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Posts Tagged "web 2.0"
Posted
on Jul 25, 2011 in Industry Trends, Technical Tips | 0 comments
So many of these are related, that I decided to simply list them in no specific order:
- “The technology changes/improves too rapidly, and I have fears of 1) ‘will what I am doing become old-school soon’ and 2) ‘is a new/better way of doing going to be released within a few months’.”
- “The documentation is daunting.”
- “The suggested pre-requisites and structured learning programs seem to change every few months.”
- “I have spent considerable time and money hiring smart coders that don’t take to 4GL development as readily.”
- “Code generating technologies have some negative connotations when it comes to code cleanliness, efficiency, and performance.”
- “There are ‘too many’ choices. Just show me the right way and the best practice.”
- “Deeper customization required to fit my specific implementation needs are much less 4GL and have a steeper development learning curve.”
- “There aren’t enough ‘experts’ readily available in the market that really know what they’re doing that would drive my ability to hire resources for low-to-medium cost, schedule a rapid delivery (ramp up, implement, deliver, support), or ensure what is being done is being done the ‘right way’.”
- “ADF is an end-to-end framework, so I need resources that understand the entire stack to be on the same page about the approach we are taking.”
- “This is nothing like anything I have worked with before.”
All this said, Oracle ADF is a core technology that any “Oracle shop” needs to seriously consider investing in at this point as Oracle itself continues to invest further in this as the baseline for both Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications.
Knowing what organizations are facing with ADF helps us stay one step ahead of ensuring we can help you get to where you need to be, so contact us to find out more about how we can help.
Posted
on Jun 18, 2011 in Business Strategy, News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments
Over the years, the M&S Consulting site has grown quite a bit. We have hundreds of blog articles and have retired more pages of content than are currently active. By introducing Bigmon Cloud into our environment, we realized — to our surprise — that our site was one of the slower loading sites when compared to other sites we have built, either for internal project or customers.
By using Bigmon metrics reporting and trending, we were able to test mechanisms for speeding up the site and moving performance into a place we felt was acceptable. Then, we were able to set new thresholds in Bigmon to ensure that we are notified when/if the site begins to perform in a manner that is less than optimal. Following are some of the Bigmon charts you will see that drive home the success of our updates as well as the value of Bigmon Cloud. You will see that we were able to address the performance issues immediately and the results are trending in slices of 2 hours, 1 day, and 1 week. Results have been consistent.
Posted
on May 30, 2011 in Industry Trends, Technical Tips | 0 comments
It’s not just web 2.0 developers making the push away from IE6 anymore. Microsoft is publishing the stats, and even they want people off of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).
Join the cause by pasting your own “STOP using this out-of-date browser” banner (provided by Microsoft):
<!--[if lt IE 7]> <div style=' clear: both; height: 59px; padding:0 0 0 15px; position: relative;'> <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie/home?ocid=ie6_countdown_bannercode"><img src="http://www.theie6countdown.com/images/banners/warning_bar_0000_us.jpg" border="0" height="42" width="820" alt="You are using an outdated browser. For a faster, safer browsing experience, upgrade for free today." /></a></div> <![endif]-->
IE6 usage is trending down, at 11.4% today compared to 18.7% one year ago:
China, South Korea, and India are the top 3 countries using IE6:
Posted
on May 10, 2011 in Technical Tips | 1 comment
I am amazed how difficult it was to find simple examples of exposing a hyperlink in an asp.net gridview control. I tried some obvious things that didn’t work at first, but I got four different approaches working that I thought I would share for others that run into this [I would assume] common need.
In my case, I wanted to hyperlink to an external site based, passing in the external url along with an ID passed in as a URL parameter.
For example: http://www.externalsite.com?myID=1234
Construct URL Inside SQL
This is old code that had the SQL query inside a SqlDataSource control, so I first thought of just adding the column there:
SELECT '<a href="http://www.externalsite.com?myID=' + CONVERT(VARCHAR,MY_FIELD) + '">Link</a>' Link, ...
By default, this rendered the actual HTML encoded hyperlink inside the grid: Link
This was easily remedied by either of the following approaches:
<Columns>
<asp:BoundField HtmlEncode="false" DataField="Link" HeaderText="Link" SortExpression="Link" />
</Columns>
Note: The key here is HtmlEncode="false"
<Columns>
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Link">
<ItemTemplate>
<%# Eval ("Link") %>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
</Columns>Construct URL Outside of SQL
The other two approaches do not rely on the URL being generated inside the SQL, but instead leveraging the ObjectId when constructing the URL in the GridView:
<Columns>
<asp:HyperLinkField Text="Link" Target="_blank" DataNavigateUrlFields="ObjectId" DataNavigateUrlFormatString="http://www.externalsite.com?myID={0}" />
</Columns><Columns>
<asp:TemplateField>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:HyperLink runat="server" Text="Link" Target="_blank" NavigateUrl='<%# "http://www.externalsite.com?myID=" + Eval("ObjectId")%>'></asp:HyperLink>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
</Columns>
Posted
on Apr 26, 2011 in Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments
I have been running Oracle Identity Management 10g with heavy use of 10g SSO capabilities. Much of our web security architecture along with application authentication relies on this infrastructure. What do I do as development begins to shift from OracleAS to WebLogic, and our middleware stack goes from 10g to 11g? We will need to run 10g and 11g in production side-by-side for some period of time.
This is a question many of our customers are asking and it is understandable that there is confusion around this. Oracle hasn’t provided the clearest of answers, and in general, identity management initiatives are not for the faint of heart to tackle. The fact is that 11g identity management has begun a paradigm shift away from the 10g approach. The good news is that customers have options as they inevitably run 10g and 11g together in their environments since identity management solutions span across applications and nobody [I know of] decides to upgrade all of their enterprise applications at once.
In 11g, you have the option of integrating applications (i.e. ADF 11g applications) running on WebLogic with 10g SSO through identity asserters. This approach basically passes in header information to WebLogic that enables it to “trust” a user authenticated via 10g SSO much like it would trust AD or any other form of identity assertion. As you move to an 11g identity management stack, nowhere will you find 10g SSO as you know it. You will need to buy into the OAM (Oracle Access Manager) 11g model, which includes a robust enterprise access management approach in line with 11g applications that rely on J2EE security standards like JAAS.
Posted
on Apr 22, 2011 in Case Studies, Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments
I was recently asked [again] about what platform to choose for an open source web CMS. At the highest level, and to avoid considering too many variables that introduce confusion into a decision, my general feeling on this is to go with the technology that best balances the following (in order):
- Community (users, third parties, and developers): size, enthusiasm, and proselytization
- Technology: tech stack and solution architecture
- Leaders: commitment, flexibility, release schedule
I feel the community size and enthusiasm is so important that I decided to chart out the general trends. Although we implement will all of these CMS’s successfully, we have been choosing WordPress over the others for a number of years on most CMS implementations. My own experience is that the WP community has been growing rapidly and gaining enthusiastic momentum. The below results prove it.
Overall, trends show popularity in WordPress far surpassing Joomla and Drupal over the years:
For the past year, we see WordPress in its own league of popularity:
Trends for the three solutions with the word “CMS” attached shows a slightly closer picture overall. I feel this is mainly because WordPress was initially marketed as a blogging platform. Though I’ve been using it as a CMS for quite some time, only more in the past year or two have people really embraced it as a powerful CMS:
However, when you look at the past year, again WordPress far surpasses the others:
Using these products for years, I have many insights and considerations that have yet to be put down in writing, but I hope the above provides you a little idea of one of the main variables we consider when selecting a solution for our customers.
Posted
on Apr 5, 2011 in Technical Tips | 0 comments
We are implementing a portal framework which works just fine in FireFox, but seems to act less-than-optimally in IE. Any web designers and developers know exactly what I am talking about. In researching some of the JavaScript errors that IE had identified, we found a reference to a line number in the hundreds-of-millions that I couldn’t help but share.
This is one case where I would have had more fun reading “Line #: fat chance finding this one, buddy“.
Posted
on Mar 1, 2011 in Technical Tips | 0 comments
While demoing out some ADF faces functionality to the team, I forgot that in order to build a form to save an object to the DB using the persistObject method you should…
1. Build the ADF Parameter Form using the Object’s Constructors from the Data Control.
2. Bind a button to the persistObject data control….. drag the persistObject data control onto the page and select ADF Button.
3. On the Action Binding screen, in the value column provide #{bindings.ObjectIterator.currentRow.dataProvider} as the value for parameter or use the EL builder to find the Iterator used by the form and bind it to the button.
For more information on EJB PersistObject & MergeObject see http://blogs.oracle.com/adf/2011/01/difference_between_ejb_persist_merge_operation.html
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