Oracle OpenWorld OOW 2010 – Middleware

Posted on Sep 13, 2010 in News and Updates | 0 comments

As has become tradition, I will be attending Oracle OpenWorld again this year joined by a few other M&S team members focused on Oracle Fusion Middleware. Let us know if you will be around and want to meet up. The most solid agenda items I have are the authors’ seminar for a new WebCenter 11g book we are releasing (more on that to come), a few of the SOA, BPM, Governance, and Enterprise 2.0 events with Product Management teams, and, of course, the concert.

Flex 4 & FlashBuilder Impressions – Catalyst, FXG, Spark Components

Posted on Jun 8, 2010 in Industry Trends, Technical Tips | 0 comments

This past week I was able to write a small application with the Flex 4 API and FlashBuilder. I have quite a bit of previous experience with Flex 3 and wanted to write a quick note on my first impressions of the new environment.

Vendor Code Hand-off and Review

Posted on May 10, 2010 in Business Strategy, Technical Tips | 0 comments

We are in the process of receiving code on behalf of a customer that is being delivered by a vendor. I couldn’t help but recall a comic I had once seen that sums up the mental process of analyzing code quality.

When mentally assessing someone’s code, I am generally lenient (much more so than when assessing my own team) as long as 1) it works and 2) it accomplishes the business need. Many times, there are external factors (time, money, changing requirements, etc.) that dictate the resulting code, so the “WTFs” represented in this comic don’t typically bother me too much. That’s not to say there aren’t coding practices that I find bothersome, but I’ll save that for a different post.

Virtualization – M&S Consulting

Posted on Apr 5, 2010 in Industry Trends, News and Updates | 1 comment

At M&S, we are going virtual all the way. We have delivered a number of virtualized environments for customers. Some have been for Oracle Middleware solutions, some for complete Microsoft domains. Some for open source system. And many for development instances.

We have tinkered with going totally virtual for own infrastructure over the years, but decided to avoid biting the bullet for a number of reasons: migration time/effort has typically been at the top of the list. But with the improvements in virtualization technology, advantages proven now over years, apparent “stickiness” of the leading players, our own maturity in this space, and general adoption by the community at large (more clearly read, “readily available support”), we are diving in.

Over the next few weeks and months, each component of the M&S infrastructure will be moved to virtual machines. Certain details of our infrastructure will not be posted on this blog for security reasons, but there are team members working on this who will try to keep the blog up-to-date. If you are interested in how things are going, feel free to contact us. We are excited about this ride.

Oracle Portal Broken with iPhone

Posted on Feb 3, 2010 in Technical Tips | 0 comments

SSL with Oracle Application Server WebCache and iPhone

The latest iPhone update appears to have broken some SSL-enabled OracleAS sites. We have been working through finding a solution for an Oracle Portal customer of ours and it has been fairly hairy. On at least one of the environments, we have found a solution. We can likely help if you have been having an issue with your SSL handshakes.

SQL to Query Oracle, Return XML – with SQLX

Posted on Jan 7, 2010 in Technical Tips | 0 comments

Like many days, I had a need to query data stored in Oracle. But today was different. I needed to return the data in an XML format. I started with a very simple need and generated the XML brute-force while traversing my cursor. However, I realized the data would not be escaped properly and knew/assumed Oracle has created built-in functionality to accomplish what I was trying to do.

I then recreated my logic using DBMS_XMLGEN. This worked well, in that it created the desired result set, but I hate the idea of storing SQL in a string to be passed into a function, which is precisely what DBMS_XMLGEN was having me do. I had a hard time figuring out the precise technique recommended by Oracle, or even the “latest” technique. My client’s environment was 9i, so I knew I wasn’t going to get to play with anything interesting 11g might have to offer.

My brief research showed that SQL/XML (SQLX) appeared to be the best option. A few hours later, it really has been nice. I have been able to create both simple and complex XML results. Once you have the syntax down, you can generate just about any XML structure you desire.

Let me know if you come across anything more interesting/useful than SQLX for querying Oracle RDBMS tables (not XML data stored natively in the DB), and I’ll be interested in checking it out.

Google Apps Reporting API – Not quite this easy with Exchange

Posted on Sep 4, 2009 in Industry Trends, Technical Tips | 1 comment

I have been somewhat enamored by Google Apps and its potential. Many enterprises have been happy with Exchange for mail, calendaring, contacts, and more. I have been one of those people. However, I have found Google Apps to be getting better and better for use in the enterprise and I will not be surprised to see it begin to take significantly larger chunk of market share from Microsoft over time.

Modular Flex Development – Multiple SWFs

Posted on Sep 1, 2009 in News and Updates, Technical Tips | 0 comments

I have been tasked with coming up with a modularized approach for logically separating out an extensive Flex application I am developing. I see Flex 3.4 might have some features I can take advantage of.