Ghattu's Technology Blog

Old WLST tools

sghattu — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:56:54 +0000

As you might know after the acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle, Dev2Dev site has been discontinued. Unfortunately I don’t see a replacement for that, not only we lost some rich information, but a number of good tools.

In that context, in the last few months I had inquiries from some users asking where they could find the original WLST that works with WebLogic 8.1 and 7.0, also WLST Script Generator and Console extension that work with WebLogic 9.x.

Now you can get these from the new google code project wlst-modules. WLST Script Generator 9.x can be downloaded from here. The zip contains a ReadMe.html that should walk you through the configurations steps. And for those unfortunate souls who are still using WebLogic 7.0 and 8.1, WLST jar can be downloaded from here.

Speed Up Your WebSphere Server Start Up Time

sghattu — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:53:33 +0000

This is a good way to speed up your WebSphere Server start up time.

If your WebSphere Servers are taking too long to start up you can try enabling “Start components as needed” from the Admin Console as shown below.

I got a 20% decrease in time once I enabled this on my WebSphere Portal Server but your mileage may vary ..

Interview with Jython Lead

sghattu — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:45:13 +0000

Just came across this excellent interview with Frank Wierzbicki, who now leads the Jython Development.

Interview can be found here

Find a class in plethora of jars in a directory with JarScan

sghattu — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:31:48 +0000

Recently I had to find a jar which contains a java class I was looking for. Previously I was using other utilities like Jarfinder, FindClass etc, but wasn’t very happy.

I found JarScan, which actually works very well and the best part is it is free!. As an example, Under WebLogic 10.0 installation I wanted to find which jar contains the class javax.annotation.PostConstruct. With JarScan you will use,

java -jar /tmp/jarscan.jar -dir /opt/WLPlatform/10.2 -class javax.annotation.PostConstruct

This will return something like,

===============================================
Found: javax.annotation.PostConstruct
Class: javax.annotation.PostConstruct
Package: javax.annotation
Library Name: javax.annotation_1.0.jar
Library Path: /opt/WLPlatform/10.2/modules/javax.annotation_1.0.jar
===============================================

No WLST cachedir with python.cachedir.skip

sghattu — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:11:21 +0000

In one of my previous post I have talked about python.cachedir and how it may cause some errors during WLST/Jython initialization.
With WebLogic 11g Oracle has upgraded the Jython Version from 2.1 to 2.2 (see my post here), which opens up yet another way of getting rid of these errors. In fact you can get rid of the cachedir entirely by starting WLST with -Dpython.cachedir.skip=true, this will instruct Jython not to create the CacheDir.
I haven’t done extensive testing with this option but so far I haven’t seen any issues by not creating this cachedir.

Tcat Server from Mulesoft

sghattu — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:02:46 +0000

Mulesoft is joining the Application Server party with Tcat (beased on Tomcat). Read here for more information.

TIBCO acquires DataSynapse

sghattu — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:41:47 +0000

TIBCO joining the Cloud Band wagon by acquiring DataSynapse.

http://www.tibco.com/company/news/releases/2009/press985.jsp

Jython 2.2 in WebLogic 11g

sghattu — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:27:24 +0000

I just started playing around with WebLogic Server 11g and realised that Oracle has upgraded Jython from 2.1 to 2.2, very nice!

For a brief description on what’s new with Jython 2.2 see my old post here.

E:\WebLogic11g\Oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\common\bin>java org.python.util.jython
Jython 2.2.1 on java1.6.0_05
>>>

Monitoring your WebLogic SSL Certificates is important

sghattu — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:45:25 +0000

I was talking to my friend yesterday and he mentioned that he was up all night due to an outage that happened to the WebLogic environments he manages, when asked why?

Expired SSL Certificates!!!My initial reaction: You don’t have Monitoring? Hmm well, that led me to think, realistically how many environments have cert expiry monitoring? I haven’t seen any environments that have automated monitors that check the WebLogic Certificates. One of the reason why this may not have affected you is one, you are not using SSL and two, the certs you obtained have a life span of more than 10 years.

In our WebLogic environments we do not have monitoring specifically on the Cert’s, but we do have some monitoring that does warn us in-case our Certs are about to expire. The way it works is, during boot time WebLogic Server logs a message if the certs configured are about to expire in the next 30 days. This message is logged with severity “Notice”. Our monitoring application listens on the Log BroadCaster (I will leave the details for another blog post), this listener will send an alert/EMail whenever a message is logged with severity “Notice”. The alert will contain the details of what is logged, in case of a Certificate that is about to expire it will contain the Date when it is going to expire and other Certificate details.

Please note, there is one problem to the above approach, i.e. we are relying on WebLogic Server to be started or restarted atleast once within this 30 days timeframe that your Certificate may expire. If not, you will never recieve the notification.

In one of my subsequent post I will write about an alternate simple approach to monitor your WebLogic Certificates.

VMWare to acquire Spring Source

sghattu — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:48:31 +0000

This is a pretty interesting move by VMWare. Does this mean VMWare is trying to get into Java App Server space and become the new Under-dog? Only time will tell.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=22526