Buttso Does the BLOG Thing

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 01:52:06 GMT

Yes, it's time to breathe some life back into the Buttso Blog.

With the release of the OC4J 10g (10.1.3) Developer Preview 3, there's quite a bit of new information to share, so the Buttso Blog will be reinstated to active duty.

Some topics likely to seen here in the not too distant future are:

1. Using the new <oracle:deploy> ant tasks for application deployment operations with OC4J
2. Management stuff around JMX, MBeans, JSR77 stats, etc.
3. Shared libraries, classloading
4. A bit about clustering using the new application level clustering feature we have in 10.1.3.

And whatever else comes to mind when I get to my desk in the mornings.

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 01:43:18 GMT

A Code Snippet to Create an AttributeChangeNotification

protected void setOrderProcessing(boolean val)
{
orderProcessing = val;
AttributeChangeNotification notification =
    new AttributeChangeNotification(
      this,
      System.currentTimeMillis(),
      System.currentTimeMillis(),
      "OrderProcessing Changed",
      "OrderProcessing",
      Boolean.TYPE.getClass().getName(),
      Boolean.valueOf(orderProcessing),
      Boolean.valueOf(val));
sendNotification(notification);
}

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 06:31:52 GMT

A Trip to the Corner Shop .... An Expedition to Everest

Maybe because it's a Friday afternoon, but I'm really struggling with getting the latest Sun Blueprint application -- Adventure Builder -- to build away from the Sun Reference Implementation environment.

I was really hoping to be able to do a quick build of the application against our latest OC4J build, and then start to add some extensions in the JMX arena to it as a demonstration. What started out as a nice Friday afternoon task has ended up as bugger of a job. I thought it'd be a simple trip to the shop ... now it's looking like a full scale expedition up Mt Everest.

For a start, I certainly don't claim to be an authority on best practices with Ant -- I got the older Petstore app building against OC4J really quickly -- but I can say that I'm finding it really hard to get this build environment to work against OC4J.

It just looks and feels too complicated as I'm wading my way through all the build components trying to change the relevant targets to work against another J2EE implementation. There's lots of calls in the Ant scripts to specific functionality in the J2EE RI to create the required resources (can't these just get put into a completely separate script!), calls out to ws compilers for all the client code which relies on the scripts in the RI, and about a billion properties to keep track of and try and debug when the shit hits the fan during a build.

If I was someone looking at J2EE and thinking I'd use this as a way to learn a bit about it on my preferred J2EE container, then I reckon I'd be jumping at the .NET wagon rolling past ...

I guess I'll keep going -- perhaps the onus is actually on us as a J2EE vendor to provide a distribution of this so it'll build against our specific J2EE implementation. I know the Sun folks can't make it that generic so it'll build against every product, but it does look like it's very tightly coupled to the J2EE RI -- hmm, which I think is now actually used as the official Sun Application Server .... perhaps there is a method in their madness after all ....

Maybe I really am being a dumb arse and should just go out for a ride. Hye, good idea. Seeya.

Fri, 21 May 2004 05:30:40 GMT

Setting up OracleAS Clustering? Check Yer' Multicast Capabilities

Our blogger-in-residence Mr Debu Panda forwarded me an email this week from someone who was trying to setup an OracleAS file based cluster in order to demonstrate our HttpSession failover capabilities, and who was getting an unexplained exception.

Turns out that they didn't have a multicast enabled environment so our cluster enabled session listeners were throwing the underlying exceptions.

To help people check first if they do have a multicast enabled environment, I've written a multicast client and server program which can be used to verify multicast is actually working, see Mutlicast Checker for more details.

Wed, 12 May 2004 05:33:07 GMT

The Blog's Not Dead Yet
Things have gone quiet for a while; I've been active on a few things which have taken up most of my time over the last few weeks.

The good news is that I've got some more things to blog about soon. I was finally forced to confront my demons in the areas of Single Sign On, JAAS and OID that I'd previously been able to (... studiously ;-) ignore. So in the next few days, I hope to write a bit about things like the cool new SSO capability we have in the 904 release called Dynamic Directives which adds programmatic single sign on operations (login, force login, logout) to J2EE applications, JAZN SSO user managers, and more things like that.

Time permitting of course!

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 01:16:31 GMT

OC4J Standalone as a Windows Service

Questions about running OC4J as a Windows Service appear on our OTN J2EE/OC4J forum from time to time. I just had a real quick look at one solution in OC4J as a Windows Service.

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 05:14:23 GMT

Form Based Authentication with OC4J

A few queries for an example of form-based authentication have appeared on OTN from time to time, so here's a small writeup and a working example.

For those folks who have it working, the next common question is why does the browser URL show "j_security_check" once a succesful logon has been made. I'm not sure about the answer to that -- to me it certainly should show the URL of the page that was originally requested (and is actually shown in the browser window). The PM who works on the Servlet aspect of OC4J is looking into it for us.

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 03:26:18 GMT

MC4J Adds Support for OC4J

MC4J is an open source management console that allows administrators to display the MBeans running in a J2EE server, browse attributes, invoke operations and receive notifications from a selected MBean.

The latest beta build of MC4J (http://mc4j.sourceforge.net) now has added support for server connections to the OC4J MBeanServer (http://mc4j.sourceforge.net/usageOC4J.html).

Have a look at my OC4J and MC4J note for some more details.