Pascal’s Blog

For my current project we are performing a Business Process analysis. The goal is to catch all relevant business processes in a Business Process Model. This model will then be used as base for a SOA implementation of a new system, which will support the customer in his business much better then the current system.
As notation for the diagrams of our BPM (Business Process Model) we use BPMN (Business Process Model Notation). Although there is some discussion if you should use this notation or just the available UML diagrams, I chose to use BPMN, as I expect this to become the (defacto) standard, if it isn’t this already.
After we have modeled the relevant processes we would like to translate the BPMN diagrams to BPEL diagrams. But before we have reached this step, we first have to identify which processes are suitable to be implemented by web services, and then we have to build all these services.
So before we are going to use BPEL, we have plenty of time to read and investigate how to use BPEL succesfull for our SOA. There are already lot of articles about this issue so we won’t have to be bored the coming months

Although there have been preview releases available for some time, last week the production release of JDeveloper 11g came out. And because I finally had some time to have a look at it, I decided to give it a go. I have been using JDeveloper since version 3.1 and as you can imagine, I have encountered a lot of changes overtime. And the same goes for this release. A look at the list of changes in this version shows there is a lot of stuff to investigate… Of course there are some nice features added but I am afraid I have to invest a lot of energy and time (again) to (re)discover even the basic stuff of JDeveloper 11G. Read more »

Since Oracle has released the Oracle XE database, I have been using it with great pleasure. It made my life much easier when I want to investigate new features in Oracle software and I need a ’simple’ database for it. Until then I had to install the complete Oracle Enterprise Database and although this process of installing has become easier and easier over the years, it still takes up a lot of my resources on my laptop when running the database. Read more »

Sometimes you might want to get a quick impression of the memory usage of your Java application, or more specific, of your Oracle ADF application that is running on OC4J. There are a lot of tools (profilers) available to let you investigate this to a very detailed level. But most of the times these programs cost money and/or they are quite hard to work with (it takes some hours/ days to understand them). I am not saying these programs are not good, on the contrary, these programs will help you if you run into serious memory/threading issues with your software. But with this post I am aiming at the general Java developer that wishes to have a impression of the memory footprint of his application. Read more »

For one of my Oracle ADF projects I had to make use of a scheduler, so every night I could execute a batch job to create some large dump files that the user wanted to have. After a quick search I found there is a scheduling framework available in Oracle AS/ OC4J. Since we are running an Oracle ADF application at an Oracle AS that would be a logical choice. So I scanned the documentation and downloaded an example from Oracle. But after 2 hours of trying and going trough the old EJB2.0 stuff I already regretted this choice. Read more »

In my former post I already said that I don’t like the JDeveloper wizard for creating Web Services. Although it is working fine and very easy in JDeveloper, the result is a web service that is only able to run on a OC4J instance! You can read about it in this (old) thread.
I am now running into this because we have one WebService application created with the JDev wizard that is supposed to run on a new server. We would prefer to deploy the application on a lightweight Tomcat container instead of on an (expensive) Oracle AS instance , but like I said, then we run into the restrictions of the created web service.
So when you are starting to use web services today and your using JDeveloper think twice before using this wizard. I would rather go for a more portable implementation, like Spring WS or Axis2, unless you are certain your Web Services are always going to be deployed on a Oracle AS….

At one of my customers when we create a new release of our application (consisting of several WAR files) we have to supply one zip-file with all the WAR files in it. Also a zip file containing the compiled Jasper reports must be added to it. Although this can be done by hand, it is of course much nicer to make part of the automated build cycle of our Maven build! Read more »

For my current project I am migrating several projects from JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 to JDeveloper 10.1.3.3. After migrating my WebService project I deployed the application to my local Standalone OC4J instance and ran my test suite in SoapUI to test the migrated services. But to my surpise, all requests failed! They all gave the same response:

Although the web services were generated with JDeveloper's Web Service 'wizard' (one way to create a web service which I definitely don't like), it just could be that I had to recreate them with the newer JDev version.
Read more »

Like I posted before I am currently working on the transition from Ant to Maven to build and package our application. One of the tasks that is performed by Ant is compiling the Jasper Reports (from the .jrxml files to the .jasper ones). Of course there is a plugin for this task: the jasperreports-maven-plugin.
You can use the plugin by adding this to the project's pom.xml for the plugin: Read more »

For one of my current projects I am changing the build process for our application from Ant to Maven. I think this is becoming a quite common change nowadays (at least it's the third project in a rather short period I am involved with this change). And although Maven has its characteristics, I am still convinced it is a good thing to do.
Now at one point in our build process we had an Ant task to fill in a version number and build number into a property file of our application. This property file is used by the application at runtime to check if the version of the application matches the version of our database objects and the version is used in the generated SOAP response messages, which makes it easier when communicating with the customer in case of problems. Read more »