1944, "profile_sidebar_fill_color": "c7b7c7", "profile_background_tile": true, "contributors_enabled": false, "lang": "en", "notifications": null, "created_at": "Wed Dec 30 07:50:52 +0000 2009", "profile_sidebar_border_color": "120412", "following": null, "geo_enabled": false, "followers_count": 2485, "protected": false, "friends_count": 2495, "location": "Working at Home", "name": "Johnathan Thomas", "verified": false, "profile_background_color": "131516", "profile_image_url": "http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/600114776/nessykalvo421_normal.jpg", "id": 100439873, "utc_offset": -28800, "favourites_count": 0 }, "in_reply_to_screen_name": null, "id": 16477056501, "contributors": null, "truncated": false } *This is the raw string (above it beautified) * {"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"text":"Home-plate umpire Crawford gets stung http://tinyurl.com/27ujc86","favorited":false,"coordinates":null,"in_reply_to_user_id":null,"source":"<a href=\"http://apiwiki.twitter.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\">API</a>","geo":null,"created_at":"Fri Jun 18 15:12:06 +0000 2010","place":null,"user":{"profile_text_color":"333333","screen_name":"HostingViral","time_zone":"Pacific Time (US & Canada)","url":"http://bit.ly/1Way7P","profile_link_color":"228235","profile_background_image_url":"http://s.twimg.com/a/1276654401/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif","description":"Full time Internet Marketer - Helping other reach their Goals\r\nhttp://wavemarker.com","statuses_count":1944,"profile_sidebar_fill_color":"c7b7c7","profile_background_tile":true,"contributors_enabled":false,"lang":"en","notifications":null,"created_at":"Wed Dec 30 07:50:52 +0000 2009","profile_sidebar_border_color":"120412","following":null,"geo_enabled":false,"followers_count":2485,"protected":false,"friends_count":2495,"location":"Working at Home","name":"Johnathan Thomas","verified":false,"profile_background_color":"131516","profile_image_url":"http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/600114776/nessykalvo421_normal.jpg","id":100439873,"utc_offset":-28800,"favourites_count":0},"in_reply_to_screen_name":null,"id":16477056501,"contributors":null,"truncated":false} I've tried multiple JSON parsers from json.org though I've tried 4 now and can't find one which can parse above json. Kind regards, Pollux

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• Maven: compile aspectj project containing Java 1.6 source

  - by gmale

  What I want to do is fairly easy. Or so you would think. However, nothing is working properly. Requirement: Using maven, compile Java 1.6 project using AspectJ compiler. Note: Our code cannot compile with javac. That is, it fails compilation if aspects are not woven in (because we have aspects that soften exceptions). Questions (based on failed attempts below): Either 1) How do you get maven to run the aspectj:compile goal directly, without ever running compile:compile? 2) How do you specify a custom compilerId that points to your own ajc compiler? Thanks for any and all suggestions. These are the things I've tried that have let to my problem/questions: Attempt 1 (fail): Specify aspectJ as the compiler for the maven-compiler-plugin: org.apache.maven.plugins maven-compiler-plugin 2.2 1.6 1.6 aspectj org.codehaus.plexus plexus-compiler-aspectj 1.8 This fails with the error: org.codehaus.plexus.compiler.CompilerException: The source version was not recognized: 1.6 No matter what version of the plexus compiler I use (1.8, 1.6, 1.3, etc), this doesn't work. I actually read through the source code and found that this compiler does not like source code above Java 1.5. Attempt 2 (fail): Use the aspectJ-maven-plugin attached to the compile and test-compile goals: org.codehaus.mojo aspectj-maven-plugin 1.3 1.6 1.6 compile test-compile This fails when running either: mvn clean test-compile mvn clean compile because it attempts to execute compile:compile before running aspectj:compile. As noted above, our code doesn't compile with javac--the aspects are required. So mvn would need to skip the compile:compile goal altogether and run only aspectj:compile. Attempt 3 (works but unnacceptable): Use the same configuration above but instead run: mvn clean aspectj:compile This works, in that it builds successfully but it's unacceptable in that we need to be able to run the compile goal and the test-compile goal directly (m2eclipse auto-build depends on those goals). Moreover, running it this way would require that we spell out every goal we want along the way (for instance, we need resources distributed and tests to be run and test resources deployed, etc)

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• Execute Ant task with Maven

  - by Gonzalo

  Hi, I'm trying to execute with Maven some test written using Ant tasks. I generated the files required to import the task into Maven, but I can't execute them. My POM is defined this way: <build> <plugins> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-ant-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> <executions> <execution> <phase>generate-sources</phase> <configuration> <tasks> <echo message="Hello, maven"/> </tasks> </configuration> <goals> <goal>run</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins> </build> I try to execute that message, but I get an error with run: [ERROR] BUILD ERROR [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] 'run' was specified in an execution, but not found in the plugin But, if I run: "mvn antrun:run", I know that this can not run the task. An if I've different targets, how do I call them from Maven? I've the pom.xml, and build.xml with the ant tasks. Thanks. Gonzalo

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• Running custom JAXB2 plugins using Maven JAXB 2.x Plugin

  - by nadouani

  I would like to generate JAXB Java classes using the Maven JAXB 2.x plugin http://static.highsource.org/mjiip/maven-jaxb2-plugin/generate-mojo.html To declare the custom JAXB plugins I would execute during the generate process, I used the "args" element like below: <plugin> <groupId>org.jvnet.jaxb2.maven2</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jaxb2-plugin</artifactId> <version>0.7.4</version> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>generate</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> <configuration> <extension>true</extension> <args> <arg>-Xinheritance</arg> <arg>-XtoString</arg> </args> ... </configuration> ... </plugin> The issue is that the maven generate process is failing with the following error: Failed to execute goal org.jvnet.jaxb2.maven2:maven-jaxb2-plugin:0.7.4:generate (default) on project was: Error parsing the command line [[Ljava.lang.String;@1ad4a1ae] Any idea on how to specify the args values? Thanks

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• axis2 maven example

  - by larrycai

  I try to use axis2 (1.5.1) version to generate java codes from wsdl files, but I can't figure out what is the correct pom.xml <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.axis2</groupId> <artifactId>axis2-wsdl2code-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>1.5.1</version> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>wsdl2code</goal> </goals> <configuration> <wsdlFile>src/main/resources/wsdl/stockquote.wsdl</wsdlFile> <databindingName>xmlbeans</databindingName> <packageName>a.bc</packageName> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins> </build> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.axis2</groupId> <artifactId>axis2</artifactId> <version>1.5.1</version> </dependency> </dependencies> when I type mvn compile, it complains the Retrieving document at 'src/main/resources/wsdl/stockquote.wsdl'. java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.xml.serializer.TreeWalker And if i try to find the TreeWalker, it is a mess to find a suitable jar files. can u someone give me a hints ? or give me correct pom.xml

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• How to set the build.xml for the Groovy Antbuilder?

  - by Jan

  I want to execute a build.xml (Ant buildfile) from using GMaven (Maven Plugin for inline executing of Groovy in a POM). Since I have to execute the buildfile several times using the maven-antrun-plugin is not an option at the moment. I take a list of properties (environment and machine names) from an xml file and want to execute ant builds for each of those machines. I found the executeTarget method in the javadocs but not how to set the location of the buildfile. How can I do that - and is this enough? What I have looks as follows: <plugin> <groupId>org.codehaus.groovy.maven</groupId> <artifactId>gmaven-plugin</artifactId> <executions> <execution> <id>some ant builds</id> <phase>process-sources</phase> <goals> <goal>execute</goal> </goals> <configuration> <source> def ant = new AntBuilder() def machines = new XmlParser().parse(new File(project.build.outputDirectory + '/MachineList.xml')); machines.children().each { log.info('Creating machine description for ' + it.Id.text() + ' / ' + it.Environment.text()); ant.project.setProperty('Environment',it.Environment.text()); ant.project.setProperty('Machine',it.Id.text()); // What's missing? ant.project.executeTarget('Tailoring'); } log.info('Ant has finished.') </source> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin>

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