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ALSB FTP Nuance: One of my customers just recently had an issue with AquaLogic Service Bus's FTP transport. This blog entries explains the nuance involved with FTP Business Service when a particular user and path are required.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on June 18, 2008 at 13:17 PDT | Comments (0)  

Using X.509 Certificates for Identity Propagation with Web Service Security: One of my customers is considering a web services interface for exchanging information with their clients. Security is a very important consideration in their design, so they are considering using best practices for authentication, integrity and confidentiality. In this post I'll explain their situation and some detail around setting up a simple prototype.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on April 29, 2008 at 11:11 PDT | Comments (5)  

Playing with Workshop and the Dojo Ajax Framework: I have been Inspired by the recent article by Gary Horen called "Ajax programming with BEA Workshop" and the numerous blogs from Skip Sauls that have touched on JSON and Firefox plug-ins like Firebug and YSlow. I decided to try using what I perceive to be the most popular javascript framework, Dojo, to solve a relatively simple requirement from one of my customers to populate the options of a select drop-down based on the selection of another drop-down without refreshing the page. For example, the options in the City drop-down will be populated based on the user's selection of an option in the State drop-down.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on March 23, 2008 at 15:04 PDT | Comments (5)  

Scala Development with Eclipse and WebLogic: At the end of my previous post about the hype/buzz for alternative programming languages I promised an entry on my experimenting with Scala in WebLogic. I have only spent a few hours of weekend time playing around, so I can't say much yet, but I'll document some of my first impressions and experiences in this post. This is not meant to be a post on learning Scala,. It is a post that documents my experience of using Scala with tooling and an application server familiar to java developers in Eclipse and WebLogic Server.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on February 06, 2008 at 18:57 PDT | Comments (3)  

Paparazzi for Programming Languages: Have you noticed that there is a growing buzz about alternative programming languages in the blogosphere and online technical journals? Is this simply just US-Weekly for technology selling the latest Brangelina gossip that will be forgotten next week or is there really a coming revolution to get out in front of or even catch up with?
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on February 03, 2008 at 22:33 PDT | Comments (4)  

Workshop, JPA, and DataSources:
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on January 25, 2008 at 23:35 PDT | Comments (2)  

Hermes JMS - Open Source JMS Console: Hermes JMS can provide an improved user experience for monitoring, inspecting and copying jms messages.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on January 02, 2008 at 14:55 PDT | Comments (3)  

Using Workshop 10.1 with WebLogic Server 10.0 MP1: Workshop for WebLogic 10.1 ships with WebLogic Server 10.0 GA bundled in the installer. Since that time BEA has released Maintenance Pack 1 for WLS 10.0. So when one of my customers was getting started with developing on WebLogic Server 10.0, I recommended that they start with Server 10.0 MP1 because it has about 7 months worth of bug fixes that the 10.0 GA bits don't have. This entry details how to use them together.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on December 15, 2007 at 10:50 PDT | Comments (3)  

Using LDAP as a user-store for WebLogic Administrators: I have previously posted on how to set up WebLogic Server for use with OpenLDAP so that LDAP users can be used for authentication for web apps, etc. In this post, I'll discuss how to extend that to WebLogic Administration, so that centralized administration of WebLogic Administrators can be enabled via external LDAP.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on December 13, 2007 at 13:51 PDT | Comments (0)  

Asynchronous Servlet Article Extras - Push Events: I just finished reading Francesco Marchioni's article entitled Using Asynchronous Servlets to Deal with Hung Threads and thought that I could add some information for those that want to explore this functionality more and see a working example of a chat room built with AJAX. This is really about implementing virtual push events to web clients.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on December 05, 2007 at 09:34 PDT | Comments (1)  

WebLogic Scheduling - A polling approach to implement a DB event generator for ALSB: Scheduling tasks for Java environments seem to come up fairly often. Often times cron or Windows's Scheduled Tasks might be used, but that's not necessarily ideal if your application servers are spread across multiple machines because your scheduling mechanism could now have a single point of failure on that particular OS instance. In this post, I'll review a customer situation that is well-suited for a scheduled polling solution and discuss the various options that I researched in WebLogic to implement it.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on November 01, 2007 at 09:58 PDT | Comments (2)  

Automate WLS Console Tasks with WLST: I've noticed frequently that it is common for developers that are doing code promotions, particularly from personal workstations to shared development environments, to use the WLS console to update their applications by using the point and click approach that takes several minutes and has multiple user interactions. Once I see this happen twice in a span of 10 minutes because of a minor bug, I quickly realize that there is an optimization opportunity to use a script for this task.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on October 25, 2007 at 14:42 PDT | Comments (0)  

Dev2Dev Bloggers should use Windows Live Writer: Our helpful dev2dev editors Jon and Sarah encouraged me to use Windows Live Writer (or WLW) to compose blog entries when I first got my dev2dev account and I absolutely love it. I've noticed that many of the dev2dev bloggers are not using it, so I thought I'd put together a little plug for it with some information on how to set it up, download it, and use it.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on October 24, 2007 at 16:25 PDT | Comments (3)  

Changing Annotation Configuration on the Fly (more detail): One of my customers asked me about a common use case: they would like to change the value of a Java annotation in their deployment artifacts at deployment time without changing the code. Well it turns out that Chris Hogue has already blogged this and his steps apply to 9.x and 10.x versions of WLS. His entry is very straight-forward, however I found that the WebLogic console interface was not as intuitive as Chris's post, so I wrote up the steps I followed to get it working.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on August 30, 2007 at 17:52 PDT | Comments (2)  

Using OpenLDAP with WebLogic Server: I've always used the Embedded LDAP server that ships with WLS as my user and group store since most of my work is just demos and prototypes, but I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to see what it is like to configure an external LDAP provider, in this case OpenLDAP.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on August 12, 2007 at 07:48 PDT | Comments (7)  

Mashups covered in the WSJ:
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on July 31, 2007 at 07:08 PDT | Comments (0)  

Workshop 10.1, Maps, GeoRSS, REST and more: In my last post, I gave some examples of how I did a simple Google Maps mashup with Workshop using RSS and XMLBeans. Well, in this post I wanted to discuss my experiences extending that example to use Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth. I also discovered the GeoRSS format and used the Yahoo Geo-coding REST API.
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on July 26, 2007 at 09:03 PDT | Comments (1)  

Mashup the Enterprise: an example:
Posted by James Bayer (jbayer) on May 31, 2007 at 17:45 PDT | Comments (2)