REST/JSON has several advantages over SOAP/XML, so it is preferred for mobile web services. As REST/JSON is a smaller than SOAP/XML, you will be passing much less data over the network. For mobile devices, it is a very important point.

In this post we will create a CRUD of employees in Oracle MAF 2.0 using REST/JSON.
I will use this REST application (Expose ADF BC as RESTful Web Service).
Download the sample application: MAFRESTJSONApp.zip.

Initialize the REST Web Service.

Create a Mobile Application Framework Application, and name it as MAFRESTJSONApp.
In the maf-feature.xml file, create a new feature and call it as employees.
Click the Content tab, and then click green plus button near File field, to create the EmployeesTF Task Flow.

Create the REST Connection.
Go to Projects panel, right-click ViewController project and choose New > From Gallery.
In the New Gallery dialog, choose General > Connections > REST Connection.
If you click Test Connection button, you will receive an error.
It is intentional, because I want to use the same REST Connection for all operations. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

There's a few things we should probably catch up on regarding Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) that you may have missed or should revisit...

1. There's a new version of Oracle MAF. Version 2.0.1 has support for iOS 8, enterprise management and security enhancements, component enhancements and enhanced tooling support.  Joe Huang covers it in detail in here. Speaking of enhance tooling support, leads to #2.

2. If you haven't heard about Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE), well, OEPE <3 MAF and isn't afraid to show it. The new release supports Eclipse Luna, Oracle Developer Cloud Service, and of course MAF 2.0.1.  Greg Stachnick covers it well here.

3. So now you have JDeveloper and Eclipse to choose from. Good! Time to put step up to the challenge. The Oracle Mobile Application challenge. Sign up of right challenge and potentially win some cash. Click here for details.

4. Want a bit of extra help? This article on mobile design patterns might help.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

Sometimes you need to dial a number from within a mobile app and for my surprise that functionality was not directly exposed through the Oracle Mobile Application Framework APIs.

Oracle MAF provides a component called Link (Go) available under the General Controls palette that can be used for navigation between pages but it can also be used to enable linking to external URLs.

Using the tel: URL scheme with the Link (Go) component gives you the capability to dial phone numbers from within an Oracle Mobile Application Framework app.

So, here is how to do it:

On your MAF page, drag and drop a Link (Go) to the Panel Page and then set the URL in the component properties to the desired phone number. You can also use a Managed Bean to set the value if you want to do some processing before displaying the number to be called. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

When you read this many of you arrived safely in Budapest and we would like to thank you and your management for investing the time to attend the Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum XX. In case you can not attend follow us online hashtag #ofmForum: www.twitter.com/soacommunity @soacommunity & www.twitter.com/wlscommunity @wlscommunity. We will also publish all presentations and training material at our Community Workspaces: SOA & BPM http://tinyurl.com/SOAworkspace & WebLogic http://tinyurl.com/WLSworkspace. If you are not yet a community member it is time to register www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa!

There will be more than 180 delegates from more than 30 countries, which will give you the opportunity to learn from other middleware minded partners and network with partners from different regions as we also have representation from Asia, North America, Latin America and the Middle-East. There also will be Oracle employees attending and we would like to invite you to challenge them how we can support you to grow your business and maintain profitability on your investment with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

During this event you will see presentations from Product Management, Pre-Sales Consultants and Partners, that will share their real life experiences with you how to implement Oracle Fusion Middleware and to see the business drivers behind these projects.

Focus of the 20^th Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum will be Middleware and Cloud Computing. At Oracle OpenWorld 2014 many new Platform as a Services (PaaS) have been announced. The Partner Community Forum is one of the first opportunities to get details and hands-on trainings about Integration Cloud Service (ICS), Process Cloud Service (PCS) and Java Cloud & Developer Cloud Service. Oracle PaaS Services give partners many new opportunities to build, customize and integrate applications in a public cloud environment. Our joint customers will benefit from this new cloud offering by fast time to market, higher availability and flexibility, lower project cost an risks. Cloud marketplace gives you as a partner new opportunities to build, deploy and promote and market offerings on the Oracle PaaS Cloud.

We are excited that Amit Zavery will highlight this new PaaS Services in this keynote. In our second keynote Andrew Sutherland will give you an update on the middleware platform. You might have seen our new branding “The Cloud Platform for Digital Business”. Digital is changing the economy, our joint customers face this challenge, Fusion Middleware is the platform you can build new Digital solutions either in the Cloud on on-premises.

Thanks to our product management team you will get details updates including demos for SOA Suite, BPM Suite and our mobile solutions. We would like to congratulate the annual winners of the Fusion Middleware Partner Community Awards. You will have the opportunity to learn direct from them why they have won the awards. On Tuesday evening during our social event you will have plenty of opportunity for deep discussion within the community and speakers.

On the second day you can choose between 3 tracks: SOA, BPM and WebLogic & Mobile / ADF. Thursday and Friday you can choose between 5 hands-on bootcamps. During the conference we will also run our Partner Exchange exhibition. Please take the opportunity to talk to the product management at the demo point and to the partners who exhibit their solutions.

We would like to encourage you to network within the community using our web2.0 features. For twitter please use the event hashtag #ofmForum:

www.twitter.com/soacommunity @soacommunity

www.twitter.com/wlscommunity @wlscommunity

Like our Facebook pages and post comments and pictures at: www.facebook.com/WebLogicCommunity www.facebook.com/soacommunity

We also want to give a special thank you to our Specialized partners for SOA, BPM, WebLogic and ADF that have been able to differentiate themselves in their local markets by showing their experience and commitment in Oracle Fusion Middleware. To continue your road to success please ensure that you align with our local Fusion Middleware sales teams and use our marketing services including the ACT on marketing campaigns.

Conference Guide app & online

Conference details will be posted in the Oracle Events 15 App for Android and iOS. To get access to the Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum Apps please:

· Make sure you downloaded the app "Oracle Events 15"

· Click on EventID

· Input “fusmid” in the box

· Click download

Or download the conference program as a pdf file at our Community Workspaces:

• SOA & BPM Community Workspace http://tinyurl.com/SOAworkspace
  
• WebLogic Community Workspace http://tinyurl.com/WLSworkspace
  

Welcome to Budapest!

Learn, Share and Connect

Your conference chair

Jürgen Kress

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

Our WebLogic Community has more than 1000 members and we continue to grow fast. Key is that you are trained and certified on WebLogic. In this week’s campaign we give away free “WebLogic Server 12c: Distinctive Recipes” books for WebLogic 12c PreSales Specialist.

You can become a certified WebLogic 12c PreSales Specialist free of charge (OPN membership required). Certified experts are recognized by our customers and partners. Make sure you add your certifications to your resume and company proposals. As part of the WebLogic Community we offer free WebLogic online trainings:

• WebLogic 12c PreSales Specialist (OPN account required – need help?)
  
• WebLogic Bootcamp training material (Community membership required)WebLogic Knowledge Zone Overview
  
• Learning Library WebLogic on-demand trainings
  

Contest begins March 2^nd and contest ends March 7^th 2015

To win one of 10 “WebLogic Server 12c: Distinctive Recipes” books send us a screenshot of your WebLogic Server 12c PreSales Specialist certificate via Twitter #WebLogicCommunity or write a comment here on the blog!

Winners: First 10 persons who send us a screenshot with the WebLogic PreSales certificate will receive a book.

Note: We can only ship the book to winners in Europe, Middle East and Africa!

Note: In case you win one of the books we ask you to write a book review on Amazon.com

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

I was inspired by recently published WorkBetter application with ADF 12c Alta UI demo (you can read more about Alta UI and download WorkBetter application from here - Oracle Alta UI). I have decided to create my own application, using the same guidelines as described by Alta UI. While WorkBetter application is based on EJB, my application is using regular ADF BC model. Right now it displays a list of employees from HR schema and allows to edit selected employee data. In the future, I plan to add CRUD support and more advanced UI features. I would recommend to watch a video from Shay Shmeltzer, he describes how to build your first Alta UI application in ADF.
Here you can download my sample application, implemented with Alta UI - ADFAltaUI.zip. This application implements ADF task flow with employees data. By default, employees data is displayed as a list (you should see how it differs comparing to pre-Alta ADF UI, now UI is much cleaner and only essential data is displayed):
According to Alta UI guidelines, user should be given an option to switch to a grid view. This is useful and gives different perspective for the data view: Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

Mobile Application Framework 2.0.1.2.0 Release Notes

Bugs Fixed In This Release

Get MAF here

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

The Oracle ADF team is happy to announce the release of the Oracle Alta Workbetter ADF application sample.

You can now get the complete source code for this sample application, so you can further learn how to develop cool user interfaces with Oracle ADF Faces that implement the Oracle Alta UI design patterns.

At the last Oracle OpenWorld conference where we announced Oracle Alta UI, we got great reactions from people who saw the new Alta UI in our new cloud services and apps. And with Oracle ADF Faces it is very easy to implement these type of user interfaces in your application too.

The WorkBetter sample application is aimed at highlighting various aspects of Oracle Alta UI design patterns, and by looking at the source code you can learn how to implement each part of it. The application is hosted here so you can play with it. Here is a quick video that shows you how the application looks and behaves at runtime. You can get the source for the application from the Oracle ADF Sample Page. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

Dear WebLogic Partner Community,

Are you ready for Digital Business in the Cloud? 2015 will be all about PaaS middleware Cloud computing. Watch Thomas Kurian interview & Cloud Platform Online Forum is now available on-demand.The theme of our 20th Oracle Partner Community Forumwill is also “The Cloud Platform for Digital Business”.
When you make your 2015 marketing plan make sure you use the our content and marketing services including Events.Oracle.com & Solutions Catalog and Marketing Campaign material  WebLogic & ADF & SOA & BPM. Use the Hosted Demo Systems at Oracle to show your customers a live Fusion Middleware Demo!

In our WebLogic section we highlight the WebLogic 12.2.1 & Coherence Roadmap presentation from Oracle OpenWorld 2014. Thanks to Bruno Borges and Frank Munz WebLogic is available on Docker. In the next days we will give a whole box from Frank’s books “WebLogic Server 12c: Distinctive Recipes: Architecture, Development and Administration” make sure you read our blog and follow us one twitter to get one!

Thanks to the community for all the excellent WebLogic articles about Private PaaS Online Assessment & Fusion Middleware public Maven Repository & WebLogic Documentation Survey & Spinning-up a Coherence Cluster & Clone an Existing WebLogic Domain & Coherence, WebLogic and Java SE 8 & Coherence: Explaining the 3 different cache types & Securing Coherence & WebLogic Server Plug-in for Java Mission Control & Using the WebLogic Embedded EJB Container & Avoiding Memory Leaks in Exalogic & Java Cloud & Java and IoT & Java EE 7 Hands-on Lab - free

In our development tool section you can now become an Oracle certified expert for Mobile Development 2015 Implementation Specialist Certification! Andrejus and Waslley published several MAF articles on MAF 2.0: Using Local Database , MAF 2.1 - Debugger , MAF iOS Simulator and Mobile Suite. Thanks to the community for all the excellent development tool articles JpsAnonymousRoleImpl in ADF Using ADF BC Declarative Built-in Rules & Custom Login Page using Login Bean in ADF & Custom selection listener & Deploy ADF Library Jar

See You all in Budapest!
Jürgen Kress

To read the complete newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/weblogicNewsFebruary2015 (OPN Account required)

To become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki

I had to estimate the effort for decoding a Base64 encoded message. Honestly A reminder to self (and for others working in the dark spheres of lowest level integration).

Python / WLST

You can easily decode a Base64 message in Python. With WebLogic installed this obviously is working with WLST (also in offline mode). No imports, no nothing, no questions asked:

‘Base64Encoded_String’.decode(‘base64′)

Online (I am tempted to write PaaS )

For a quick I-need-to-get-this-decoded solution try one of the online services such as

https://www.base64decode.org which is working pretty well for me.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

LDAP servers can be configured to use as authenticator in Weblogic Server. In order to efficiently use an LDAP server, it must be possible to uniquely identify LDAP objects. GUID (global universal identifier) attributes can be used as unique identifier for an LDAP object. There are several specific and some more generic LDAP authentication providers available for Weblogic Server. The specific authentication providers have default GUID (global universal identifier) attributes (see here at ‘Use of GUID and LDAP DN Data in WebLogic Principals’). When using the generic Weblogic Server LDAPAuthenticator, there is no default GUID attribute. In order for LDAP caching to work and to allow browsing of group memberships for users, the GUID attribute needs to be defined. The entryUUID is a good candidate for this since every LDAP server should support it. See RFC 4530. Also see here.

In my example, I’ve used the user ‘maarten’ to authenticate myself with when logging into Weblogic Server. The user ‘maarten’ is member of the groups Administrators and DummyGroup. The debug information was acquired by setting the DebugSecurityAtn flag as described here. Weblogic Server 12.1.3.0.0 was used and ApacheDS 2.0.0 as LDAP server. For the configuration of ApacheDS/Weblogic Server, I’ve used the following: http://technology.amis.nl/2014/08/03/ldap-weblogic-using-apacheds-authentication-provider/.

GUID Attribute set to entryUUID

In the below example, the GUID attribute is set to ‘entryUUID’. As you can see, the GUID is correctly determined and there where no errors during authentication. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

I'm about to embark on a journey that explores the use of WebLogic Server within a DevOps regime.  My first port of call for this journey will be using Chef.
A loose travel itinerary is:

• Setting up an environment to explore the basic operations of Chef - using the Chef Development Kit (ChefDK)
• Exploring the basics of how Chef works to install Java and WebLogic Server on a single node
• Installing and examining some of the existing cookbooks that are available for Java and WebLogic Server
• Extending the environment to provision multiple nodes to create a typical multiple machine clustered WebLogic Server environment

I've started working on the first task, where I've also explored using Docker to create an isolated, reusable and easily shareable environment that contains the ChefDK.
The Docker project is here on GitHub:

• https://github.com/buttso/chef-docker
  

I also tried a quick experiment with using Oracle Linux as the base docker image:

• https://github.com/buttso/chef-docker-ol
  

The Dockerfile contains the set of instructions required to install the ChefDK and the necessary utilities into the docker image when it is built. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

We have just released Coherence 12.1.3.0.1, (Patch 18378184) which is the first patch set on top of 12.1.3.  As part of this patch there are a few updates to the Coherence JVisualVM Plugin that improve the range of functionality that we can support, a couple of UI tweaks as well as addressing an issue monitoring Coherence clusters in WebLogic Server environments.

The feature highlights are:

1. Added a tab for displaying information about Elastic Data

2. Added a tab for display JCache Information when using Coherence to store JCache (JSR-107) caches

3. Additional metrics to track partitions stats graphically for a service

4. Displaying extra details for some data via drill down.

Displaying Elastic Data Information

We have added support for displaying a tab when you are using Elastic Data. We support clusters running 3.7.x and above and display information about both the Ram Journal and Flash Journal usage as well as the number of compactions taking place. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

Today one of the Adminservers failed to re-start and was flooding the AdminServer.out with multiple EmbeddedLDAP java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundException messages per second. I do admit, this is not the first article about how to recover from this issue, and probably not the last. Although i was able to Google multiple articles and blogs on this exception, all of the suggested solutions left me with a seed embedded LDAP. The good news is that  by default a backup is made of the embedded LDAP every day at 23:05 and the last 7 copies are retained. You can find these setting by selecting the domain in the domainstructure of the Weblogic console and then open the tab Security > Embedded LDAP.

So you can recover fully from a corrupt Weblogic embedded LDAP server, just follow these few steps.

· Shutdown admin server

· Move the current data directory so you can access it later.
mv <domain_home>/servers/AdminServer/data to <domain_home>/servers/AdminServer/data.bkp

· Start the admin server Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki

The Nashorn JavaScript engine is one of many improvements in JDK 8. Nashorn (German for Rhino) is a faster replacement for the previous JavaScript engine known as Rhino. There is also another noteworthy feature: the ability to run many Node.js and io.js applications in the JVM. These applications can then call back and forth between optimized Java libraries and automatically receive monitoring capabilities through JMX.

In the upcoming JDK 8 update 40, it is planned to improve Nashorn / JavaScript performance even further through optimistic typing.

Java Virtual Machine - More than just Java

The Java Platform offers a way to run different types of applications, even if those applications are not written in the Java programming language. As a result, developers can take advantage of optimizations and stability of the JVM, while system administrators can better control and monitor deployments.

Examples of other languages on the JVM include: JavaScript (Nashorn), Ruby (JRuby), Python (Jython), Scala, Groovy, and many others.

Project Avatar – A JavaScript services layer on the JVM

Avatar.js is a project to bring the node programming model, APIs and module ecosystem to the Java platform. Although written in JavaScript, these applications can take advantage of the Java platform's scalability, manageability, tools, and extensive collection of Java libraries and middleware. After downloading the Avatar.js binaries, developers can then execute their applications. For example, Tim Caswell’s article "Hello Node!" contains basic examples for hello-console.js and hello-http.js that can be used as a basic way for testing Avatar.

Nashorn, The Hidden Weapon of JDK 8 was presented at the Silicon Valley Java User Group meeting in December 2014. The available slides describe the use of Nashorn and Avatar at Netflix and provide additional Nashorn demos.

Avoid rewrites and re-use libraries

One major benefit of running serverside JavaScript applications within the JVM is access to Java libraries. Developers do not have to rewrite major libraries or functionality like SQL or NoSQL drivers, Hadoop clients, encoding libraries, etc. Additional examples are available in a previous post, Nashorn: the rhino in the room, but they are not specific to Node.js.

Niko Köbler has a two-part article about Avatar 2.0 and its Model Store API. By using this model store API, developers can more easily interact with SQL and No-SQL and benefit from many existing optimizations.

1. Part 1 explains the architecture and threading model.
2. Part 2 covers the technology behind the Model Store API.

Monitoring Applications on the JVM

All Java processes can be monitored through a mechanism called JMX. System Administrators can enable remote authenticated JMX connections and see inside these running applications, rather than monitoring from the outside coming in.

Additional details about JMX monitoring (both local and remote) can be found in a previous post, Deep Monitoring with JMX.

Monitoring applications with Mission Control / Flight Recorder

Java Flight Recorder is an effective way of monitoring JVM applications in production. Unlike standard development profilers (like the NetBeans profiler), Flight Recorder has negligible performance impact.

The dashboard view in Mission Control provides basic information about CPU and memory resources. Developers may use the Threads tab to better understand system throughput, or if the application is blocking around any particular resources.

To open Mission Control, run the jmc command and connect to your Avatar application. The screenshot below shows Mission Control monitoring a Node.js application identified as com.oracle.avatar.Server. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Blog Twitter LinkedIn Forum Wiki