Portal

Leave it to Dan to spill the beans…side project in Alpha

Posted by Topper on 9/5/2007
Posted in: BI Server, BIEE, Business Intelligence, Data Integrator, Discoverer, General, Identity Management, Oracle, Portal, VMWare. Leave a Comment

Well, as many of you know, Dan Norris and I used to work together at ITC. He decided to go join some company known for handing out mints that tend to appear in peculiar places. In his post today he linked to the new site I’ve been working on. It’s obviously not live, but I linked in the blog section tonight. I still have some work to do on the templates in both the blog and wiki sections, some organization of the wiki, a couple entries in the FAQ, and a digg style rating system for users. I’ve worked out all my kinks with Amazon’s S3 service for the torrent downloads, now I’m in the process of uploading the initial VMs.

The first ones to be released will be a generic Oracle Enterprise Linux Update 5 VM with all the pre-configuration completed for database and application server installs. Next up will be a Portal 10.1.4 / BI 10.1.2.2.0 vm, an 11g database vm, and then hopefully Dan’s RAC vms.  The IdM VMs will come after that.  I’ve also had offers from Mark and John @ Rittmanmead.com for some of their BI and Data Warehousing VMs, hopefully I can catch up with them for dinner before the BIWA summit.

I’ve been busy with a whole bunch of client stuff lately, when Dan left ITC he also left me with a pretty healthy pipeline to deliver to, and I had already been booked for a client through the end of the year. (BTW, any Fusion Middleware guys need a job?) Needless to say, I’ve been a little busy lately and the horrible hotel upload speeds haven’t helped the situation in pushing things to Amazon.

So for now, go ahead, start using it. Tell me whats good, whats bad, what works, what doesn’t work, and I’ll do my best to keep on top of things. The OracleVMs.com project forum (http://www.oraclevms.com/forums/project.php?projectid=8) is the best place to log bugs, issues and feature requests. Feel free to start putting them there and I’ll slot them into the release cycle.

Where have all the developers gone?

Posted by Topper on 8/9/2007
Posted in: BI Server, BIEE, Business Intelligence, Data Integrator, Discoverer, Identity Management, MapViewer / GIS, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Portal, Technology. 3 comments

In the IOUG Fusion Task Force meeting this week, we were discussing what could be provided to build a better community around the Fusion Middleware world and it’s ever growing list of products and acquisitions. A lot of us are classic Oracle guys that have been doing Java, ADF, App Server, Portal, Discoverer, etc. since its first release. We’ve always known the standard Oracle Metalink, Forums, and ListServs for Oracle help when we need it. Now with so many acquisitions it’s getting incredibly hard to catch up and the communities for many of the new products don’t exist.

One of the big questions that came up was where have all the developers gone. For some reason the term “The Lost Developers” popped into my head, which of course popped the bad 80’s movie “The Lost Boys,” and in turn this bad graphic. (Trust me you don’t want to try and understand whats in my head)

The Lost Oracle Developers

But in all seriousness, where did everyone go. I know a lot of the people went to start their own independent consulting shops, some stayed with Oracle, but what about the rest of the world? What about all the customers and other implementation partners? I went through, looked at the acquisition list, and couldn’t find user groups or message boards for many of them. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places or haven’t been taught the secret handshake yet, but here is the list I came up with:

Agile: Nothing
AppForge: Palm and Windows Media Local User Groups, nothing centralized
Bharosa: Nothing
Tangosol: LCUG (http://wiki.tangosol.com/display/LCUG/Home)
HotSip: Nothing
Siebel (Analytics): ITtoolbox Group (http://siebel.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/siebel-analytics-l)
SigmaDynamics: Nothing
Sleepycat: Nabble Forums (http://www.nabble.com/Berkeley-DB-f2899.html)
Stellent: Stellentforums.com and regional user groups
Context Media: Nothing
Oblix: Nothing
Octet String: Nothing
Thor Technologies: Nothing
TimesTen: Nothing
TripleHop: Nothing

Yes there are the Oracle boards, but many of them aren’t trolled by the experts of the acquired companies yet. So what happened? Where did everyone go? Right now I’m working on building a lot of pre-built virtual machines for my side project (thanks again for the people volunteering to help), but on the newer components I’m having to learn a ton as I go and it would be helpful to bounce ideas / questions off of people who have already been there and done that. I’m sure a lot of them are having the same problems now trying to deploy on to the Fusion Middleware stack.

So here it is, an open invite to come out of the corners and reveal yourselves. Where is everyone hiding? How can we build a better collaborative Oracle development world? I would love to hear people’s feedback. Maybe we need a myspace or facebook for Oracle people? I’m only half joking here, there sure are enough of us to keep it busy. What features would make it a kick ass collaboration environment? Forums? Wiki? Torrents? Instant Messaging? Desktop Sharing? Blogs Provider? Maybe just an Aggregator? Rent a VM development environments? Calendaring? Mapping? Presence? Ok, enough web 2.0 buzz words (crap, there was another one).

Call me, email me, IM me, post comments here, I just want to figure out how to make it easier on all of us.

The 2 Minute Job That Always Takes Me Too Long

Posted by Topper on 8/5/2007
Posted in: General, Oracle, Portal, Technology. Leave a Comment

I’m just going to post this up here because this is something I do all the time and for some reason it will never stick in my head. The idea is that I have a server root that I want to forward to another URL with mod_rewrite. Yeah, I know, I could just write it in mod_alias or a quick meta tag or JavaScript or whatever, but I live the clean mod_rewrite solution that I can bake right into a httpd.conf or .htaccess file. So here is it, whenever you want to forward something like: http:///www.mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal here it is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal [R,L]

OK, enough, done…night.

PS- As you can tell I’m a bit frustrated with myself over this one. It’s only about the 100th time I’ve done something like this and I can never remember the syntax.

Oracle Portal Issue

Posted by Topper on 11/16/2005
Posted in: Oracle, Portal. Leave a Comment

I’ve been at a customer developing a lot of custom menus based on portal security. Portal has a few views in it that sets up all of the page/component security for users that come in really handy. The problem is that each time the view is called it calls an external function to get the current user. This makes it a pain if you are trying to debug a statement in SQL*Plus. After a bunch of headaches I found that if I execute the statement execute WWCTX_API.SET_CONTEXT(‘{oid username}’,'{oid password}’);
I can execute queries agaist the WWSBR_ALL_FOLDERS and WWV_USER_CORNERS tables until my hearts content and get the information I need. Ahh…one less pain of dealing with portal and pl/sql, my day is complete.

BTW, the error I was getting is an ORA-06512, if your getting the same error number this might be the trick.