Virtual Identity Dialogue

One of the really great things about working at Oracle is that there
are lots of internal people who are working on spreading the word about your
products without you even having to ask.



For example - there is a great new article on OTN about using OID to manage the information for Oracle Names.



What this article talks about is how you can get away from having to
manage individual text files like TNSNAMES files on desktops (for
client-server applications) or your application-server farms into a
centralized, managed service which is OID.



If you have a dozen or more databases if not hundreds or have many
client based applications (either client-server or middleware) - I
would strongly suggest you check the article out to see if OID and
Oracle Names can make your database management life easier.

I was reminded today that we're doing an Oracle Virtual Directory
session during the "X-Treme" weekend leading as part of Oracle
OpenWorld.



Basically if you're interested in seeing how OVD can simplify your
deployment of LDAP enabled applications - this is the session to attend.



More information can be found here.

Look for Fusion Middleware sessions.



Here's the "official" blurb:

Identity Management�Directory Configuration and Management for Real-World Deployment

Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) delivers the hot-pluggable capability to quickly connect an application to multiple sources of user identities. This session will include Oracle Virtual Directory server and manager installation, configuring LDAP adapters to Microsoft AD and Sun Directory Server, configuring SSL and non-SSL directory connections, creating and configuring OVD with relational databases, as well as joins, logging, troubleshooting and support.

As part of a new whitepaper and demo I'm building for OVD - I needed to
build a sample Web Service. I have built many Web Services before but I
want to say that creating them in JDeveloper was definitely the easiest.



You create your Java class (or you can create them from WSDL) and then
run the wizard. Finally you can deploy to a number of different
application servers, though I am using the included OC4J (aka Oracle Application Server) container.



What I thought was particularly cool and useful:



1 - OC4J allows you to test your Web Services (including SOAP) from a Web Browser without needing to create a proxy client.



2 - You can generate your Web Services with both a SOAP and REST
interface. I really like this and highly recommend that unless you
generate both interfaces, in particular since it will "auto-document"
the REST interface as well as provide a WSDL file for SOAP clients. The
reason why I recommend this is because it maximizes the number of ways
clients can use your service in particular if you want to have an AJAX
based application. REST interfaces are much easier to build with REST
services than SOAP.



I used this article to help get me started.