Oracle forums (OTN): Redesign & new features

This weekend forums.oracle.com was unavailable. After some hours i checked the URL again and the design had changed a little...
But after some further investigation it was clear, that Oracle has released a new forums version with some web 2.0 features (tag cloud, FAQ in a wiki). One bad thing is, that OTN has not informed anyone about this upgrade and no documentation is available (see this discussion). This discussion shows one of the new features (emoticons) but this is not really needed on a technical forum.

So what is new?
1. For helpful answers you will get 5 points and for correct answers you will get 10 points. But there is no documentation, who is responsible for making this decision...


2. Related to this new scoring system the threads in the forums can have some new states like "Answered" or "Unanswered" questions:


3. After you have posted a new thread, you will see this:
If you click on question, you will be guided to this page:


4. Each post has an icon added, which show "click to report abuse..." as tool tip.
But just now there is this error ( 10:06:22 UTC+1), if you try to load forums.oracle.com

500 Internal Server Error

But this happens on each new software release ;-)
So let's what the next week will show us...

UPDATE:
On the FAQ (wiki) you can find the following

What software do they run on?
Oracle Discussion Forums run on version 4.2 of Jive Forums. An ungrade to v 5.5, originally scheduled for July 1, has been delayed.

The lost (collaxa) BPEL-tutorials: 103.XMLDocuments

After you have everything in place (follow this posting), let's step to this tutorial: 103.XMLDocuments
In this sample a "complex" xml document is created within the bpel. Sometimes you have to answer the question: there is a xml document with many defaults and you want to update only a few parameters.
Here the solution:
Build a BPEL and use a xsd which corresponds to your complex xml document. In this BPEL add an assign with the following operation:


The option "XML Fragment" can be chosen in the pulldown menu within the create operation dialog.
Into this XML Fragment you have to add the following xml


if your XSD looks like this:

<schema targetNamespace ="http://samples.otn.com/finance"
xmlns = "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
elementFormDefault="qualified"/>
<complexType name="StockReviewSheetType"/>
<sequence/>
<element name="symbol" type="string" />
<element name="targetPrice" type="float" />
<element name="currentPrice" type="float" />
<element name="action" type="string" />
<element name="quantity" type="int" />
<sequence/>
<complexType/>
<schema/>

Very important is to specfy the right namespace in the xml fragment. If you forget this, the assign is executed, but it is like you assign values to the variables of com.gip.myclass and you need them in com.xyna.myclass.... This will break your workflow not now, but later...

The lost (collaxa) BPEL-tutorials: 101.HelloWorld

There are many people who want to get used to BPEL in particular to Oracle BPEL PM. Now if you search the ORACLE_HOME of your Oracle Application Server 10g, you will find the following diretory:

/opt/oracle/product/10.1.3.1/OracleAS_1/bpel/samples/tutorials

In this directory there are many samples like 101.HelloWorld. The samples were built as the BPEL engine was not yet bought from Oracle. And this is the problem of this samples. You can not find any document, where these are described. I only found this reference:
BPEL4WS 101 Tutorial. Learn BPEL through an example

So i think, it would be helpful, if i explain some of the tutorials here on my blog....
Let's start with this 101.HelloWorld:

So what does this example tell us?
Nothing special. Just the typical Hello World AND HOW TO SET UP EVERYTHING (like connecting jdeveloper and BPEL PM, Deploying a BPEL, Testing a BPEL, ...)

Download jdeveloper 10.1.3.3
Unzip the file
Start jdeveloper (JDEV_HOME/jdeveloper.exe on Windows or JDEV_HOME/jdev/bin/jdev on Linux)
Create an application (File->New or for deeper understanding read here
Open the HelloWorld.jpr (just answer the migration dialog with yes)
DoubleClick HelloWorld.bpel and testHelloWorld.xml

Then you should see this (after dragging one tab to the right):

To get the BPEL running, you have to perform the following:
JDeveloper: Setting up an application server connection
JDeveloper: Setting up an integration server connection
JDeveloper: Deployment of a BPEL
Login to you BPELConsole (yourwindowsserver:80/BPELConsole or yourunixserver:7777/BPELConsole)
Automated testing of a BPEL (you have to do first Deploying a test suite and second Running a test suite).

So this is all you can learn from this 101.HelloWorld tutorial: Deploy a BPEL and do an automated test.

You can find all bpel tutorials on this blog via this link.

UPDATE: You can find the 101.HelloWorld with SOA Suite 11g here.

Firefox 3.0...

Today firefox 3.0 was released. So i downloaded it, but it did not start on my debian etch system... so what to do?
Fortunately i found the following link:
www.captain.at
And after doing some gtk compilation, voila:

A very nice feature is the auto completion for the address bar:

But for all new feature read this FAQ from mozilla.

Oracle Metalink: Software Configuration Manager

Have you recently made a login to metalink?
There is a knew tab called "Software Configuration Manager". Take a look at this screenshot:

Here some statements from Oracle about this new feature:

Software Configuration Manager gives you a complete, dynamic view of your current configurations—including application, middleware, and database versions, plus operating system and hardware platform details—in a new, customizable, easy-to-use dashboard. You define the filters and views to track the configuration information that matters most to your business.

and

Software Configuration Manager customers have reported 40% faster issue resolution, a 30% reduction in the time it takes to log a Service Request, and 25% problem avoidance with Alerts and HealthChecks.

Provided with this numbers you will never fail again on a SR ;-)

SUN: Solaris Cluster (SUN Cluster) is now Opensource

SUN released the source code of the Sun Cluster on www.opensolaris.org under the name High Availability Clusters.
The project page can be found here.

If you are really interested try the wiki or the related blog.
The Open HA Cluster source code is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). For more information follow this link to wikipedia.

Here some statements from sun about Solaris Cluster:

Previously known as Sun Cluster, the Solaris Cluster framework extends high availability features of Solaris - it includes Solaris Cluster, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, developer tools and support for commercial and open-source applications through Solaris Cluster agents. The integrated software provides high availability and disaster recovery for local, campus, metropolitan and worldwide clusters.

By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Solaris Cluster provides the maximum level of service availability and performance for a cluster system.
The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects. These interconnects carry important cluster information (data as well as a cluster "heartbeat"). This heartbeat lets the servers in the cluster monitor the health of the other servers within the cluster, ensuring that each server is "alive". If one of the servers goes offline and its heartbeat disappears, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail-over" any application or data from the failing node to another node. This fail-over process is quick and transparent to users of the application. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Solaris Cluster ensures the highest levels of availability.

Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition software enables a multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed Solaris Clusters. In the event that a primary cluster goes down, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition enables sysadmins to start up automatically business applications with replicated data on the secondary Solaris Cluster.

I think Solaris Cluster is an alternative solution to Oracle Clusterware to achieve high availability for your software stack. But keep in mind, that the configuration of these cluster software stacks has to be planned and maintained carefully...