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

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • 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

Apple’s Subtle F.U. to Microsoft

pc_blue_screen_of_deathWe’ve come a long way since 1997, when Microsoft invested $150M in the beleaguered Apple, perhaps so that there would still be a platform on which to run Microsoft’s Office for the Mac.

Fast-forward ten years to 2007 — starting with the eye candy iMacs and then iPods in every shape, size and color, and now with the iPhone, Apple has risen from the ashes in perhaps what is the greatest corporate comeback of all time.

Now, with the release of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) last week, Apple has delivered a fine — albeit subtle — slap in the face to Microsoft. The icon for a PC server shows the PC displaying the infamous blue screen of death. As if the “I’m Mac/I’m PC” ads weren’t enough. . . .

Categories
Software Development

Adventures in desktop linux

I’ve had such a good experience using Fedora on several of bdg’s enterprise systems (SugarCRM, Subversion, Bugzilla, Vetrics, Connotea, etc.) that I thought I would give desktop linux a shot.

What a mistake.

Actually, it was a good learning experience. But still, a mistake.

First I download Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) using BitTorrent. My first problem was mastering the ISO files to CD. Windows has no native support for this (surprise) and for the life of me I couldn’t find a free product without filesize restrictions or other issues. Finally I remembered that I had a purchased a license for Sateira DropToCD some time ago, so I attempted to use that miserable excuse for a program. I tried to burn the five CDs at 24x (~10 minutes each) and my computer would not recognize them. The CD-Rs, once burned, were useless, yet Windows did not show any data on them nor a volume label.

I did a little Googling and then remembered that I needed to burn at 4x in order to get Fedora Core 4 (and Solaris x86 — another mistake) to work. So I tried that (at ~30 minutes per CD) and again, total failure. Finally I used a real operating system, OS X, running on my wife’s Mac laptop, to create the ISOs. (Of course OS X has built in support for ISO burning that works like a charm.)

After all this nonsense, I was finally ready to install FC5. So I backed up all my company files, music, photos and other stuff to my Western Digital 250 Gb external firewire drive and off I went.

I must say, there are some nice things about FC5. Unfortunately, it’s a short list:

  1. The installer, Anaconda, is awesome.
  2. The graphic design is beautiful.
  3. Wireless networking just works.
  4. Firewire just works.

So I was off to a running start. But here is where my problems began. At the top of my shit list is CodeWeavers‘ CrossOver Office. What a complete piece of garbage. From all their press releases, I was led to believe that they actually supported some useful Windows programs such as Office and, more recently, iTunes on various flavors of Linux. Don’t believe what you read. It’s all lies. Damn lies.

I started with Office 2003. That just failed utterly and completely. I wasn’t about to go back to Office XP, so I gave up on running M$ Office. FC5 comes with OpenOffice, which claims to support Word, Excel, etc. so I figured I would just use that.

Next I moved to iTunes. First off, installing it is a series of hacks and kludges. Upon following these ridiculous instructions, iTunes actually launched! But:

  1. All my playlists were gone, even though I repeatedly pointed iTunes to my backed up iTunes Music folder.
  2. The best feature in iTunes, search, didn’t work — the search box was grayed out.
  3. A basic feature — scrolling — was inconsistent and buggy.
  4. It crashed about 10 times before I completely gave up on it.

So now I had limited options. I decided that I would give up on purchasing DRM music through the iTunes store (and save about $500/yr in the process) and switch to Banshee, which claimed to be everything that iTunes was minus the music store.

Okay, so music is just music. But what about e-mail? I’m totally addicted to Outlook — the proof is my 1.5+ Gb .pst saved mail file. Without CrossOver Office running Outlook, I had to fall back on Evolution or Thunderbird. Access to saved mail, however, was a showstopper. To use my gi-normous .pst file in a non-M$ program, I needed to convert it to MBOX format. That proved impossible. Or at least not possible within my own personal constraints of time, patience and most importantly, sanity.

First I tried Thunderbird, because I remembered using its Outlook .pst conversion program. After struggling for a long time with compilation issues, linking issues/missing dependencies (including the wrong version of libstdc++) and segfaults, I finally got the ol’ T-bird working on FC5. But to my disbelief, the option to import a .pst was missing. After some Googling, I found out that Mozilla’s hairbrained implementation actually relies on MAPI, so you need to have Outlook installed and configured on the machine with Thunderbird in order to convert from .pst to MBOX.

I tried various other programs, including a useless dungheap called MailNavigator. I also tried hand-compiling a C program called libpst that was supposed to work and didn’t. I was beginning to think that my .pst file had been corrupted, but that was impossible because it was running fine in Outlook.

After all this nonsense, I used my wife’s laptop to download a DOS book disk with fdisk, deleted all my partition info, and now here I am back on Windows XP.

Lessons learned:

  1. Linux is not ready for the desktop, even if you’re a hardcore developer.
  2. Don’t believe anything CodeWeavers say about CrossOver Office. It just doesn’t work. Period.
  3. Windows, for all its faults, is actually not that bad. I can’t believe I just said that, but it’s true. 😉
Categories
Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Plumtree releases G6

Late yesterday, Plumtree announced the release of their G6 line of products. They have made everything generally available for download for partners and customers at portal.plumtree.com.

A couple things have been renamed. The Portal has become the “Foundation,” Content Server has become “Publisher,” Authentication Web Services have become “Identity Services,” Crawler Web Services have become “Content Services,” the .NET Web Controls have had the word “Consumer” tacked on the end, and the EDK (once known as the GDK), is now contained within something called the PDK. Not sure what happened to the WSRP container, but the JSR 168 container has been updated for G6 as well.

The major difference is that the Foundation product and many of the services are now entirely Java-based or entirely C#-based. This means some interesting things, including the fact that although Plumtree is only officially supporting RedHat Linux 3 ES Update 3 right now, there’s a good chance that the Java version will run (and run well) on other versions of Linux and even on Solaris or even Solaris X86.

On Windows, the support matrix includes IIS 6.0 and SQL Server 2000 SP3a.

For the non-Microsofties, Oracle 9i and Oracle 10G (with or without RAC) are supported along with Tomcat 5.0.28, IBM WebSphere 6.0.1 and of course BEA 8.1 SP4.

If you’re just silly like that, you can also run any of those configurations on Windows, but I’d have to ask you “why?!?” if you did. 😉

Major feature differences include a re-tooled (and now web-based) object migration, enhanced subportals (now called user experiences), improved user syncrhonization, enhanced Snapshot Queries and Best Best, and improved tools for integrating existing web applications into the portal.

Everyone at bdg is excited about this release and we look forward to helping our customers upgrade to the latest and greatest, starting whenever they’re ready.

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

My take on the acquisition of Plumtree by BEA

Several colleagues, coworkers, customers and other Plumtree partners have asked me for my opinion on the buyout of Plumtree by BEA Systems. I certainly have thoughts and comments about this event, but moreover I have several open questions that I want to ask Plumtree, BEA and the community of customers and partners. Of course I have my own take on the answers, but I’m curious to hear from others in the community.

First, let me say this: I feel overwhelmingly positive about the acquisition. BEA is a great company with excellent products (Weblogic, Tuxedo, JRocket) and a solid strategic vision. Most of the articles I’ve read have said that they plan to make Plumtree its own business unit and continue to support Plumtree’s 700 customers. By purchasing Plumtree, BEA has made a strong, albeit implied, statement about the portal market. You won’t read this in any of the articles out there, but it’s a statement that I’ve been making for a long time: Plumtree is clearly the best and the only pure-play horizontal portal technology out there. All of this is good news for Plumtree and for Plumtree partners like bdg.

Now, on to my questions . . . .

Will BEA continue to support Plumtree on .NET?

According to the FAQ published on BEA’s web site, the company plans to support Plumtree on all of the existing platforms and application servers on which it runs. This is a major change of direction for BEA, which has always aligned itself more with the Java/Sun/McNealy vision that the .NET/MS/Gates vision and which ties all of its products to its own application server, Weblogic.

The problem is that IT departments in major companies have their own near-religious beliefs about platforms. Some want “pure” Microsoft stacks (Windows, SQLServer, IIS, .NET/CLR), some want “pure” Java stacks (Solaris, Oracle DB, Weblogic/Websphere/Tomcat/JBoss and Java/JVM) and some even want LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

In order for a portal — the UI integration layer for the enterprise — to be successful in the heterogeneous IT world in which we live, it must run on all of those platforms and it must have a strategy for supporting integration with every platform. It’s clear from their product direction, including their recent decision to support Linux, that Plumtree has known this for a long time. I can’t speak for BEA, but the message I’ve been getting from them for the past several years is that you can solve all the world’s problems — or least all the world’s IT problems — with Java. As much as I like Java, I’ve never quite bought into that vision. The IT world is just too heterogeneous for that vision to approach reality.

I sincerely hope that BEA sticks to this new strategy of supporting the Microsoft stack for Plumtree. The good news is that Weblogic has always run on Windows. Running Java on Windows is fine in my book, but if you tell that to the approximately 500 Plumtree customers who run Plumtree on a Microsoft stack, they’re not going to be pleased. In fact, I think they’ll start looking for another solution, perhaps even Sharepoint.

What will happen to BEA’s Portal product?

The press releases are calling BEA’s portal product a transactional portal for the extranet and Plumtree’s a collaborative portal for the intranet. This is nothing more than an attempt to downplay the competitive nature of the two products. This spin isn’t working for me. bdg has built transactional extranets using Plumtree and I’m sure that enterprises have built collaborative intranets using the BEA Portal. In fact, BEA specifically pitches the collaborative features of their portal product as part of their marketing literature.

Obviously the companies need to make a statement saying that they’re going to support both camps in order to avoid massive customer hemorrhaging. (Look what happened to Epicentric’s customers when they were acquired by Vignette.) It’s good to hear that the near-term plan supports both portal products for the sake of the customers, but I hope to hear some more believable strategic direction from BEA and Plumtree about their clearly competitive portal offerings.

What would make sense to me would be a hybrid that includes most of Plumtree’s compelling out-of-the-box functionality — including collaboration, content management and usage tracking — and merge it with the compelling parts of BEA’s portal, such as the Portal Java Controls and the Portal Resources Designer. Development tools like these will greatly enhance Plumtree’s Java developer offerings to bring them up to speed with their Microsoft offerings (like the EDK’s .NET Web Controls). But there are some big architectural decisions to make. For example, is it better to integrate BEA’s Designer with the Plumtree EDK to help those of us building Java portlets, or should they take an IDE plug-in approach for Eclipse like Plumtree did with the .NET IDE?

The industry press is still beating up BEA for having a Java client portal designer instead of a web-based one just like they beat up Plumtree four years ago because of their Windows-based portal designer (called Content Manager). The answer is simple: BEA needs to webify their portal designer. But if they’re going to live by their new strategy of cross-platform support, anything they build will need to have a .NET equivalent.

This may be cynical, but I think telling all the developers who currently support Weblogic Portal that they’re going to have start thinking about portability to .NET is going to be a hard sell.

How will the merger affect the ship date for Plumtree G6?

Plumtree has set a ship date for G6, the next generation of their portal product. The product is currently in Beta, so we all know that we’re getting close.

The press releases and FAQ do not mention G6 or say anything about the next version of BEA’s portal. If any kind of tangible BEA Portal/Plumtree Portal integration attempts are squeezed into G6, I doubt that they will hit their ship date.

I think it would be a smart move to ship G6 as is — and there’s a good chance that it will happen, given the fact that Plumtree will be a separate business unit at BEA — and then shoot for integration in the next major product iteration, whenever that is.

I hope to hear some clear direction from the two companies on this soon because our customers’ rollout plans are directly affected by information like this.

Will this deal make BEA even more of an acquisition target for Oracle?

Everyone I know — myself included — had a feeling that Plumtree would be acquired some day. But the major questions were 1) when and 2) by whom? Quite some time ago and long before Plumtree had its Java strategy fleshed out, there were rumors of a Microsoft takeover. Then Siebel. Then Peoplesoft. But BEA? I never would have guessed.

I personally thought Oracle would be the suitor, especially after they acquired Oblix, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards. After extending its tentacles into almost every enterprise software market (and proving tremendously incapable of producing any decent software applications other than a database), Oracle snapped up ERP, HR and SSO/Identity Management in the blink of an eye. It seemed reasonable to me that a good portal product that could integrate with all those applications would be a clear next target. Oracle’s portal certainly doesn’t cut the mustard. In fact, they often offer it up for free only to be beaten out by Plumtree, which is, ahem, a far cry from free.

Now the next pressing question: is Oracle even more likely to acquire Plumtree now that they’re a part of BEA? Now they’d get an excellent application server and a cross-platform, industry-leading portal. You know it crossed Larry Ellison’s mind when he heard the news. Food for thought.

What will happen to the name Plumtree?

Back in late 1998, when BEA acquired WebLogic, Inc., they kept the company’s preexisting market share and mind share intact by transitioning the name of the company into the name of what has become BEA’s flagship product. Oracle has done the same with its recent acquisitions.

BEA would be wise to do the same with Plumtree. “BEA Plumtree Portal” may not have a ring to it right now — but mark my words — it is soon to become a household name in the world of enterprise software.

* * *

For all of you who asked, those are my thoughts on the merger. Sorry it took me almost a week to come up with a response to your questions, but if you recall from an earlier post, I was teaching a Plumtree training class all last week. Anyone who has taught training knows how exhausting that is, hence the delay in putting my thoughts on (virtual) paper.

As always, your comments are most welcome.