Oracle WebCenter Perfomance Analysis and Tuning Tech Paper Published

I have a series of technical paper on Oracle WebCenter Spaces Performance Analysis and Tuning in Practice published at OTN:

Part 1:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/enterprise2/zheng-webcenter-perf-1-1927402.html

Part 2:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/enterprise2/zheng-webcenter-perf-2-1927421.html

WebCenter PS6 is live

Oracle WebCenter Portal/Content 11.1.1.7 (aka PS6) is released!

Official download site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/portal/downloads/index.html

Document Lib site: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/webportal.htm

Jdeveloper and ADF 11.1.1.7

	What's New
	Release Notes
	Certification Information
	Oracle JDeveloper and ADF Documentation Library
	- Installation Guide for Oracle JDeveloper
	- Installation Guide for Application Developer
	- Installation Guide for Oracle Team Productivity Center Server
	Oracle Fusion Middleware Documentation Library
	Oracle ADF 10.1.3 Migration to 11g
	Upgrade Guide for Oracle SOA Suite, WebCenter, and ADF
	Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Oracle ADF — Code Samples
	Instructions for Running Fusion Order Demo for Oracle SOA Suite
	JDeveloper and ADF Tutorials

 

Please Join my Session @ Collaborate 13 - Responsive Web Design on WebCenter Portal

Hi Folks,

I personally welcome you to join my session @ Collaborate 13 on Responsive Web Design on WebCenter Portal.

#129 - Responsive Web Design on WebCenter Portal

Date:
Monday, April 8
3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
Location:
Mile High Ballroom 4D

Here is the link to my session:
http://coll13.mapyourshow.com/5_0/sessions/sessiondetails.cfm?ScheduledSessionID=18AECEC0

Companies are often struggling to keep up with all the popular website delivery channels: internet, intranet, extranet, workstations, laptops, tablets, mobile devices, etc. New devices are emerging as you read this. The display technology is evolving so fast that it feels like your website is obsolete before it is published. Is there a solution? Responsive web design (RWD), introduced in 2010, is intended to be the solution. This session provides the definition of RWD, the benefits, and how it can bring value to your organization. This session also addresses how to deliver your WebCenter-based websites across different rendering devices, with practical advice on how to start using RWD in your WebCenter solutions, the technical difficulties you may encounter, and how to resolve them.

To leak some of my demo pictures:

Hope to See you there!

Build an Image Slider in ADF/WebCenter Portal using jFlow Plus v2

In a modernized ADF/WebCenter Portal application, it's very common to have an image slider that can slide images automatically/manually from one to another. If you are thinking of implementing such functionality, my post here might help you. The image slider transition is implemented by JQuery. I will not focus anything on JQuery as there are many third party JQuery plugin out there for such image sliding effect. But those plugins are not ready to use for your ADF/WebCenter application, due to ADF technology itself which is based on faces components. Here I am presenting a working copy of such implementation.

The plugin I used here is "jFlow Plus v2". You can download the plugin and find more info about it here: http://wordimpress.com/demos/jflowplus-v2/. To preview the finished version built on top of ADF, here is the screenshot:

Here are several things I want to emphasize:

1. Determine your page layout - flow layout or stretch layout. You always want to determine this before starting working on any user interface related project.
2. Determine the images' (yes, plural) width. The slider contains a series of images which may not be consistent on sizes. You need to consider your expected user experience if you have such case.
3. Build the slider functionality into an ADF task flow. This sounds pretty natural as you want to wrap all the slider related resources into one task flow.
4. Consider where to fetch the image. In my example, I just put the images in the local project directory. However, the powerfulness of ADF/WebCenter Portal application would of course have a dedicated centralized repository to store the images (Content server or DB). When stored in content server, the images should be retrieved as an iterator (by CMIS or RIDC). The iterator could be coded with <af:forEach> tag to iterate each image.

To make the application functioning, you would need some knowledge on ADF skinning, JavaScript and UI development. All you have to do is taking over the plugin and tweak it working in your ADF application.

You can download the finished application here (Built on JDev 11.1.1.6)

Changing Labels on Built-In WebCenter Taskflows

Recently I have a request from a customer to change the label of Comment button of the DocumentViewer TaskFlow in a WebCenter Portal application, from "Comment" to "Post your comment". Here is a screenshot of the standard view of the documentViewer Taskflow with the comment sidebar.

The request itself is a customization request to change a label of a command button inside a built-in WebCenter Taskflow. There are two options to deal with customizations for WebCenter Portal: seeded customization or runtime customization. To give you an upfront warning, the seeded customization will not work for this case, and I will explain why.

First, let's look at the seeded customizations. To enable seeded customization, there are several prerequisites to do.

1. Make sure in the application adf-config.xml, customization class is is pointing oracle.adf.share.config.SiteCC in the MDS configuration.
2. Enable the seeded customization option in project property - ADF View.
3. Change the Jdeveloper role to "Customization Developer" in Jdeveloper Tools and Preference. Restart Jdeveloper.

After the above, you can "show the library" in Jdeveloper and examine the standard task flow. In our case, we are looking for the DocumentView Taskflow. After examination, you would be able to find the comment task flow is wrapped inside a sidebar task flow and represented by a page/fragment called "ObjectCommentsSummary". The source code of the such page is composed of a single library tag ("ObjectCommentsSummary" tag) that cannot be further analyzed. According to Oracle Support, it's bundled and encapsulated within a taglib library and not available to edit from client code. So the conclusion here is it's a dead end.

You may ask - the label is wrapped into the resource bundle file and can we change from there? Unfortunately the resource bundle is also internal and is not available to edit. FYI: the resource key for the comment button label is "#{activityStreamingViewBundle.COMMENTS_LABEL_VERB_POST_COMMENT}".

Fortunately enough, we still have the 2nd option which is easy and straightforward. To enable runtime customization, we need to make sure the taskflow is wrapped by an Oracle Composer component which can render the page in the EDIT mode. You also need to make sure the login user you used to customize have the permission to edit the page. Here are the steps to implement the label change:

1). Open the page with the DocumentViewer Taskflow and click Edit to go to EDIT mode.

2). From the Edit mode toobar, click on "View" and choose "Source".

3). Scroll down the page and look for the comment button under the comment input area.

4). You will notice your mouse changed to a "Magnifier" icon. Click on the "Comment" button.

5). A warning popup will show up to confirm that you want to edit a shared component. The content of the warning message is "You are opening a shared component for editing. The changes you make will affect this instance and every other instance of this component on other pages".

6) Click on "Edit" and you will notice in the source code view the selected component is highlighted.

7) With the component highlighted, click on "Edit" below the Edit Mode toolbar. The Component Property Edit Popup will show up and looks like this:

8). Click on the down arrow icon on the right of the Text property and choose "Expression Builder" and type in your proposed text. In this case, the text is "Post your comment".

9) Click "OK" and "OK" to dismiss all popup. Click save button on the Edit Mode toolbar to save the changes and close the Edit mode. You will notice the Comment button's label has been changed to "Post your comment".

Please note since the comment task flow is reused through all WebCenter Portal service. Once the label is changed, all comment button's label will be updated too. You probably already notice this by reading the warning message on step 5. But if you need to update the label only on specific scenario (e.g: only for one page), you need to introduce additional parameters and register the parameter via customization layer.  So the label can be set dynamically on expression language.

There is another question before I wrap up this post - migration of the changes from one instance to another.

For the one change mentioned above, it's simple and you can redo the same steps on another instance. But when there are multiple customization changes OR at least there is a policy that blocks you to do such manual changes on some instance (like Prod), we need to use the script to migrate the changes. The runtime change is stored in MDS and in xml format. We can use WSLT script to export from one instance and import to another instance. Here are the steps:

1). Putty into your linux server. Navigate and run ./ORACLE_HOME/Oracle_WC1/common/bin/wlst.sh (Oracle_WC1 here is your WebCenter instance)

2). Run the following wlst command:

>exportMetadata(application='DomainA',server='WC_CustomPortal',toLocation='/oracle/tmp',docs='/oracle/webcenter/**')

The above command will export all pages into the '/oracle/tmp' directory. We do this step to target the page we need to migrate (See next step).

3). In the '/oracle/tmp', run the following command to find the string recursively.

>grep -r "Post your comment"

The command will return the metadata page. You can view the page and it contains the runtime changes was made.

4). Do an export with the target page (replace the targetPage with the metadata page return from step 3)

>exportMetadata(application='DomainA',server='WC_CustomPortal',toLocation='/oracle/metadata',docs='targetPage')

5). zip & unzip the target page to the target instance.

6). import the metadata on the target instance (replace the targetPage with the metadata page return from step 3):

>importMetadata(application='DomainB', server='WC_CustomPortal', fromLocation='/oracle/metadata',docs='targetPage')

7) Now you can test the changes on the target instance.

Retrieve User Profile Info from Identity Store

In any WebCenter Portal (or ADF) application, no matter what identity store is used for authentication, you could get hold of the user profile instance using Oracle Platform Security Service (OPSS) API, as OPSS is the layer used to connect between the WebCenter/ADF security and the identity store.

There are a number of identity stores are supported in WebLogic Server. Here is a list of them:

• Oracle Internet Directory 11g
• Oracle Virtual Directory
• Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition 11.1.1.3
• Active Directory 2008
• Novell eDirectory 8.8
• OpenLDAP 2.2
• Tivoli Access Manager
• Sun DS 6.3, 7.0
• Oracle DB 10g, 11gR1, 11gR2
• iPlanet Directory Server
• Custom Authenticator

By implementing any one or many of the above, we will be able to retrieve the user profile info from the application. Here is the code snippet.

First, we will get hold of the JpsContext and get the identityStore instance by its service instance.

        JpsContextFactory ctxFactory = JpsContextFactory.getContextFactory();
        JpsContext ctx = ctxFactory.getContext();
        LdapIdentityStore idstoreService = (LdapIdentityStore)ctx.getServiceInstance(IdentityStoreService.class);
        IdentityStore idmIdentityStore = idstoreService.getIdmStore();

After the identity store is retrieved, there can be multiple ways to get hold of the user or user profile. For example get the user instance from the login principal. Principal is retrieve from the ADF Security Context:

        ADFContext adfC = ADFContext.getCurrent();
        SecurityContext sc = adfC.getSecurityContext();
        if (sc.isAuthenticated()) {
            Principal p = sc.getUserPrincipal();
            return p;
        } else {
            _logger.severe("Error: Authentication Failed. Not able to get the principal.");
            return null;  
        }

Getting user by principal:

        User user = idmIdentityStore.searchUser(p);

Getting user profile by the user instance:

        UserProfile up = user.getUserProfile();

Once userProfile is retrieved, we can get any defined properties on the identity store by: UserProfile.getPropertyVal("propertyName")

I suggest to store the user profile in a session scope if the user profile is used many times throughout the application.

Skin Analysis on WebCenter Spaces Page Template

Oracle WebCenter Spaces provides framework and resources that ready for business users to use after installation and configurations. But we all know the default look and feel of the site is really not appealing. I’ve seen prospective customers direct eyes on the WebCenter great features but step back because of the look and feel. I will have to confirm them that the site can be skinned and customized to whatever you want the site to look like. And that’s true, there are indeed great looking sites out there using sophisticated CSS and JavaScript (e.g. JQuery). Those sites are mostly designed from a HTML markup perspective and mixed with ADF components, which could make the source codes of the pages hard to read and maintain. Hard to read? Who cares, as long as it works for what the customer wants. But one of the drawbacks I’ve seen and it’s worthy to mention is it breaks the partial page rendering because of the mix of html and ADF components. Most of the pretty WebCenter public sites so far don't have the PPR feature - every navigation is a full page refresh - which doesn't surprise me (If anyone knows any public sites with PPR enabled, please let me know). Therefore, I will do a few analyses on the standard WebCenter Space page template and make a few changes on the CSS file to improve the look and feel of the WebCenter Spaces site. It might not be good enough for your needs, but should be a good start to begin with.

The default page template widely used in WebCenter Spaces is the one called “Top Navigation”. Please note there is another version of top navigation but stretchable. I will take the non-stretchable one to present as it is the default one being used. Here is the screenshot of it using the default top navigation page template. 

 

Page Structure

I’ve marked four regions which will represent on the page definition later on. To grab the source codes for the page template, just go to the administration section -> resources, from the ‘page template’ group, make a copy of the top navigation template and rename it whatever you like, from the edit link, you will be able to see the ‘Edit Source’ link enabled and that’s how you can grab the source code easy and quick. You can paste the source codes into JDeveloper which will help us to understand the page template structure. Here is the screenshot of the page structure:

As you can see, the page template starts with a panelGroupLayout in a scroll layout, and this is how this template is a flow layout template (fixed width of the page). For a stretchable layout, you will see it starts with the ‘panel stretch layout’.

Next you will find two Spaces tags and we will skip that.

Next is a decorative box component and it’s the template header part and the A region in the first image. This region contains site logo, a search inputbox region and several command/go links. You are definitely free to customize those components if you like. One thing you may consider to do is to upload your site logo to content server and put the image url to an ADF image component for the site logo. Decorative box comes with two facets: center and top. By default, the top facet doesn’t have any background (white color), but the center has some light gray background on the top edge of it. See the following: 

Besides, decorative box provides an additional property for styling call “theme”.

Tips: About Theme

The purpose of themes is to provide a consistent look and feel across multiple components for a portion of a page. A common usage for themes is in a page template where certain areas have a distinct look. For example, a page may have a branding area at the top with a dark background and light text, a navigation component with a lighter background, and a main content area with a light background.

A component that sets a theme exposes that theme to its child components and therefore the theme is inherited. Themes can be set (started or changed) by the following components:

·         af:document

·         af:decorativeBox

·         af:panelStretchLayout

·         af:panelGroupLayout

By definition, themes are cascaded down through all child components. All HTML elements that are rendered by a rich component within a themed component will have the theme added to its list of style classes. Themes are not compatible with tonal styles and therefore only one method can be used per page (themes or tonal styles). A blank theme will remove the current theme, and a value of "inherit", null or not setting a theme will use the current theme. Skins are the sources of the themes. Some skins may have no themed definitions. Suggested theme names include "dark", "medium", "light", and "default".

Besides decorative box, Spaces have additional theme styling, such as “webcenter” is applied to the decorative box by default. If you want to have your own background and styling, I suggest avoiding using the decorative box simply by dragging its direct child out of the decorative box. In this case it’s ‘panel border layout’. Just drag the panel border layout out of the decorative box and comment it. You can apply your styling directly on the panel border layout.

Next component is the navigation panel region which is marked as ‘B’. The region is referring a build-in navigation task flow. To examine the source codes of it, please refer to another blog I posted here.

Next part is the content which is just a facet in a page template. It’s marked as ‘C’.

The last part is the ‘panel border layout’ component again wrapping the footer of the page template. It’s marked as ‘D’.

 

Styling

Spaces template uses style class for styling purpose, which comes with “WC” as its prefix. Now I will list all the style class that are used in the top navigation template by what effect it could take for styling in the page.

Here I am going to change the background to white:

/*override the background*/

.WCSiteTemplateBackground{

    background: #FFFFFF !important;

}

Change the navigation background to dark gray color:

/*change the styling of the page template top navigation*/

.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanel {

    background: #666666 !important;

}

To change the navigation links text color to white:

af|commandMenuItem.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanel::bar-item-text {

    color: #FFFFFF !important;

}

You can add hover effect if you want by defining:

af|commandMenuItem.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanel::bar-item-text:hover {}

 Define the background of the navigation link when it’s selected:

/*the styling when tab is selected*/

.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanelSelected {

    background: #FF8000 !important;

}

You can define the text color to change when it’s selected by defining:

af|commandMenuItem.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanelSelected::bar-item-text {}

Define the navigation link to change color when hovering:

/*the styling when mouse hover*/

.WCSiteTemplateTopNavPanel:highlighted {

    background: #7A7A7A !important;

}

Change the footer background:

/*change the background of the page template footer*/

.WCSiteTemplateFooter {

    background: #666666 !important;

}

Change the header and footer font color:

/*change the font color on the template header*/

.x106, .x107 {

    color: #FFFFFF !important;

    font-weight: bold !important;

}

By the above few CSS changes and some minor change on the template, you will find your pages could look like this:

Is it nice and neat? Besides, you won’t have your ppr navigation broken. Enjoy!

Set a PanelTab height dynamically using JavaScript

It's not a common scenario but interesting to note down what's the use case and how to implement it.

The use case is to get the view port height on the ADF page and set height to the PanelTab or other component related to the view port height. Most sites are still designed with flow layout on fixed width of the page. Users would have all kinds of different desktop resolutions so that their browser would render the ADF pages a bit differently. Some with large resolution would have large blank space. To make the site more appealing (or even readable at least) and fit into different browser window sizes, we can definitely control the heights of ADF components using JavaScript. In this example, we will look at the PanelTab component but it can be applied to any other ADF components. There is actually a web design - responsive web design - supposed to solve these kind of problems and render the site in multiple platforms. But the solution in this blog is more or less a fix/workaround to an existing ADF application designed with flow layout that requires such effects.

First, we want to get the browser window size (height) when the page is rendered/refreshed. Using the following JavaScript to get the view port height for the ADF page.

function getViewPortHeight(evt) {
    var topComp = evt.getSource();
    var height = topComp.getProperty("viewPortHeight");
    if (height == null) {
        var vpHeight = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
        AdfCustomEvent.queue(evt.getSource(), "getHeightEvent",
        {
            height : vpHeight
        },
        true);
        evt.cancel();
    }
}

The JavaScript is called from the af:document component of your jspx page. Only af:document supports the 'load' type clientListener so we can get the heights when page loads.

The ClientListener will get the height and pass it to the managed bean for further processing. That's how the serverListener is used here.

    public void storeViewPortalHeight(ClientEvent clientEvent) {
        Double height = (Double)clientEvent.getParameters().get("height");
        log.debug("The view Portal height is : {}", height);
        getSessionScope().put("vpHeight", height);
    }

In storeViewPortHeight() method, it gets the height from the clientListener and save it into session scope.

    public void setConfigurationPanelTab(RichPanelTabbed panelTab) {
        String heightStyle = null;
        Double vpHeight = 650.0;
        if (this.getSessionScope().get("vpHeight") != null) {
            vpHeight = (Double)this.getSessionScope().get("vpHeight");
        }
        heightStyle = "height:" + vpHeight + "px;";
        if (hightStyle != null) {
            configurationPanelTab.setInlineStyle(hightStyle);
        } else {
            log.info("View Port is not available");
        }
        this.panelTab= panelTab;
    }

In the above method, we get the height from session scope and set it as inline style on the component setter method.

Manully Change the WebLogic Security Authenticator Type

It's triggered by a configuration mistake on LDAP authenticator provider. I was trying to register the OpenLDAP store with Weblogic Server. But by mistake, I chose "LDAPAuthenticator" as the provider type  which should be "OpenLDAPAuthenticator".

I didn't realize the mistake until I restarted the Admin server and got the errors - "JPS-00027: internal error You configured a generic WLS LDAPAuthenticator".

Caused By: oracle.security.jps.service.idstore.IdentityStoreException: JPS-00056: Failed to create identity store service instance idstore.ldap.provider:idstore.ldap. Reason: oracle.security.jps.JpsRuntimeException: JPS-00027: internal error You configured a generic WLS LDAPAuthenticator.

The identity store type cannot be determined. Please choose an LDAP Authentication provider that matches your LDAP server.

                at oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider.getIdStoreConfig(LdapIdentityStoreProvider.java:199)

                at oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider.access$300(LdapIdentityStoreProvider.java:74)

                at oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider$NoLibOvd.getInstance(LdapIdentityStoreProvider.java:246)

                at oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider.getInstance(LdapIdentityStoreProvider.java:118)

                at oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider.getInstance(LdapIdentityStoreProvider.java:74)

                Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace

>

<Sep 26, 2012 11:03:39 AM CDT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FAILED>

<Sep 26, 2012 11:03:39 AM CDT> <Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down>

<Sep 26, 2012 11:03:39 AM CDT> <Notice> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to FORCE_SHUTTING_DOWN>

So the admin server cannot be started because of the wrong authenticator type. But here is how to manually change the authenticator type. Target $Domain_HOME/config/config.xml, you will find the following line:

The fix is to replace "wls:ldap-authenticatorType" with "wls:open-ldap-authenticatorType". What it does is to switch the authenticator type from LDAPAuthenticator to OpenLDAPAuthenticator. Here you go, start the admin server and the error is cleared.

Oracle ADF Essential For Free

Personally I think this is a milestone event. Cheers!

Check out for details:

JDeveloper PM Blog.
Official link.
FAQ link.

Setup your own WebCenter Suite on a VM from scratch

I’d like to share my own “Install Notes” on step-to-step how to build your own WebCenter Suite on a VM from scratch. If you follow my notes here, you should have your own WebCenter work station in a few hours. The install notes here are based on the Linux 64 OS which is the industry standard. Let’s begin.

Software needed (can be obtained from e-delivery)

a.       Oracle Linux64 bit (ver6.2 or whatever latest)

b.      Oracle VirtualBox

c.       Oracle DB XE11g Linux 64

d.      Oracle RCU

e.      Oracle Weblogic Server 11g Linux

f.        Oracle WebCenter 11g

g.       Oracle UCM 11g

h.      Oracle Web Tier 11g

Create a new Virtual Disk

a.       Install VirtualBox on your host. Start the virtualbox and create a new virtual disk.

b.      Set the memory to 4096Mb or above depending on how much RAM you have on your host.

c.       Storage: choose “dynamic” and set the size to 50Gb

Install Linux 64bit

Download the Linux 64bit and install it on the virtual disk created in the previous step. After the system is installed, do the following using root.

Install required kernels

a.       Enable yum - on oracle Linux 6 series, do the following:

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d

# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo

b.      Update the system:

# yum update

And

# yum update kernel

c.       Install GNU C compiler and the kernel development package:

# yum install gcc

# yum install kernel-devel

# yum install kernel-uek-devel-2.6.32-300.3.1.1el6uek.x86_64

To make it more generic:

# yum install kernel-uek-devel-`uname –r`

d.      Install DKMS by using the following:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms-2.2.0.3-1.noarch.rpm
# yum install /tmp/dkms-2.2.0.3-1.noarch.rpm –nogpgcheck

Install VBox Guest Addition

There are numbers of reasons that you want to install the VBox guest additions. You can enable the file sharing between your host and VM. Also, the graphic support is enhanced so the resolution of the VM is dynamically set to the VM window size.

In case there is an error in installing VBox guest addition, the error could be:

Here is the fix:

# cd /lib/modules/2.6.32-300.3.1.1el6uek.x86_64

# ls –l

You would see there is no such folder “2.6.32-300.3.1.1el6uek.x86_64” exists. So the fix is to install the package using the following:

# yum install kernel-uek-devel-2.6.32-300.3.1.1el6uek.x86_64

Before doing this step, do a vm clone or take a snapshot of the VM. Mount the guest addition, and execute the following:

# sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Share the resource folder with the host

Install required libraries on Linux 64

Check all the required libraries from Fusion Middleware: http://docs.oracle.com/html/E18558_01/fusion_requirements.htm#BABCEFEA

This is the list for Oracle Linux 6/Red Hat 6 (Totally 17 packages)

compat-libcap1-1.10-1

compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-69.e16 for x86_64

compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-69.e16 for i686

libaio-0.3.107-10.e16

libaio-devel-0.3.107-10.e16

libgcc-4.4.4-13.e16

libstdc++-4.4.4-13.e16 for x86_64

libstdc++-4.4.4-13.e16 for i686

libstdc++-devel-4.4.4-13.e16

libXext for i686

libXtst for i686

gcc-4.4.4-13.e16

gcc-c++-4.4.4-13.e16

glibc-2.12-1.7.e16 for x86_64

glibc-2.12-1.7.e16 for i686

glibc-devel-2.12-1.7.e16

sysstat-9.0.4-11.e16

Install Oracle DB 64 bit

Create the dba group in the system:

# /usr/sbin/groupadd dba 

Create the installation folder as root

# mkdir –p /u01/app/oracle

Change the ownership of the folder:

# chown –R oracle:dba /u01/app/oracle

Modify the permission on the directory to 775:

# chmod –R 775 /u01/app/oracle

Configure the oracle user environment before installation:

Login as oracle user:

# ORACLE_SID=XE

# export ORACLE_SID

# ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle

# export ORACLE_BASE

If the domain name of the machine has been changed during OS installation, here the domain name 

must be added to the system before continue. Change the user to ‘root’:

# vi /etc/hosts

Add the domain name after the “127.0.0.1”.

Start the db install:

# su -c "rpm -i ./oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm"

Configure the db after install:

# su –c “/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure”

Once you finish your install, make sure it’s up and running then connect to Oracle XE as sys and change the PROCESSES param to 300.

SQL> conn sys/sena as sysdba

SQL> alter system set processes=300 scope=spfile; 

After that, restart your instance:

su -c "/sbin/service oracle-xe reload"

Using RCU to create Schemas

You can use RCU in two ways: on your host or on the Linux VM. To use it on your host (I assume it’s a 

windows host), first disable the firewall on the Linux VM so that the host can access the DB hosted on 

the VM:

# su -c “/etc/init.d/iptables save”

# su –c “/etc/init.d/iptables stop”

Then you can use the RCU on your windows to create schemas. 

To use it on your Linux VM: 

If the linux system is on 64 versions, do the following (this will 32bit lib).

# yum install /lib/ld-linux.so.2 

# yum install libXext.i686*

# yum install libXtst.i686*

After this, we can continue with RCU – 

# cd rcuHome/bin

# ./rcu

Install JRockit JDK

      # ./jrockit*****.bin

Install Weblogic Server

Set the JAVA_HOME and PATH evn variables. Navigate to the directory of the 

wls1036_generic.jar:

# export JAVA_HOME=/jrockit_install_path

# export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

# java –d64 –jar wls1036_generic.jar

Install WebCenter/UCM/WebTier

Modify the limits.conf file:

# vi /etc/security/limits.conf

Add the following if not exist:

# oracle soft nofile 4096;

# oracle hard nofile 4096;

And run the installer:

./runInstaller

Create WebCenter WSL domain (clustering, SSL)

# cd $FMW_HOME/Oracle_WC1/common/bin

# ./config.sh

After all the above, you can start your Admin server and managed servers. You are ready to explore your WebCenter environment.

JDBC Data Sources and Connection Pooling

Here I am describing JDBC Data Sources and Connection Pooling using a few slides that I borrowed from Oracle Weblogic 12c BootCamp.

1. What's JDBC Data Source?

2. Scope of Data Source: system or application. All JDBC configurations must conform to the new weblogic-jdbc.xsd schema. IDE can validate the JDBC modules based on the schema.

3. What’s a Connection Pooling?

4. How Connection Pooling works?

5. Benefits of Connection Pooling?

6. How Data Source Connection Pooling is used?

7. Connection Pooling Configuration

8. Connection Pooling Hints

Oracle Weblogic 12c

I attended the Weblogic 12c boot camp this week and learned some great features of it and I like to share some of them.

The Cloud Application Foundation: everything you need in one box. It’s the foundation of the next generation of Fusion Middleware stack. Oracle traffic directory sitting on the top serves the software load balancer (can replace web cache server). Virtual assembly builder sitting at the bottom better simplifies the deployment process for multi-tier application topologies in a centralized virtualized environment.

Oracle Traffic Director: Oracle Traffic Director is a fast, reliable, and scalable layer-7 software load balancer that you can deploy as the reliable entry point for all HTTP and HTTPS traffic to application servers and web servers in your network. OTD will replace Oracle Web Cache as a software load balancer on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle says it delivers a 3 to 4 times performance boost to the Oracle WebLogic applications. OTD Data sheet can be found here. Documentation on OTD can be found here. Documentation on VSB can be found here.

Java 6/7 support: with new Java release, you are supposed to write less code to achieve your functionalities. Dependency injection, annotation, POJO and REST are all supported. You will have a cleaner and more maintainable application with Java 6/7. Besides, some nice code automations: on JDBC, no need to close the connection and the Java does it for you after execution of your code.

Enhanced Enterprise Manager with Cloud Control: lots of new features come with the EM on performance monitoring and diagnostics, configuration management and cloud management. You can take a snapshot of the diagnostics logs before restart the server for later analysis. Cloud management with build-in oracle support allows easy patching/unpatching and upgrading.

How to get the source codes of Build-In WebCenter Spaces Task Flows

Since WebCenter PS5, Oracle brings lots of standard task flows inside WebCenter Spaces. Some of them are already registered within the resource catalog and ready to use, most of them are also ready but you need to add them to the resource catalog first for business users to utilize. But from a developer standpoint, you may be interested in reviewing the source codes of the standard task flow shipped with Oracle WebCenter Spaces. Today I will show you how to locate the EAR or WAR file and take the advantages of build-in task flows.

After the Oracle WebCenter Spaces is installed, go to the following directory and you will find the relevant EAR and WAR files are already installed. In my case, it’s WebCenter PS5 but it’s applicable to other 11g releases.

$FMW_HOME/<WebCenter Instance Name>/webcenter/modules/oracle.webcenter.spaces_11.1.1

The one we are interested is the one at the bottom ‘oracle.webcenter.spaces.webapp.war’ file. You can ftp the file from the server to your local directory and extract it. You will find there are two subfolders in the file – “META-INF” and “WEB-INF”. If you are familiar with WebCenter/ADF development/deployment, those two folders should not be strange. The “META-INF” folder contains configuration files for applications, extensions, class loaders and services. The “WEB-INF” contains the static content that could be referenced and defined in some configuration files in META-INF folder for libraries pre-loading. So there is a folder ‘lib’ residing in WEB-INF and contains the JAR files that is pre-loaded when the server starts and they are the libraries that contains the build-in task flows. Here is the snapshot of the lib directory:

Again, it contains several JAR files that aggregate different set of resources in terms of their modules of functionalities and scope of use. We will look at the one at the bottom “spaces-web” JAR file. In this jar file, you will find all kinds of build-in task flows that are used internally in standard WebCenter Spaces resources. For example, in WebCenter Spaces, the default page template is a template called “Top Navigation”. In the template files, there are several regions being used are those task flows, which can be found here. Take the navigation region as an example, you could find the navigation task flow in this package ‘oracle.webcenter.webcenterapp.view.taskflows.navigation’. Here is the screenshot of the directory you can find about navigation task flows:

In the same ‘spaces-web’ jar file, you could find:

•  All the templates jspx file and their page definition files
• Standard task flows that you can access from resource catalog
• Java Beans that manage/support the transactions for the task flows and page fragments

If you want to learn a certain functionality that how Oracle WebCenter build or just find out the source codes that behind the scene, you can find all the relevant info by this means.