Andrej Koelewijn

I recently rewrote the website for the Jumpteam. It used to be a coldfusion website, the layout was done using a lot of tables, and the html didn’t validate. I’ve redone the site in php, i’m using css instead of tables, and the html pages mostly validate. I think that as a result of this the site gets better results in google.

But today i discovered something strange. If you do an image search on google, you only find images on the old site. Google doesn’t find any images on the new site. Results for all images and results for images on the new site.

Any idea why the images on the new site aren’t found by google? The html seems to be OK.

Just found out about Centos. Centos is a new Linux distribution which aims to be a 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is very good news as Oracle only tests it’s products on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Theoritically you should be able to use another distribution, but i’ve found out that this is not the easiest way. I’ve experienced stability problems on Fedora, and installation problems on another distribution.

Yesterday i attended the Amis query on Oracle BPEL, to see how Oracle’s BPEL plugin for JDeveloper is progressing. Both the Eclipse version and the new JDeveloper version were demoed, and we had a chance to try them. I must say Oracle’s making good progress on the plugin and according to Oracle’s Sandor Nieuwenhuijs a production release should be available in a couple of months. A beta release will be available soon.

Some points discussed yesterday:

• Oracle is going to include a Web services gateway in Oracle Application server 10.1.3. The gateway will allow you to add security in the application server to already existing services, so you won’t need to modify all the existing services.

• Oracle is is not yet going to provide a tool to convert high level business process diagrams to BPEL. The question is what should such a tool do and do you really want it: do you really want to automatically translate process diagrams generated by non technical people into an executable process? My opinion is that it’s not very important. I think it would be more usefull if there was a tool to convert complex BPEL diagrams into easy to read high level process diagrams (e.g., UML activity diagrams) so that you have a tool for explaining to business what your BPEL processes are doing.

• Sandor discussed the various Oracle process management/workflow/integration tools and their future. Oracle Workflow is here to stay as it’s heavily used in Oracle Applications, but if you don’t use Oracle Applications then you’re probably better of using a standards compliant tool, ie., Oracle BPEL.

• If you want a book on BPEL: Sandor recommended Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

• The BPEL plugin now has a service adapters plugin wizard. This wizard will create all the configuration files you need to use existing services through WSIF. Using this wizard you can using Oracle AQ (advanced queueing), ftp services, and detect and read files. This last option was pretty nice: it allows you to specify the structure of text files (fixed column, comma separated, etc), and the text files will be converted to Xml by the BPEL process manager. One important option missing in this wizard was the option to generated configuration files for EJB services. But this option is comming according to Sandor.

• The BPEL plugin now also contains a xml transformations tool, which enables you to graphically specify how xml files should be transformed to other xml formats. In other words, it’s a visual xslt editor.

I just saw an interesting post from Jonas Jacobi on OTN. A tool will be provided by Oracle to automatically upgrade ADF UIX to ADF Faces, but UIX will also still be supported in Jdeveloper 10.1.3:

We are working on a migration utility to move UIX pages to ADF Faces/JSP pages. This is in the works, although I cannot give you a date when this will be available. The current plan is to continue to support ADF UIX and provide the same level of developer experience in the 10.1.3 production release as we currently have in the 9.0.5/10.1.2 releases.

PostgreSQL version 8 has been released. The biggest change is that Windows is now a supported platform.

For someone like me who mainly works with Oracle databases, PostgreSQL is a much better fit than MySQL. PostgreSQL supports many features which i use daily on Oracle databases: stored procedures, schema’s, views, sequences, etc.

I’m currently using MySQL 4.0 for the Jumpteam website, but i’d rather use PostgreSQL. One reason: Unions. The site started on MySQL 3. No support for unions. Now we’re using MySQL 4.0.18. MySQL 4.0’s union is seriously broken. This has been fixed in newer versions, but unfortunately i can’t upgrade MySQL on this machine.

Update Initially i wrote here that PostgreSQL supports inline views, but some google research seems to indicate otherwise. And apparently MySQL supports inline views as of version 4.1. Seems it’s time to upgrade MySQL to version 4.1 instead of moving to PostgreSQL.

Another update Joseph commented that PostgreSQL does support inline views. I guess they’re not called inline views in PostgreSQL though. When you search in the PostgreSQL documentation for inline view nothing helpfull comes up.

Another update Inline views are called sub-selects in PostgresSQL.

The register has a piece on google’s new link attribute to prevent comment spam: Google’s No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web

Overall is a pretty negative piece:

It’s effectively declaring PageRank™ dead for weblogs, in an attempt to stem the problem.

“If such a tag were used widespread against comments and trackbacks, then wouldn’t this end up kneecaping blogs, by killing their intricate networks of interlinks?”

I don’t think the impacts are as negative as this, if you only use the nofollow attribute in comments. Blog entries can still link to other blog entries, and these will still be followed by google’s spiders.

Comment spam is a big pain, so i’m happy to see that google is trying to help prevent it: Preventing comment spam.

Oreilly has an interesting read: Run Mac OS X on a PC. Apparently it’s even usable on a 3Ghz processor.

Today i’ve been upgrading our project to use all the libraries provided by jdeveloper. I’ve had some problems:

• We’re using jgoodies in combination with jclient. I received an error about a property not existing (don’t remember the exact error). After upgrading to jgoodies looks 1.3 snapshot the error disappeared.
• I got null pointer exceptions in some junit tests which use oracle’s pooled connection. This can be avoided by provinding a username and password to the datasource, even if you specify the username and password in your database url. So, instead of

  ds = new OracleConnectionPoolDataSource();
  ds.setURL(dbUrl);
  conn = ds.getPooledConnection();
  

  Specify:

  ds = new OracleConnectionPoolDataSource();
  ds.setURL(dbUrl);
  ds.setPassword(password);
  ds.setUser(username);
  conn = ds.getPooledConnection();
  

It’s not very obvious, but version 10.1.2 is a bug fix release for jDeveloper 9.0.5.2. It contains over 1000 bug fixes, so if you’re using jDeveloper 9.0.5.2 start downloading now. I know i am.