Welcome to Nick Aiva 's blog!

Back to classicism? Zurück zur Klassik. Ein neuer Blick auf das alte Griechenland

2013-03-16T21:29:00.001+02:00

Following the trend of discovering ancient Greece is a new exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. More details one can find here: http://kulturfonds-frm.de/projekte/zurueck-zur-klassik-ein-neuer-blick-auf-das-alte-griechenland One step further for those who have been taught some form of Greek at school, is visiting the available online museums of Greece and reading the literature about it:

Comments on Oracle SOA Infrastructure Implementation certification Handbook (1Z0-451)) by Kathiravan Udayakumar

2012-11-03T10:10:00.000+02:00

On the bright side, the text is of average quality written in American English. It is well organized, full of helpful images though of the older JDeveloper 11.1.1.5 version, with minimal if any tutorials or hands on practice. The author explains clearly some points, such as the different kinds of BPEL processes, synchronous, asynchronous, one way or bilateral, especially in the early

Processing BLOBs via the ImageServlet

2012-09-16T16:39:00.000+03:00

In this post an alternative code version to the traditional ImageServlet will be given, supplementing the one presented in the book named Oracle Fusion Developer Guide (p.409), by F.Nimphius and L.Munsinger and other official Oracle aces' and employees' blogs. This alternative version will use the EJB 3 way to get rid of the surplus database definition hard coded in the doGet() method. As an

Farewell to ...ANT?

2012-04-19T10:06:00.002+03:00

Following the articles by J.Stegeman and E.Biemond about building via ant scripts, external to JDeveloper, one can quickly find out that the former does show how to create a war file, out of mostly .xml files, but not an ear; and the latter misses on creating a war file out of the ViewController project! This article comes as supplement of both, showing how to jar the ejb3 model project, to

Obtaining the selected values of a selectManyChoice component

2012-03-20T13:55:00.001+02:00

Searching for selectManyChoice in the J2EE or fusion 11g developer guides does not return more than a series of drag and drop instructions. Again, the programmer is left at one's own devises, to improvise in order to find the solution. This is no exception to the rule that when in need or emergency, the only thing one is certain to find in a technical guide document is missing information! Even

EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0

2012-02-24T21:17:00.019+02:00

Apart from setting up a domain with the jrf libraries and data sources, presently the books and developer guides for ADF 11g development do not delve into deployment troubleshooting details, as the prior ADF 10g documentation did. Moreover, the older docs included deployment directions for Tomcat, JBoss, etc, which is currently missing from the 11g versions. This rough guide is a supplement to

Preview of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook, by Nick Haralabidis

2011-12-23T12:57:00.005+02:00

This new post is an exception to the rule of commenting on books I have read, or better studied even their code. Since the author is an old colleague and a friend of mine who has helped me in the past, I feel obliged to present his new book, which is currently in preparation. I am afraid I have not studied the whole text, the complete source code is though available; just read some parts of it.

Comments on Getting Started With Oracle BPM 11gR1 Suite, by Heidi Buelow, Manoj Das, Manas Deb, Prasen Palvankar, Meera Srinivasan

2011-11-18T13:15:00.007+02:00

On the bright side the text is well written in American English. It is well organized, full of helpful images of the older JDeveloper 11.1.1.2 version, tutorials and hands on practice. The setup instructions are accurate, detailed and the full source code is available online too. On the dark side, the text is full of marketing lecture, whole chapters of promoting the suite, using rather banal

Comments on Spring 3 in action, by Craig Walls

2011-09-15T13:29:00.004+03:00

On the bright side, the text is very well written without spelling errors. The author has organized each sequence of paragraphs so well, as neat as a chain having rings following one chapter after another. There are plenty of metaphors, analogies and examples from the daily life to help the reader grasp the Spring fundamentals. On the dark side, the book has no tutorial format; in other words

The Java SOA cookbook, by Eben Hewitt

2011-09-08T16:18:00.008+03:00

On the bright side the cook book is well written, in American English, with some spelling errors.The error page of the book presents at the moment only unconfirmed errata: http://oreilly.com/catalog/errataunconfirmed.csp?isbn=9780596520731 The book consists of a series of useful stand alone ...dishes; articles structured like this: specific problem, relevant solution, discussion of java code,

Providing the model layer for a ReSTful web service

2011-08-23T13:55:00.014+03:00

In this new article we shall discuss about implementing the model layer for a simple REST style web service, presented in a book authored by Eben Hewitt, called SOA Cookbook. In example 8-1 the author presents a plain servlet which draws hard coded values from a pojo called ProductCatalog. The XML values returned in the browser are the ones that are statically hard coded in the pojo's

Processing XML with JDeveloper 11g, by Deepak Vohra

2011-07-28T22:23:00.002+03:00

On the bright side, the text is well written, showing step by step instructions how to proceed with coding in each autonomous chapter. Each code snippet is explained line by line. Some basics of xpath and xquery are presented as well. What is surprising is an introduction to Berkeley DB XML in chapter 13: Storing XML in Oracle Berkeley DB XML. One can find more information on the internet

Vacation in Agioi Apostoloi, Kalamos

2011-06-30T13:19:00.019+03:00

In this new post a destination near to Athens will be briefly presented as an alternative to a daily excursion to the provinces of Attica; far away of the hectic life and the demonstrations of the busy city centre. A view of the sea from the Panorama area The place is called Kalamos, its port Ag.Apostoloi (the greek for Saint Apostles) and its distance from Athens centre is less than 50 Km

Comments on EJB 3.0 Database Persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, by Deepak Vohra

2011-06-10T16:40:00.007+03:00

On the bright side, the text is well written, providing a brief synopsis of the ejb 3, (not 3.01 which is the current) background and following a block by block explanation of each snippet of source code used. Apart from using the oracle db, the text presents an example of MySql db server and Eclipse too. The applications are usually tested and deployed to the Weblogic server version 10.1.x.x. g

Comments on Oracle Performance Survival Guide: A Systematic Approach to Database Optimization, by Guy Harrison

2011-05-30T12:08:00.001+03:00

On the bright side, this is one of the easiest review for me to write, since there are so many readers of the several editions of the book, that I shall mainly copy and paste some lines of reviews I agree to. Thus, I quote: " This book is an encyclopedic overview of all aspects of Oracle performance. Mr. Harrison takes a layered approach, starting at the top with application and data model

Comments on Oracle PL/SQL by Example (4th Edition) by Benjamin Rosenzweig, Elena Silvestrova Rakhimov

2011-05-27T12:06:00.006+03:00

On the bright side, the text is easy to follow and understand with only a few spelling errors. It follows a structured approach with worked out examples to teach the basics to the beginner, offering many clarifications and new methods also useful to the intermediate developer in the same time. For example, the method for timing the execution of pl sql code block for performance comparison is

Migrating an EJB 3 application to the new JDeveloper version

2011-05-17T17:01:00.010+03:00

This new post discusses several exceptions which have occurred because of migration to the current version of JDev. As far as I can remember the application was working well with the previous version. It seems that code rots! The first has to do with populating a primary key field with a sequence in an entity EJB: @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "

JDeveloper 11g: Setting up the newest java development kit

2011-04-11T12:44:00.013+03:00

This new post is about users who would like to update to the newest jdk, without having to waste time or hard disk space, by setting up from scratch JDeveloper 11g, each time a new jdk is available. Moreover, people who still use older versions of the database such as 9, may also find handy the jdbc connection localization properties hint which follows. If you 'd like to jump to it at once,

A handy way to tune one's SQL

2011-03-27T17:22:00.003+03:00

Recently, a french project manager working in a 5 year long European commission project in Brussels, contacted me and complained that their fully working code (in testing environment), using Oracle Text 10g, failed to meet the customer expectations. In their RAC production environment the application was unbearably slow. The project deadline is early June this year. Not an unknown situation,

Vacation in eastern Crete: visit the place of 'The Island' by Victoria Hislop!

2011-03-14T15:10:00.012+02:00

In case you are fed up with programming and reading several books or manuals, this could be something of a break. This is a brief description of travel experiences in eastern Crete, or Kreta for German speaking people, that is Malia, Ag.Nikolaos, Neapoli, and finally Chersonisos. You can see the map on your left hand side, the position of the island of Crete in the Greek territory. If you have

Setting up Oracle 11g Complex Event Processing (CEP) server

2011-02-08T16:05:00.004+02:00

The power of change in human life has long fascinated people. Babies are born, other people pass away, employees are made redundant, others get promoted. Businessmen, or whole states, go bankrupt, while others prosper. Even at war, a sudden change in weather can reverse the outcome of an initially easy to win, battle. The highly educated executives soon realized that staying informed about

Setting up Oracle service registry 11.1.1

2010-12-29T12:08:00.007+02:00

db options screen shot Last time I attended the Oracle day in Athens, Greece, I was impressed by a presales consultant stating that the real difficulties of SOA projects arise not in the first project, but in the second. That is when there is already a prebuilt foundation of services, on which one needs to base the new applications of the second project. This is the time to prove whether

Comments on WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Application with Oracle SOA Suite 11g, by Matjaz B. Juric, Marcel Krizevnik

2010-12-21T20:29:00.020+02:00

On the bright side, the text is written in American English, formal, well organized and neat, having the last sentence of each paragraph linking to the following one. Although the title sounds pretty familiar, the content of the book is actually about the newer version of BPEL 2.0. That's what makes this particular book unique, as the time of this writing. I quote: "Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2

SOA: Decoupling the database adapter service from the BPEL process

2010-11-22T15:40:00.008+02:00

BPEL process In this article a common source code reuse problem will be brought to the SOA level, using a small demonstration example based on the SOA 11g Handbook chapter 7 source code. Please bear in mind that in order to fully comprehend the content of this post, one needs as a prerequisite, knowledge of xsd and web services wsdl files. The JDeveloper 11g IDE will be used as in the book,

Comments on Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook, by Lucas Jellema

2010-10-27T18:43:00.029+03:00

On the bright side, the book offers a plethora of web resources, apart from the textbook itself. The online supplements are actually a way of previewing it by studying the material mentioned, before buying the book. The text is well organized with a few spelling errors. It delves deeply into XML code details, such as creating the xsd files and editing them. The historical review serves well as