OraNA :: General

Apache James on IBM AIX

Martien van den Akker — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:45:04 PST

Apache James is a very nice e-mail server to be used in a development or test environment, where you need to integrate with an email system. I mentioned it in an earlier post. It supports smtp, pop, nntp (news) and imap.
It's installation is as simple as can be: just unzip the tool, set your JAVA_HOME environment variable and run the appropriate run.sh or run.bat script (given your OS being either Unix/Linux or Windows). The only thing you need besides the zip is a Java Runtime Environment that is at least of version 1.4.2.

For most systems this is all you have to do to get it running. But I found that on IBM AIX (5.x) it is a little less obvious. Getting it running is not an issue, but as soon as you want to add a user, you'll run into the error:

Exception: Security error: java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: SHA MessageDigest not available

And after that the telnet connection is closed.
It turns out that the security-provider packages are not registered properly. To get it right there are two things to do.

Make sure that the JAVA_HOME is pointing to the jre folder in the root folder of the java-installment on your system. So like: /usr/java5_64/jre instead of /usr/java5_64. Also make sure that there is a lib/ext folder (/usr/java5_64/jre/lib/ext) that contains a <make>jceprovider.jar, eg. sunjce_provider.jar or ibmjceprovider.jar.
Change <james-home>/bin/phoenix.sh to register the extensions:

Find the line:

JVM_EXT_DIRS="$PHOENIX_HOME/lib:$PHOENIX_HOME/tools/lib"

Change it to:

JVM_EXT_DIRS="$PHOENIX_HOME/lib:$JAVA_HOME/lib/ext:$PHOENIX_HOME/tools/lib"

Now james can be started using the run.sh/run.bat scripts and using the telnet console you should be able to succesfully add users.

It might be that on your system, the system administrators block port 25(smtp) and 110 (pop). That would prevent james to startup the smtp and pop services.
In the <james-home>/apps/james/SAR-INF/ there is a config.xml file. In that file you can find a line:

<pop3server enabled="true">

There you can choose to disable pop by changing the enabled attribute. But benaath that line there is a port element. You could change that instead to for example 8110. That would enable pop-support on the 8110 port. You should instruct your client to use that port off course.
The same counts for smtp-support. That can be found at:

<smtpserver enabled="true">

For smtp you could choose to set the port to 8025.

There should be a word for this (Blog/Twitter edition) part 2

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:30:49 PST

Back in October (see “there should be a word for this” part 1) I listed a few concepts (related to twitter and/or blogging) for which new words were needed. Since it’s such a rich field, I barely scratched the surface. Here is the second installment.

#9 The temptation to repeat a brilliant tweet of yours that went unnoticed when you expected a RT storm in response (maybe it was a bad time of the day when everyone was offline? maybe it fell in a twitter mini-outage?)

#10 The new pair of eyes you get the second after you post a tweet.

#11 The act of sharing (e.g. via delicious…) or RTing a URL to an article you haven’t actually read (but you think it makes you look smart). For example, I’d love to give a test to everyone who RTed this entry.

#12 The shock of seeing a delivery error when DMing someone you were positive was following you (this is related to definition #1 from part 1, so Shlomo’s followimp could apply).

#13 The minimum number of people to follow on twitter, of blog feeds to subscribe to and of Facebook friends to have such that you can cycles through all three continuous and never run out of new content. In the TV world, the equivalent would be the minimum number of cable channels needed to cycle through them and never feel like you’ve established that there is nothing worth watching.

#14 The awful feeling when the twitter/blog/facebook cycle from #13 breaks on a Friday night because others have a life.

#15 When a twitter conversation has reached a dead-end because of the short form. When the response you get makes you wonder what the other person understood from your last tweet. But forcing a clarification would take a half-dozen tweets at least and risk turning you into a twoll (another coinage for the twitter era, by Andi Mann).

#16 The compression rate of a sentence: how hard it is to further compress it (e.g. in order to squeeze in an RT comment), whether all the easy shortcuts have been taken already.

Please submit your candidate terms for these definitions.

New Release APEX Paper through Contractors Network

RebeccaBragg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:39:37 PST

Hi Everyone,

I am pleased to announce the next release in our extensive Oracle related White Paper Library of:

Oracle Application Express The Fast Way to Extend to Oracle E-Business Suite

Authored by Rod West

The Purpose of Rod’s Paper:

This article describes how an APEX application can be integrated with the E-Business Suite 11i and R12. There are many tools that Applications developers can use to extend E-Business Suite but often developers are unaware that APEX can be closely integrated with the E-Business Suite. APEX forms and reports can be added to E-Business Suite menus and spreadsheet data can be uploaded into the E-Business Suite application.

Please feel free to drop by the White Paper library to request your copy of the White Paper today.

Thanks Rod for putting together this article.

Hotsos 2010 – About swag, the Oscars and other stuff

Marco Gralike — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:21:52 PST

Its Sunday and its raining outside. The nice weather on Saturday (approx. sunny / 20 degrees Celsius) has gone. After a decent flight on Friday where I actually made it to switch in Houston from the international Continental flight, going through customs and pick the next one, a domestic Continental Express flight, within the boundaries [...]

EBS, Blogs of Note, SOA, Oracle Support, Business and IT, APEX, ADF, Hyperion

Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:44:56 PST

EBS

At the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog this week:

EBS 12 Certified with 11gR2 DB 11.2.0.1 on HP-UX Itanium

E-Business Suite Certified on 11gR2 11.2.0.1 on IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit)

EBS 11i Applications Desktop Integrator (ADI) Certified on 11gR2 Database

Oracle E-Business Suite Platform Smörgåsbord

Blogs of Note

Kevin Closson singles out the Oracle-Base blog as one of his favorites, and Kevin's blog is one of my favorites, so I'm passing it along. This is a real technical treasure trove. Consider these samples:

Oracle 10g Release 5 Grid Control Installation On Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL 4.8 64-bit)

Oracle ASM Cluster File Systems (ACFS) in Oracle Database 11g Release 2

SOA

Over at the Inside scoop on Oracle SOA Suite, BPM and EDA blog we have a link to a good technical article: Setting Web Service and JCA Adapter Endpoints Dynamically in Oracle SOA Suite

At the same blog we find the start of a series on advanced fault handling.

Oracle Support

Chris Warticki has moved his postings to Oracle Communities, which makes getting a login there worthwhile by itself. But he is still posting links to his postings at his blog. This one is entitled: Support Synchronization - Best Practices .

Business and IT

Over at the Tech Demo Guy blog there's a good quick set of 5 Rules for Selling Technology to Business Audiences. Worth a read.

APEX

Anton Nielsen brings us a technical hint at this blog: APEX Refresh Classic Report Region AJAX style.

ADF

Keeping the users out of trouble by Integration in Oracle ADF with ADF Task Flows and Dynamic Regions Pending Changes at the Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog.

Hyperion

As Glenn Schwartzberg's Essbase Blog tells us, Kaleidescope is already on the horizon and closing fast on our position. Time to figure out what you want to attend. As I always found at technical conferences, there's always too much interesting stuff going on. There's only one solution, but cloning technology and phase-shifting to attend two events at once are still a ways off. The next best thing is reading up on the schedule in advance and make up your mind.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

*Upgrade

Angela Golla — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:46:42 PST

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Upgrade to 11g Performance Best Practices

Uday Moogala has written a great whitepaper on best practices of upgrading to 11g for E-Business Suite customers. It can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/doc/11g-upgrade-performance-best-practices.pdf

Users need to fight back against Oracle’s third-party support clamp down

Shayna Garlick — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:07:23 PST

Using a third-party maintenance and support vendor can be a smart decision for some Oracle customers given those customers can expect better service, a significant reduction in fees and more flexible maintenance policies.

Naturally, Oracle hates this.

In January the software giant sued third-party support provider Rimini Street for intellectual property theft, claiming that the company and CEO Seth Ravin are responsible for “massive theft of Oracle’s software and related support materials.” It also accused Rimini Street of alleged copyright infringement, fraud, breach of contract and unfair competition.

Two years earlier, Oracle made TomorrowNow the target of a similar lawsuit, in which the software giant made numerous allegations - including committing “corporate theft on a grand scale” and stealing software products — against the SAP-owned third-party support provider, some of which SAP admitted to.

But as Oracle turns against third-party maintenance providers, more and more users are turning toward them. In a new report from Altimeter Group analyst Ray Wang, interest in third-party maintenance services are shown to have increased by 113.8% from Q3 2009 to Q1 2010.

So what’s causing such a surge?

According to Wang, survey results show that high costs (Oracle charges 22% annual fees) and reduced budgets are the biggest culprits, but other contributing factors include customers disliking the vendor, poor service and feeling they are not getting enough value for their money. Also, 30% of respondents reported delivering their own support, having no need to pay for outside maintenance.

In Oracle‘s defense, it has good reason to be concerned with protecting its intellectual property. Wang’s survey showed that the vendor had the highest percentage (88.1%) of users who expressed interest in seeking third-party support with SAP coming in second at 76.2%.

But how will Oracle’s legal battles with third-party providers affect not only the companies they put under fire, but their own customers?

In his article “ERP Support: How far will Oracle go to protect the golden egg?” Thomas Wailgum wonders if continued litigation by Oracle will discourage competition, giving customers little choice but to stick with Oracle for support at a time when, as Wang points out, they already have few options.

If Oracle has reasons other than simply protecting its $3 billion in profits from maintenance and support to file lawsuits and providers are actually breaking laws, Oracle should protect its rights. But customers have rights as well, and third-party enterprise support is entirely legal.

Wang is encouraging users to band together and take action. ”Users and user groups must vigorously defend their positions in contracts and legal action or lose this right. Failure will result in a continued software maintenance monopoly. Success will ensure market competition and renewed innovation.” he writes.

Do you use third-party support? Why or why not? Do you feel like you have enough third-party maintenance options? Do you think Oracle has gone too far in going against providers of third-party support? If you have any answers or opinions to these questions we would like to hear from you.

Oracle BPM Studio and Snow Leopard

Arjaan Peree — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:25:24 PST

Business process management (BPM) is getting more momentum. The BPMN 2.0 specification is getting final and has a few new nice features, for example a model standard so that models are interchangeable between tools. Another new feature is easier event implementation, meaning that it will be easier to run a BPMN process. This week I started [...]

Presentations: Square One. Again.

GretchenA — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:30:00 PST

The 13 year-old arrived in the living room last Sunday with a wild look in his eyes.

"Mom, I have to do a presentation on my Math Problem of the Week. Can you teach me Powerpoint?"

[NB: Once upon a time, I was, in fact, paid to teach people how to give presentations. So there's some precedent to the request.]

So we sat down at the table, fired up the computer, and I asked him what he wanted to present. In order, his answers were:

1. I need to show all of the content from my math assignment, because that's what the teacher is looking for.

2. I need to do something that will keep people awake, because this could be boring.

3. I want to do some cool transitions - do you have any with flames?

He's only 13, and already he's been taught that presentations should reflect all of your content, and creativity is limited to how you get from point to point. On the plus side, the idea of "keeping people awake" had some merit - although I think it had more to do with him not liking math, than thinking about presentations.

45 minutes later, he had 19 slides - all text, with 1 thought per slide. As we were editing for font alignment, I decided to try again - "How are you going to keep people awake?" We brainstormed, and he loved the idea of framing the problem around creating a new Olympic sport. All the math calculations could be brought in as "supporting material" for presenting to the IOC on safety standards. We started changing graphics, adding new images, and talking about the difference between the Story, and the Slide Content. We finished by finalizing the math components, and agreed to practice the story on Monday.

Monday night. 8pm. "Mom, I know we had a good idea, but I watched the smartest person in class give her presentation today. She had all of her information on the slides, and just read them. So I'm going to do that, too."

Sadly, it'll be a while before the IOC gets to learn about para-skiing ... however, I now know where to find animated slide transitions. Maybe I'll throw in some flames the next time I'm low on inspiration!

[Image from Chris and Laura Pawluk. Used under CC]

Two versions of a protocol is one too many

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:47:34 PST

There is always a temptation, when facing a hard design decision in the process of creating an interface or a protocol, to produce two (or more) versions. It’s sometimes a good idea, as a way to explore where each one takes you so you can make a more informed choice. But we know how this invariably ends up. Documents get published that arguably should not. It’s even harder in a standard working group, where someone was asked (or at least encouraged) by the group to create each of the alternative specifications. Canning one is at best socially awkward (despite the appearances, not everyone in standards is a psychopath or a sadist) and often politically impossible.

And yet, it has to be done. Compare the alternatives, then pick one and commit. Don’t confuse being accommodating with being weak.

The typical example these days is of course SOAP versus REST: the temptation is to support both rather than make a choice. This applies to standards and to proprietary interfaces. When a standard does this, it hurts rather than promote interoperability. Vendors have a bit more of an excuse when they offer a choice (“the customer is always right”) but in reality it forces customers to play Russian roulette whether they want it or not. Because one of the alternatives will eventually be left behind (either discarded or maintained but not improved). If you balance the small immediate customer benefit of using the interface style they are most used to with the risk of redoing the integration down the road, the value proposition of offering several options crumbles.

[Pedantic disclaimer: I use the term "REST" in this post the way it is often (incorrectly) used, to mean pretty much anything that uses HTTP without a SOAP wrapper. The technical issues are a topic for other posts.]

CMDBf

CMDBf v1 is a DMTF standard. It is a SOAP-based protocol. For v2, it has been suggested that there should a REST version. I don’t know what the CMDBf group (in which I participate) will end up doing but I’ve made my position clear: I could go either way (remain with SOAP or dump it) but I do not want to have two versions of the protocol (one SOAP one REST). If we think we’re better off with a REST version, then let’s make v2 REST-only. Supporting both mechanisms in v2 would be stupid. They would address the same use cases and only serve to provide political ass-coverage. There is no functional need for both. The argument that we need to keep supporting SOAP for the benefit of those who implemented v1 doesn’t fly. As an implementer, nobody is saying that you need to turn off your v1 services the second you launch the v2 version.

DMTF Cloud

Between the specifications submitted directly to DMTF, the specifications developed by DMTF “partner” organizations and the existing DMTF protocols, the DMTF Cloud effort is presented with a mix of SOAP, RESTful and XML-RPC-over-HTTP options. In the process of deciding what to create or adopt I am sure that the temptation will be high to take the easy route of supporting several versions to placate everyone. But such a “consensus” would be achieved on the back of the implementers so I very much hope it won’t be the case.

When it is appropriate

There are cases where supporting alternatives options is worth the cost. But it typically happens when they serve very different use cases. Think of SAX versus DOM, which have clearly differentiated sweetspots. In the Cloud world, Amazon S3 gives us interesting examples of both justified and extraneous alternatives. The extraneous one is the choice between REST and SOAP for the S3 API. I often praise AWS for its innovation and pragmatism, but this is an example of something that only looks pragmatic. On the other hand, the AWS import/export mechanism is a useful alternative. It allows you to physically ship a device with a few terabytes of data to Amazon. This is technically an alternative to the S3 programmatic interface, but one with obviously differentiated use cases. I recommend you reserve the use of “alternative APIs” for such scenarios.

If it didn’t work for Tiger Woods, it won’t work for your Cloud API either. Learn to commit.

[CLARIFICATION: based on some of the early Twitter feedback on this entry, I want to clarify that it's alternative versions that I am against, not successive versions (i.e. an evolution of the interface over time). How to manage successive versions properly is a whole other debate.]

Part of the Puzzle: Oracle XMLDB NFS Functionality

Marco Gralike — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:38:17 PST

This story is long overdue and no its NOT about the Oracle Database 11g Database File System (DBFS). Its about an “undocumented” NFS functionality that, maybe someday, will be serviced by the XMLDB XDB Protocol Adapter. This post is “long overdue” because the actual attempts to try to figure it out were done during the [...]

Another reason to expect number-crunching and big-data management to converge

Curt Monash — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:03:12 PST

Dan Olds argues that Oracle is likely to pursue commercially-substantive high performance computing (HPC), emphasis mine:

I just don’t see Oracle abandoning HPC entirely. I think it may call it by some other name or describe it differently, but it will be in the high throughput computing business for the foreseeable future.

There are some interesting angles for it to pursue. Many of its best commercial customers have sizeable HPC or HPC-like workloads that Oracle can now (with the addition of Sun) compete for. I don’t see it passing up those opportunities.

Oracle can also look to specialize on certain subsets of the market and provide more of a solution rather than piece parts. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of it offering an Exadata-like system that is optimized for, say, seismic or financial services. In fact, Exadata as it stands today is a decent fit for financial service analytic workloads.

HPC can be a profitable business and, in a lot of organizations, it’s growing faster than traditional business processing. From Oracle’s perspective, what’s not to like?

Now, except for the Exadata-in-financial-services comment, that’s not directly an argument for the convergence of number crunching and data management. However, I think Netezza and Aster Data are showing the way for that convergence. So, up to a point, is the scientific-research community. And of course the Hadoop guys think they have the best way to that convergent future.

But if Dan Olds is right that the best technologies for Oracle to pursue HPC and big-data processing with aren’t all that far apart, then the chances that Oracle will indeed pursue their convergence are pretty high. And that would amount to critical mass for the trend.

Subversion – branching, merging and reintegration

Aino Andriessen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:27:41 PST

Subversion is a great source control system. One of the great features is it’s branching and merging support. Although many developers avoid it, branching is very powerful and useful and should not be something to be afraid off but something to be familiar with. And for the stable and controlled development is it almost a [...]

Complex Event Processing – Java Magazine – Sources & References

Lucas Jellema — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:41:32 PST

This article contains the resources for an article on Complex Event Processing (using Oracle CEP) that is published in the March 2010 issue of the Dutch Java Magazine. This article describes the interaction between CEP and Java Applications, using examples of temperature sensors that are monitored (aggregating their readings and looking out for any broken [...]

Hyperion, SQL and APEX, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, SOA, OBIEE

Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:43:32 PST

Hyperion

Just came across a Hyperion blog I hadn't seen before, one run by Johnson & Associates Consulting called the Hyperion Consultant Blog. Let me know what you think of it.

SQL and APEX

A posting over at John's Blog touches the tip of the veritable iceberg of the potential impact of views on performance. Through a simple example he shows how you can end up with a reduntant sort operation from using a view. But there can be lots of other impacts, and I've seen views of such intricacy and inefficiency that they've turned out to be the cause of major performance problems. Often it starts out as: well, we just need a view to simplify coding this report. Then over the months and years it is forgotten that the view was created for a specific report and it starts to be used as if it were a table, then there are modifications, then someone creates a view that uses the view as an element, and from there it's all downhill in a handbasket.

So views are a great way to help out developers, but don't let them take on a life of their own or they can become a real problem.

On APEX, have you been hearing the hoopla about Application Express for a long time and meaning to 'get around to that'? Well, have a look at this site and you can set up an account and mess around in your very own workspace to get familiar with APEX. I think you will find it an elegant and useful product for fast development (and a lot of more complex tasks).

One more item in the wonderful world of APEX this week: How to Avoid Bot Spammers in APEXover at Martin Giffy D'Souza's APEX blog.

Lies, Statistics and Their Ilk

In a posting entitled Autotrace Lies Too! Kerry Osborne digs in to some of the behavior of autotrace and the intricacies of how close an explain plan is to what the optimizer really ends up doing. He points back in the posting to an excellent posting from Tom Kyte on the same subject.

SOA

Looking for a trimmed down summary of SOA 11g: Cluster installation? Well, there's the link over at the SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus. The blog title is almost as long as the process.

OBIEE

Working with OBIEE? You should definitely take a look at the Oracle Business Intelligence obiee 101 blog. Lots of nice little technical how-to's. Definitely something to add to your RSS feeds. Example: OBIEE Popup Box.

Larry’s suddenly Sunny disposition

Ed Scannell — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:20:32 PST

Speaking at an event over the weekend celebrating his triumphant return with The America’s Cup in hand, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison said he expects his other prize - Sun Microsystems - to be profitable “right away”.

This is not exactly breaking news. Just last month at the combined company’s debut, Chairman Larry said he expected to revive Sun’s sagging fortunes, pulling the company back into the black even by the end of this month. At that event he said he expected to make about $1.5 billion in operating profit from Sun’s portfolio after owning the company for a full year and that he expected to take that number much higher over the next few years.

This sort of unbridled optimism gives one pause however. From early September, when the European Commission (EC) began its investigation of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, until late December we heard a steady rant from Mr. Ellison about how that investigation was slowly strangling Sun’s chances for survival.

For instance, in late September speaking at a dinner sponsored by The Churchill Club, the chairman said the investigation was significantly contributing to Sun losing some $100 million a month. This statement came in the heels of Sun having reported a quarterly loss of $147 million.

In that talk the good chairman said the longer the EC’s approval process takes “the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody. We want to get this (acquisition) done to save as many jobs as we can.”

Also contributing to Sun’s cloudy outlook around that time were multiple analyst reports surfacing indicating Sun was losing huge chunks of market share to archrivals IBM and HP in server hardware. A major contributor, of course, was the lingering uncertainty of Sun’s fate thanks to the EC’s investigation, which prompted Sun users to halt purchasing decisions or jump ship.

But with yesterday’s comments, all the angst Larry had over the EC’s four-month long investigation sun setting Sun’s future seems to have dissipated rather quickly. Now he is talking boldly about hiring a couple of thousand new employees to bolster Sun’s products instead of laying them off (although he did indicate there could be up to 1,000 employees let go), and exhibiting confidence about how the Oracle-Sun developed Exadata 2 super server, and the various stack computing strategies built around it, will soon outgun any offerings from IBM and HP.

So was Larry crying wolf to the EC about its investigation crippling Sun, or is his bold optimism about Sun’s chance simply masking the tough task he has ahead of him to make this deal succeed over the short term? It is hard to say, it may be a little of both. But given his claim he will make Sun profitable by the end of the month, it won’t take long to find out.

If you are concerned about Larry giving up his day job to spend more time plotting his defense of The America’s Cup, don’t be. The 65-year-old chairman says is not ready for retirement indicating he will continue to pursue software and sailing with an equal amount of vigor.

“I love Oracle and I love sailing, and I think I can do both,” he said.

Automatic testing Oracle Service Bus using Hudson, maven and SoapUI

Robbrecht van Amerongen — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:53:07 PST

A lot of current projects are implementing some sort of service based architecture. Testing in this architecture becomes more complex. When implementing an OSB project with Scrum you test-automation is imperative. Scrum will require more frequent testing of your system. This is only feasible (in time and money) when you automate as much as possible. Using [...]

Outages in a paperless office

JohnMcGhee — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:04:10 PST

No matter how wonderfully efficient and user-friendly an Oracle application might be its reputation and reliability can be needlessly dented by a single prolonged network outage, separating users from the information they need to do their jobs.

One of these outages occurred this morning in the organisation where I am currently contracting, damaging user confidence in the local Oracle application. Persuading users that the problem is not the fault of the application doesn’t placate them much because the main issue is that all their key information is now on computers – because we told them to put it there, thus placing them at the mercy of network and electrical outages.

Throughout various paperless office initiatives over the years I have continued to encourage users to print off limited key information – subject to confidentiality and data protection rules - if they consider it essential to their job, so they have a paper copy in case of computer unavailability. It must be stressed that data should always be electronically stored and updated on the computer application to maintain accuracy and to comply with integrated working practices but in most cases there is nothing wrong in downloading an occasional paper copy for convenience, portability and contingency purposes. Typical examples are phone lists, presentation notes and other documents needed for meetings or conferences which cannot be cancelled just because of a computer or network glitch. Obviously, any amendments and updates subsequently deemed necessary must be made on the computer application as this must always be the ‘master’ copy.

It seems a shame that the well-intentioned idea of a paperless office is marred by the misconception that computer applications are installed merely to eliminate paper rather than to manage data more efficiently, with significant reduction in paper being an added bonus. It isn’t a coincidence that most application screens have a ‘Print’ button or link so that the user has the option to print if they consider it necessary.

Square peg, REST hole

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:46:46 PST

For all its goodness, REST sometimes feels like trying to fit a square peg in the proverbial round hole. Some interaction patterns just don’t lend themselves well to the REST approach. Here are a few examples, taken from the field of IT/Cloud management.

Long-lived operations. You can’t just hang on for a synchronous response. Tim Bray best described the situation, which he called Slow REST. Do you create an “action in progress” resource?

Query: how do you query for “all the instances of app foo deployed in a container that has patch 1234 installed” in a to-each-resource-its-own-URL world? I’ve seen proposals that create a “query” resource and build it up incrementally by POSTing constraints to it. Very RESTful. Very impractical too.

Events: the process of creating and managing subscriptions maps well to the resource-oriented RESTful approach. It’s when you consider event delivery mechanisms that things get nasty. You quickly end up worrying a lot more about firewalls and the cost of keeping HTTP connections open than about RESTful purity.

Enumeration: what if your resource state is a very long document and you’d rather retrieve it in increments? A basic GET is not going to cut it. You either have to improve on GET or, once again, create a specifically crafted resource (an enumeration context) to serve as a crutch for your protocol.

Filtering: take that same resource with a very long representation. Say you just want a small piece of it (e.g. one XML element). How do you retrieveAQuery: how do you query for “all the instances of app foo deployed in a container that has patch 1234 installed” in a to-each-resource-its-own-URL world? I’ve seen proposals that create a “query” resource and build it up incrementally by POSTing constraints to it. Very RESTful. Very impractical too.

Filtering: take that same resource with a very long representation. Say you just want a small piece of it (e.g. one XML element). How do you retrieve just that piece?

Collections: it’s hard to manage many resources as one when they each have their own control endpoint. It’s especially infuriating when the URLs look like http://myCloud.com/resources/XXX where XXX, the only variable part, is a resource Id and you know – you just know – that there is one application processing all your messages and yet you can’t send it a unique message and tell it to apply the same request to a list of resources.

The afterlife: how do you retrieve data about a resource once it’s gone? Which is what a DELETE does to it. Except just because it’s been removed operationally doesn’t mean you have no interest in retrieving data about it.

I am not saying that these patterns cannot be supported in a RESTful way. In fact, the problem is that they can. A crafty engineer can come up with carefully-defined resources that would support all such usages. But at the cost of polluting the resource model with artifacts that have little to do with the business at hand and a lot more with the limitations of the access mechanism.

Now if we move from trying to do things in “the REST way” to doing them in “a way that is as simple as possible and uses HTTP smartly where appropriate” then we’re in a better situation as we don’t have to contort ourselves. It doesn’t mean that the problems above go away. Events, for example, are

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

*Get more

Angela Golla — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:24:56 PST

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Get more value out of your Oracle investment
Oracle is now offering a complementary online self-assessment has been designed to share Oracle Customer Services good practices across five domains—Strategy, Process, Technology, People, and Governance—to help you get maximum value from your Oracle investments. These good practices and their associated next steps are built on the knowledge and expertise that comes from supporting more than 300,000 customers across the solution lifecycle. This collective experience allows Oracle Customer Services to help enable your success by providing you with insight into how you can reduce total cost of ownership, minimize risk, and improve business value.

Take this assessment and immediately receive an industry wide benchmarking study that can help you understand how your current practices compare to those of your peers. You will be asked a series of multiple-choice questions that should take only 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Oracle may contact you to discuss the survey results and related Oracle products and services.

The detailed, personalized benchmark study will give you:
A comparison of your results to those of your peers
Advice on good practices in 25 practice areas across 5 domains
Recommended actions you can take to improve your practices
A list of Oracle Services to assist you in your practice improvements

Begin the Oracle Customer Success Self-Assessment