Web Services on Drugs

I have a new tools to share with you : JD GUI http://java.decompiler.free.fr/?q=jdgui It's one of the must-have if you need to figure out why things are not working the way you expect them to work... After two days searching for a NPE, which was not reported, I wished I would not have wait that long before to get down to the rubber. Hoping I'll learn from my mistakes. Remember the bad smell: try { } catch { return null; } My $0.02 for today.

Always been confused between 13th and 30th, when it goes to English pronunciation - go figure. There has been a lot going on, and it may explain why my blog has been so quiet lately. Here are some fun facts and though about Web square (a.k.a 2.0): Thanks to a spammer, I came across an old post of mine where I was happy to see my ranking in the oc4j WS forum so high. Since, I have been moving to other area of development, and only reply to forum post using feedly reader, when I kind of see obvious error I can help with. I used to have a gold medal - now I am a newbie again. Did I lost my mojo? My new center of interest goes around ADF nowadays, and there is a new blog to add to your list - ADF Garage . On the fun part, I am wondering if it would make sense to put multiple mobile version of web sites, side by side in a single page, instead of using the full blown version, even when you are on a wide-screen computer, attached to a fast network. Try facebook and twitter mobile editions...

Maybe this would be better as a question on twitter, as I may not get to many comment here on my web 1.5 journal. Is it OK to write code I cannot test and assumes that by the time I am done writing the features I have in mind, the environment to test it would be available, or should I start setting up the environment first, and get the hello world application up and running with the monitoring and clean log files, so that I can then go ahead with small incremental cycles which are all providing features I can test as I go? On another topic, when can you consider that a forum or forum category is to be considered dead? a) 0 post in a day b) 0 post in a week ? c) 0 post in a month?

No comment, I have been looking forward to my new toys for days now, and the news is out on April first ...

Check this first:

Today, I have been stuck at home, and it was a good opportunity for me to upgrade my current 10g release of JDeveloper to the latest and greatest, on my iMac. So far so good, but remember the basics: read the releases notes, and Google for someone else, with past experience on your issue at hand. 1) setup JDK 1.6 / for me it was already part of the 'OS', just needed to change the default JDK - Applications > Utils > Java > Admin Java, DRAG the 1.6 Version at the top in the list 2) tweak JDK so that the JDev installer does find home as a valid one - It's all documented in the readme (watch for the missing /). 3) Next, you can setup your own .app file to have a nice icon to start from (there is more than just an icon if you are really looking into it). Now, that I have my first "Hello Eric" service up on WLS, I can start to look at the next steps: setup SVN and get going with the new discovery process. By the time I am done here, America will have a new p...

For some time, I have been away from my blog, and sent most of my spare time on facebook, trying to figure out why I should use it. did not find the answer yet ... but I am sure there is some. otherwise, why would everyone been their, and acept my request to connect with them in the first place? I have a new comic strip to share with you: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cautionary.png If you are still in WS-Land, you may find useful information from Gerard on his blog . Until next time.

If you are into wine, you may like this wen site: http://tv.winelibrary.com/ . Gary Vaynerchuk is fun to watch, on his TV show. I am now waiting for Loic Le Meur to have his version of wine testing on Seemic , so that Robert Scoble knows what to buy, next time he looks for a good bottle. But, why do we need to through Facebook or FriendConnect in the mix?

As father day is coming around the conner, here is some could stuff I'll love to have: the virtual goggles: http://www.psfk.com/2008/06/virtual-googles-for-your-future-robotic-assistant.html the BAD Mini Club: http://jalopnik.com/390392/a-bad-bad-mini-clubman-for-a-good-cause

As you are getting up to speed with the command line option you get with the Oracle Web Service stack, you may ran into the following error message (hopefully, you will be able to google this post) : " method java.util.Collections.emptyList with signature ()Ljava.util.List; was not found. " As the string is directly coming back from the java.lang.NoSuchMethodError exception, there is little to be done about it, other that checking that you have pre-requist before to get started. A better error message would have been " JAVA 5 or higher required ". If you ran into this issue, the simplest test to perform is to check the version of the JDK you are getting in your environment ( $ java -version will do it ). I guess it's why I am using the ant task instead of the command line option, those days... Hope it save some of you some time some day.

As I am spending more and more time with BPEL and more complex deployment layout, trapping the SOAP messages going across multiple nodes was becoming harder, until I got introduced to one of the new features from JDeveloper. With the 11g TP3, available from OTN ( see announcement ), there is a new feature that makes working with the HTTP Analyzer tool even better; the Rules and Filters . You can define rules and associate with your HTTP listner. Back in 2006 , I was explaining how to navigate from message to message with the blue arrows. With this release, you have a new TAB - named correlation - that groups message by logical unit; the grouping is done with the WS-Addressing MessageID (see Figure 1). Let starts by getting the setup right. For that, you will need to do the following (the exact step may varied, based on you specific configuration setup): Find the IP address (or hostname) of the system where you run JDeveloper, and make sure that this system can be access from the locat...

Happy Hour or special Boost - see http://www.aldenteblog.com/2008/03/happy-hour-drin.html And for Monday, we will be back to the healthy version...

If you have ~one hour to spare in from of your computer, or at the Gym with the podcast version, this presentation from Dave Chappell is worth your time. I love the introduction of BPEL Dehydration Example which starts with a sip of water ;-) Getting back to the big picture, when you are down to the rubber, trying to make versioning works with Web Services is not a bad idea.

You don't need to with Web 2.0 to build a Web Application that is usable and fast. Remember how Google was (and still his on the search part). If you are using the Oracle Middle Ware, I'll recommend the peek console, for the Oscar nomination - http://localhost:8988/peek with the latest Tech Preview III. Special Kudos for the developer-architect-QA guys (maybe they are the same after all). From Random pics My Youtube watch for today: Chem-Culture

I have been so used to the simple way to overwrite the URL endpoint you get from the WSDL location with the Oracle's JAX-RPC client proxy, that I have to remember it's that easy on JAX-WS based proxy: URL endpointUrl; ((BindingProvider)port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY, endpointUrl.toExternalForm()); Some reading and video to watch, while your are waiting for your commit,merge, or other integration task to complete: Linus Torvalds on GIT and SCM . My recent YouTube watch: Head tracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw Décompte des manifestants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFYGxSfVoyU Blue-ray: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiI-z87Hmlk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=friS4OOcdgQ Mergers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOlznuyPOeM

With the latest technology preview of JDeveloper, you have to choose between two flavors. Kind of like Strawberry vs. Vanilla. Which one should I pick. After all it's a question of taste. Personally, I pick JAX-RPC for the following reasons: - It's more stable as it was already part of 10.1.3 release. - There is a nice helper to set endpoint address (and other little things). - It does not query for the WSDL every time you instantiate a new object, which is mainly adding HTTP requests I do not want to see in the HTTP Analyzer window. - Most of the time, I can work around schema issues with the no-data-binding options. You just need to learn how to leverage this class: oracle.webservices.SOAPUtil and the 'toSOAPElement()' method. If you are looking into new features, like addressing, ws-rm or any policy-based feature, you should look at JAX-WS. It's the future. For those who are missing setEndpoint(), the equivalent in JAX-WS will look like this: URL endpointUrl; ......

Do you need dual screen or a bigger screen? For a long time, I have been thinking that having dual screen setup was more productive than having a single screen, then I start to look at some other developers having a single large 24" screen with many xterm. I am getting tired to see pop-up showing up in the middle of the virtual screen that is the result of two screens. I know, the correct answer is to have 3 screens. Then, the small pop-up will be centered in the middle of the virtual space as well as the physical display. Soon, I'm hoping to get a new 24" iMac for my home operations. Yes, I still believe in Santa... My YouTube pick for today (in memory of WebVan): http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=5TYobcseYfE http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o Until next time...

I have been busy recently, and this is how it translate on my blog. Not much was happening there... I use to post about Web Services, and Vista until that day, where I got a system upgrade. It all started nicely with a nice screen and a simple prompt. The only problem was that it took me to much time before to get to that screen. (I even had the time to turn on the camera on my "Mobile5" device to take the two shoots. That was it. Bye bye vista / Welcome to Entreprise Linux 5. Maybe, it was made to happen, when I picked this background for my laptop. To be fair, I have to said that I got my first 'screen of death' on my iMac during the same periode of time... With all that, I wish you a good day. Next time, I may be back with useful stuff.

With Technology Preview II, you can now undeploy your J2EE applications from within JDeveloper - no need to get back to the command line or to write ant task to do this. From the 'view' menu, select the 'Application Server Navigator' Navigate to Application Servers -> IDE Connections -> [AppServerConnection] -> standalone -> Applications Select your application node and using the context menu, pick the 'undeploy' command. It's that simple: [AppServerConnection] has to be replaced with the name of the name you gave to your connection.

If you are trying to stay on top of the latest technologies in the Java land, you can get your hands on the latest preview version of JDeveloper today: Oracle JDeveloper 11g Technical Preview 2 is available here More on this, once I get a chance to install the Mac OS X version.