Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Running ALI on SQL Server 2005 Express

    1. Download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. As with SQL Server 2000, make sure you select “mixed” authentication mode instead of Windows only.
    2. Download and install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express.
    3. Open the Management Studio and create your database. Then, right click on the database and set “SQL Server 2000 Compatibility Mode.”
    4. Create your database user and grant rights to the new database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
    5. Script your database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
    6. Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration, select Protocols for SQL2005. Double click on TCP/IP and make sure that it’s enabled and set to run on a static port (1433) for all IP addresses.

You should be good to go! (Remember that this is not a configuration supported by BEA, but it works well for development purposes.)

Comments

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  • Cool. I think ALI also works on Oracle 10g XE. I will give it a shot next week.

    Posted by: twang on February 8, 2008 at 10:28 PM

    • Indeed it does. You might want to refer to this post for tips on getting ALI running on Oracle 10g XE on Linux. Some of the tips probably apply to Windows too.

      Posted by: bucchere on February 9, 2008 at 8:11 AM

Categories
Business Software Development

Twitter down again?

twitter-down-againWith the amount of downtime that twitter experiences, it makes me wonder whether or not Ruby on Rails is a viable alternative to PHP, Java, etc.

Is it the platform (RoR) or is it just bad code from Twitter? Or something else entirely?

Categories
bdg Business Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0 (in six parts)

Back in November of 2007 I gave a one-hour talk in Tyson’s Corner, VA entitled “The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0.” There were probably about thirty people in attendance. Since then, I’ve had several people tell me that they were sorry they missed the talk, etc. If you were one of those people, these next six posts are for you.

Why I am delivering this content in a six-part series?

I don’t have a video streaming server set up nor do I care to put one up and pay for the bandwidth. So, YouTube is an obvious solution to the hosting and bandwidth problem. Unfortunately, YouTube has a ten-minute limit on the length of uploaded videos. So, I needed to edit my talk into six, ten-minute clips.

Therein lies the problem.

What I’m learning in the process is that HD video editing is hard, even on a Mac. The first problem is space: I’ve got about five gigs of raw footage. My conversion program, Voltaic, was choking near the end of each 2 Gb conversion, so I switched to a PC (for shame!) and used the software that came with the camera (a Sony HDR-SR5) to convert from MTS (raw AVCHD format) to MPEG-2. Then I needed to buy a program from Apple for $19.99 (thanks for nickel-n-dime’n me, Steve) to convert from MPEG-2 to MOV (QuickTime format). Now I’m importing into iMovieHD. Each one of these conversions takes about two hours and has an output between 2x and 12x the size of the original MTS file! That means, just to be safe, you need like 15Gb of scratch space to edit a 1Gb movie! On top of the space issue, I’ve hit Google already dozens of times to figure out how to deal with things like frame rates, aspect ratios, sound compression, format conversion, and so on, ad infinitum.

And this is supposed to be easy! I’m on a Mac for goodness’s sake!

So, why am I ranting about my video editing woes in a post that’s purportedly about the enterprise relevance of Web 2.0? Because I think there’s a lesson to be learned from all this.

If personal computing is this challenging, that does not bode well for the enterprise, where everything is 10-100 times more expensive and 10-100 times more complicated.

Is this a good thing? For me and my company, maybe, because we’re making a living trying to make sense of the complexities of the enterprise and building user interfaces that help abstract people away from all the complexity so that they can do their jobs effectively.

But to truly bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise, we need to take these concepts — abstracting, simplifying, beautifying and “social-ifying” — enterprise applications down to the point at which they’re simple, beautiful and fun to use, all the while maintaining their power and utility. The experience people have using corporate software should mirror the experience they have using well designed, functional sites like Netflix, Facebook, Wishlistr, Dopplr and Kayak.

Most people writing corporate/enterprise software these days — with a few notable exceptions like 37 Signals (the makers of Campfire, Basecamp and Highrise) — are stuck in a function-over-form rut that’s really hindering the process of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Those of you who have had the pleasure of using AquaLogic Pages know that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Software can be both fun and functional at the same time.

So that’s an awfully long-winded and angst-ridden introduction to my six-part series on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. If any of the above struck a chord with you and resonated even a little bit, then I highly recommend that you check out the forthcoming videos.

That is, assuming that I actually succeed in producing them!

While you’re waiting for the videos, you can check out the slide deck.

[metaslider id=954]

 

Comments

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  • Chris, enjoyed your post. I’ve got a little one on the way so I imagine I’ll have to understand all of the video nuances of encodings/converstions soon for youtubing for the grandparents. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as easy as I thought! James

    Posted by: jbayer on January 23, 2008 at 7:44 AM

Categories
Feedhaus

An International Phenomenon

Feedhaus is making quite a splash internationally. Lately, we’ve gotten news coverage in German (of course), Spanish, French (again), Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese!

Categories
bdg dev2dev Featured Posts Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Write an ALUI IDS in Under 15 Lines Using Ruby on Rails

Not only is it possible to write an ALUI Identity Service in Ruby on Rails, it’s remarkably easy. I was able to do the entire authentication part in fewer than 15 lines of code! However, I ran into problems on the synchronization side and ended up writing that part in Java. Read on for all the gory details.

As part of building the suite of social applications for BEA Participate 2008, we’re designing a social application framework in Ruby on Rails and integrating it with ALI 6.5. Not being a big fan of LDAP, I decided to put the users of the social application framework in the database (which is MySQL). Now, when we integrate with ALI, we need to sync this user repository (just as many enterprises do with Active Directory or LDAP).

So I set out to build an IDS to pull in users, groups and memberships in Ruby on Rails.

It’s pretty obvious that Ruby on Rails favors REST over SOAP for their web service support. However, they still support SOAP for interoperability and it mostly works. I did have to make one patch to Ruby’s core XML processing libraries to get things humming along. I haven’t submitted the patch back to Ruby yet, but at some point I will. Basically, the problem was that the parser didn’t recognize the UTF-8 encoding if it was enclosed in quotes (“UTF-8”). This patch suggestion guided me in the right direction, but I ended up doing something a little different because the suggested patch didn’t work.

I changed line 27 of lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/encoding.rb as follows:

 enc = enc.nil? ? nil : enc.upcase.gsub('"','') #that's a double quote inside single quotes

Now that Ruby’s XML parser recognized UTF-8 as a valid format, it decided that it didn’t support UTF-8! To work around this, I installed iconv, which is available for Windows and *nix and works seamlessly with Ruby. In fact, after installation, all the XML parsing issues went bye-bye.

Now, on to the IDS code. From your rails project, type:

ruby script/generate web_service Authenticate

This creates app/apis/authenticate_api.rb. In that file, place the following lines of code:

class AuthenticateApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
 api_method :Authenticate, :expects => [{:Username =>
:string}, {:Password =>
:string}, {:NameValuePairs =>
[:string]}], :returns =>
[:string]
end

All you’re doing here is extending ActionWebService and declaring the input/output params for your web service. Now type the following command:

ruby script/generate controller Authenticate

This creates the controller, where, if you stick with direct dispatching (which I recommend), you’ll be doing all the heavy lifting. (And there isn’t much.) This file should contain the following:

class AuthenticateController < ApplicationController
 web_service_dispatching_mode :direct
 wsdl_service_name 'Authenticate'
 web_service_scaffold :invoke

 def Authenticate(username, password, nameValuePairs)
   if User.authenticate(username, password)
     return ""
   else
     raise "-102" #generic username/password failure code
   end
 end
end

Replace User.authenticate with whatever mechanism you’re using to authenticate your users. (I’m using the login_generator gem.) That’s all there is to it! Just point your AWS to http://localhost:3000/authenticate/api and you’re off to the races.

Now, if you want to do some functional testing (independently of the portal), rails sets up a nice web service scaffold UI to let you invoke your web service and examine the result. Just visit http://localhost:3000/authenticate/invoke to see all of that tasty goodness.

There you have it — a Ruby on Rails-based IDS for ALUI in fewer than 15 lines of code!

The synchronization side of the IDS was almost just as simple to write, but after countless hours of debugging, I gave up on it and re-wrote it in Java using the supported ALUI IDK. Although I never could quite put my finger on it, it seemed the problem had something to do with some subtleties about how BEA’s XML parser was handing UTF-8 newlines. I’ll post the code here just in case anyone has an interest in trying to get it to work. Caveat: this code is untested and currently it fails on the call to GetGroups because of the aforementioned problems.

In app/apis/synchronize_api.rb:

class SynchronizeApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
 api_method :Initialize, :expects =>
[{:NameValuePairs =>
[:string]}], :returns =>
[:integer]
 api_method :GetGroups, :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :GetUsers, :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :GetMembers, :expects =>
[{:GroupID => :string}], :returns =>
[[:string]]
 api_method :Shutdown
end

In app/controllers/synchronize_controller.rb:

class SynchronizeController < ApplicationController
  web_service_dispatching_mode :direct
  wsdl_service_name 'Synchronize'
  web_service_scaffold :invoke

  def Initialize(nameValuePairs)
    session['initialized'] = true
    return 2
  end

  def GetGroups()
    if session['initialized']
      session['initialized'] = false
      groups = Group.find_all
      
      groupNames = Array.new
      for group in groups
        groupNames << "<SecureObject Name=\"#{group.name}\" AuthName=\"#{group.name}\" UniqueName=\"#{group.id}\"/>" 
      end 
      return groupNames
    else
      return nil
    end
  end
  
  def GetUsers()
    if session['initialized']
      session['initialized'] = false
      users = User.find_all
      
      userNames = Array.new
      for user in users
        userNames << "<SecureObject Name=\"#{user.login}\" AuthName=\"#{user.login}\" UniqueName=\"#{user.id}\"/>" 
      end
      
      return userNames
    else
      return nil
    end
  end

  def Shutdown()
    return nil
  end
end

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Nice post, Chris. This is the first time I’ve seen this done!

    Posted by: dmeyer on January 20, 2008 at 4:16 PM

  • Thank you, David.I just noticed that part of my sync code was chomped off in the blog post because WordPress was assuming that was actually an opening HTML/XML tag. I made the correction so the above code now accurately reflects what I was testing.

    Posted by: bucchere on January 21, 2008 at 1:16 PM

Categories
Feedhaus

Feedhaus Featured on The Web 2.0 Show

Josh Owens and Chris Saylor of The Web 2.0 Show interviewed me for their podcast. Give it a listen.

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

One Portal to Rule Them All

I won’t rehash what’s already been said by everyone in the press and the blogosphere — Oracle is buying BEA. I wrote almost three years ago that this was inevitable, and now it’s upon us.

I’m hopeful that the BEA/Oracle management crew can take what they learned from the Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline (for BEA) and Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oblix (for Oracle) acquisitions and apply it to the challenges their own merger presents.

Over the past three years, Oracle has acquired dozens of companies. The most notable were probably PeopleSoft (which had just acquired JD Edwards, if I remember correctly), Siebel and Oblix, which gave them a great suite of HR apps, CRM apps and identity management, respectively. These were all enterprise software products that Oracle had, with a modicum of success, built on their own from the ground up, sold and supported as “Oracle Apps.”

Of course, with almost every major company they’ve acquired, Oracle has picked up a portal product. (And with BEA, there’s a special bonus — they get two: WLP and ALI.)

That’s going to create a portal soup consisting of at least the following ingredients:

  • Siebel Portal
  • JD Edwards Portal
  • PeopleSoft Portal
  • Oracle Portal (part of Oracle Fusion Middleware)
  • WLP
  • ALI

Oracle won’t want to endanger existing customer relationships by terminating support for the non-horizontal portals from Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. Besides, the word “portal” really only loosely applies there, because those “portals” are really just web UIs into Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.

But what about the horizontal portals: Oracle, WLP and ALI?

They are all playing in the same space. It’s already questionable that we need all three in the market now. And three under the same circle-shaped roof that is Oracle? Absurd.

What will Oracle do with this portal quandary?

Well, I think they’ll do the only thing they can do and support all the products. So that covers legacy customers, but what about future customers? If I’m an Oracle sales rep and my customer wants to buy a portal to front their SOA stack, what on earth do I sell them?

In my opinion, which is just that — my opinion — post-merger, there need to be some decisive acts from Oracle regarding the future direction of their portal strategy.

And, again, IMO, this is where the ALI portal and the ALUI suite of products (formerly Plumtree) can really shine. Why? Because not only can you front Java, .NET, Rails, PHP and any other web application stack with ALI, but ALI already has integration kits for Siebel, PeopleSoft, JSR-168, WSRP and five different flavors of SSO, including Oblix! (Not to mention the obvious fact that since day one, ALI has run beautifully on Windows and *nix systems using Oracle’s bread-and-butter product, their database.) So naturally, if you’re an Oracle shop running a clustered Oracle DB for storage, Siebel for CRM, PeopelSoft for HR, Oracle Financials for the books and Oblix Identity Management, no other product under the sun has more pre-packaged, no-brainer integration and integration options than ALI.

It may be a hard, bloody battle to get Oracle to drop it’s own beloved portal product in favor of AquaLogic Interaction, but I think it’s a battle that needs to be fought.

Same goes for WLP. In fact, I think every product acquired by Oracle has to fight for it’s life and fight to be the #1 product in the space, retiring the others to “maintenance and support” but focusing all futures on the product that is rightfully #1. And I think — and hope — that Oracle has the good sense and the wherewithal to encourage this.

It may cause some near term pain, but taking a longer-term view it’s the right thing to do.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Interesting post, Chris. Obviously this is something we ALUI consultants have been considering in the past few days. One monkeywrench I have for you: as far as I know, Oracle offers their portal product for free to existing customers, whereas we (obviously) charge for it. I wonder how that kind of business model might change the landscape of how the ALUI portal is distributed/used.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 7:02 AM

  • Funny you should mention the price issue. About two years ago, we had a customer switch from ALI to Oracle portal for that exact reason. Why pay for licenses and support for ALUI products when Oracle gives you the portal for free? That customer still calls on us for ALUI support, so apparently the migration hasn’t gone exactly as planned.Two old adages come to mind here:
    1. You get what you pay for.
    2. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

    Regarding #1, the products really don’t cover the same feature set — Oracle portal cannot be the gateway to SOA that we all know ALUI is, so it’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison.

    Regarding #2, with any free software, whether it’s from a large company like Oracle or from the Apache Software Foundation, you always need to think about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If you need to build services integration points in Oracle Portal to talk to all of Oracle’s other products, that adds to your TCO. Moreover, if somebody is giving something away, what sort of quality expectations do you have about the product? What happens if you need to request support from Oracle or ask them to develop a patch for you? All of a sudden, the fact that you didn’t pay for the software comes back and bites you in the butt. 🙂

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 7:23 AM

  • I guess I agree with you, since I’m not an Oracle portal consultant (not yet, anyway); but I think the bigger question is how Oracle will assimilate these new portals given its current pricing strategy (aka – the bloody war you speak of). If I were an existing Oracle customer, the first question I’d ask is “how come I can get XYZ portal for free but not ABC portal”. And if I’m Oracle product management, I’m thinking about how my current “free portal” strategy has been working out for me versus the ALUI model of charging for it.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 8:22 AM

  • You’re right — the big issue is how will Oracle deal with the portals they’re acquiring and will there be a shakedown or more of a graceful assimilation.There’s a similar issue with WLS and Oracle’s application server, although I think in that case the answer is a little less complicated. 😉

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 8:32 AM

  • Of course you completely forgot to mention Oracle WebCenter. In spite of your assertions, there are only 2 portal products at Oracle. Oracle Portal and WebCenter. WebCenter is the future “face” of Fusion Applications, so any integration of portal products will move in that direction. IMHO….plumtree is as proprietary as Oracle Portal, and its dead. WLP and the folks on the WebCenter team will need to figure out how to integrate the code bases of those two products since they are the most similar in their support of Web 2.0 futures.

    Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on January 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM

  • Thanks for the correction about Oracle WebCenter — I’m not too familiar with Oracle products other than the DB and I should have done more homework before posting this!However, I still disagree that there are only two portals at Oracle. I’m not too sure about JDE, but I remember with 100% certainty that PeopleSoft and Siebel called their UIs “portals.” They’re not truly portals in a horizontal sense like Oracle Portal, WebCenter, WLP and ALUI and I don’t think they’re actually relevant to this discussion, so it’s a moot point.

    Now, given the four remaining portal products, I challenge your assertion that WebCenter and WLP “support Web 2.0 futures” and I’d like to see some examples that support that claim. As far as I know, the only products coming out of BEA that deserve the “Web 2.0” label are AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. (Note I don’t include ALI itself as a Web 2.0 product, despite the fact that ALI 6.5 has some pretty slick social features that might someday earn it that distinction.)

    I also take issue with your calling Plumtree/ALUI proprietary and I’m not sure what makes you make that claim. It’s written in Java and ported to C#.net, so it runs “natively” on IIS (which no other products from BEA or Oracle can do). Its Java version (from the same source base), runs on WebSphere, WLS, Tomcat and probably JBoss and other app servers and it supports both Oracle and SQL Server, so in terms of how and where you can run it, it’s probably the most open and flexible product in the entire 40+ product lineup that BEA boasts.

    That’s just one side of the proprietary vs. open argument. The other is how well one supports standards for plugging in functionality. In those terms, I think ALUI stands out from the pack as well. It supports portlets over two very well supported standards: HTTP and HTML, which again makes it the most flexible portlet development environment on the market. (You can develop ALI portlets using ANY web server that speaks HTTP and I’ve personally done so using Java, .NET, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails and even Domino if you can believe that.) It also supports JSR-168 and WSRP. (In reading about WebCenter, all portlet development documentation was Java-centric, so I’m not sure if they support any other kind of portlet development, e.g. .NET. It’s crucial that any product which claims to be the “face of SOA” supports at least Java and .NET development and plugins; however, many would argue that you need to support much more — e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.)

    Leaving portlets out of the picture for a moment, consider the other ALUI integration points: AWS, PWS, CWS and SWS. All of them use SOAP, which is a documented open standard. In fact, in my next blog post (which went up last night), I talk about how I integrated a custom MySQL/Ruby on Rails user store with ALI using a Rails-based SOAP-driven web service to interface with ALI’s user management system. It just doesn’t get any more open than that. At last year’s Participate conference, I demonstrated how you could use the ALI “face” to front WLS applications written to run on the WL message bus and communicating with data stores using DSP, proving that you integrate ALUI products with pretty much anything. I would like to see how a WebCenter consultant or a WLS guy would approach integrating Siebel or PeopleSoft, two products now in the Oracle family.

    I may make many “assertions” (as you call them), but they’re backed up by solid facts. I’m open to continuing this dialog because I want to hear more facts about 1) how you perceive ALUI as a proprietary technology and 2) how WLP and WebCenter claim to support “Web 2.0.”

    Posted by: bucchere on January 20, 2008 at 6:10 PM

  • Out of respect of SEC rules, I won’t touch the Oracle topic. But as for WebLogic Portal (WLP)…2) how WLP … claim to support “Web 2.0.”There are a bunch of features that contribute to the overall Web 2.0 story for WLP. Look at the WLP Groupspace application, for example. Web 2.0 is about publishing social applications that get better the more people use them. Groupspace is such an app. It is first a packaged social app ready to go out of the box, but secondly shows off many of the WLP features in the area of “Web 2.0”.

    Groupspace doc link (community framework, RSS, Groupnotes (think wiki), discussion forums, shared document repository, calendar, contacts, etc, etc).

    Also, read up on Josh Lannin’s blog to see what will be out shortly in terms of WLP and REST, more Ajax, more Portlet Publishing (Google Gadgets, RoR, PHP, etc). Lannin’s WLP futures

    Cheers – PJL

    Posted by: plaird on January 21, 2008 at 8:30 PM