I have always wanted a quick way to build components without firing up ComponentWizard. I'm not talking about the actual construction of the component like adding resources. I'm talking about the assembly of the component zip file. Combing through the intradoc user group and other online forums can yield a little discussion about Apache ANT being used to construct component zip files. However, I did not find an easy reference to an actual ant file for such purpose.

So once we have this ability to create component zips what else can we do with it? Most projects do not consist of a single component. The components are also not completed in a linear fashion. Generally components that are completed will typically have adjustments being made throughout the project. Using a tool like ant we can orchestrate the build of multiple components at once. This orchestration can even include tasks such as placing built components in shared folders or uploading them to an FTP location.

As for using the Component Wizard to lay out the component architecture you might want to add the build file as a component extra. Then the installation of the component at a target location brings the build file along for the ride.

Here's an example build file:

<project name="CompName" default="dist" basedir=".">
 <property name="build.home" value="${basedir}/classes"/>
 <property name="src.home" value="${basedir}/src"/>
 <property name="compile.debug" value="true"/>
 <property name="compile.deprecation" value="true"/>
 <property name="component.root" value="component/${ant.project.name}/"/>

 <path id="compile.classpath">
  <pathelement location="${basedir}/../../shared/classes/server.zip"/>
  <pathelement location="${basedir}/../../shared/classes/jspserver.jar"/>
 </path>

 <target name="clean">
  <delete dir="${build.home}"/>
  <mkdir dir="${build.home}"/>
 </target>

 <target name="compile" depends="clean">
  <javac srcdir="${src.home}" destdir="${build.home}" debug="${compile.debug}" deprecation="${compile.deprecation}">
   <classpath refid="compile.classpath"/>
  </javac>
 </target>

 <target name="dist" depends="compile" description="Package as a Fusion ECM Component">
  <delete file="${basedir}/${ant.project.name}.zip"/>
  <tstamp>
   <format property="component.timestamp" pattern="yyyy_MM_dd_hh_mm_ss_aa"/>
  </tstamp>

  <zip destfile="${basedir}/${component.timestamp}_${ant.project.name}.zip">
   <zipfileset dir="${src.home}" prefix="${component.root}src"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${build.home}" prefix="${component.root}classes"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${basedir}/resources" excludes="**/lockwait.dat" prefix="${component.root}resources"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${basedir}" includes="${ant.project.name}.hda" fullpath="${component.root}${ant.project.name}.hda"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${basedir}" includes="build.xml" fullpath="${component.root}build.xml"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${basedir}" includes="readme.txt" fullpath="${component.root}readme.txt"/>
   <zipfileset dir="${basedir}" includes="manifest.hda" fullpath="manifest.hda"/>
  </zip>
 </target>
</project>

By adding IsXml=1 to the end of the HCSF URL

A group of scientists put five monkeys in a cage. In the center of the cage was a step ladder, and a banana was hung from the very top. The monkeys scurried up the ladder to retrieve the banana and then the scientists sprayed them with freezing cold water to prevent them from reaching it. Each time they tried to go up the ladder, they were again sprayed until none of the monkeys went up the ladder.

The scientists removed one monkey from the cage and replaced it with a new monkey. The new monkey saw the banana, saw the ladder and attempted to go up. The four original monkeys, afraid of being sprayed with water, assaulted the new guy to prevent him from going up the ladder. He had no idea why he was being attacked but he didn't go up the ladder again.

A second original monkey was removed from the cage and replaced with a new one. Same thing: the new monkey attempts to go up the ladder to retrieve the banana, and once again, this newest monkey is assaulted. Except this time, the first new monkey takes part in the beating of the newest monkey. He has no idea why he is participating in the beating, but nevertheless it happened to him.

This process of bringing in new monkeys continues until there are no original ones in the cage that were sprayed with cold water. But no monkey in this now completely new group dares go up the ladder out of fear of being assaulted, not sprayed with cold water. Again, it's always been done this way!

Thanks to my co-worker Mark for pointing out this story. I'm sure several of you already knew of its existence. I sure felt this applied to the business of content management and incorporating new systems in general for companies. Think about content server’s WebDAV capability. You install content server at company X. "Can we still look at it with folders?" they ask? Why? Because that’s how they do it today, that’s how they’ve always done it...

With the newer versions of Site Studio (10gR3, at least 10.1.3.3.3+) there is a handy way to set the default link format for your site.  You can do this through the Site Studio Designer and the setting is persisted in your Project XML file in Content Server.  This is pretty handy if you want to do things like using one manner of linking to data files for 90% of your content creation work.

Like them or hate them, Microsoft continues to be busy.  Personally, I like the Silverlight platform and I think almost all forms of competition is good.  I think Silverlight, while different, is good for the Flash/Air/Fireworks platforms.  If nobody is chasing you, you don't try as hard.

So anyway, Microsoft has released the production, final version of Silverlight 2.0!

http://silverlight.net/

When oracle released the 10.1.3.3.3+ site studio product they delivered a new contributor application along with new data file formats. Inside these data files the structure has changed from previous versions. Here’s an example of the new format:

          <?xml
version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<wcm:root xmlns:wcm="http://www.stellent.com/wcm-data/ns/8.0.0" version="8.0.0.0">
    <wcm:element name="HeaderImage"><img
border="0" alt="Wide
Image" src="[!--$ssWeblayoutUrl('groups/public/documents/web_assets/wideimage.gif')--]" /></wcm:element>
</wcm:root>
        

As you can see a near full path is embedded in the xml file. In this case if I were to change the security group of this image from public to secure the page using this data file would render with a missing image. The same is also true of the doc type and/or account. What can we do about this?

The documentation mentions that the function ssWeblayoutUrl() is able to work with the dDocName: This script extension is used to determine the full web address of a file from either the path or dDocName. This is most typically used for paths to images in data files.

Great. It turns out that through the use of a configuration variable added to config.cfg or through the admin server under general configuration week in control what gets embedded in data files. Note: this is available in build 251 or higher.

SSWeblayoutUrlUsesDocNames=true

On a related note, check out another blog post starring ssWeblayoutUrl over at Web Monkey Magic.

http://webmonkeymagic.blogspot.com/2008/09/surprise-ssweblayouturl.html

There are often a wide variety of reasons why someone may want to keep only the latest n revisions of content in their content server. These reasons range all over from keeping disk usage in check to a form of security/retention management. Whatever your reason the process is pretty straight forward. I am going to show you how to setup archiver to take out all but the latest X revisions. In a later post we can talk about various ways to enact that archive on a scheduled basis.

So, simply put, the secret to this is the Revision Rank (dRevRank) field. A lot of times in the past I've tried looking at dRevLabel, dID, dDocID, but nope, the special field you want is Revision Rank. Use the following steps to set up your archive:

1. Log onto your content server as a user with administration rights
2. Under "Administration" select "Admin Applets" and then fire up the Archiver applet
3. From the "Edit" menu select "Add"
4. Give your archive some kind of meaningful name
5. Provide a description, perhaps include something about the expected lifetime of this archive?
6. Click "OK"
7. Select the new archive in the archive list and then click on the "Export Data" tab
8. From the Export Query section select "Edit"
9. Set the following field defintions
   1. field to "Revision Rank"
   2. Set the Operator to "Is Greater Than"
   3. Set the value to "4"
10. Click "Add", add and then "OK"
11. Under "Actions" click on "Export"

Great, now lets discuss some of these points. The Revision Rank field is zero based (meaning it starts at zero) and that zero represents the most recent revision of the content in question. The second most recent revision is denoted by a dRevRank of 1, etc. For example, if you wanted to delete everything but the 5 latest revisions you should set dRevRank to 4. If you wanted to only keep the most recent revsion set dRevRank to 0.

Upon selecting "Export" you will be prompted deleting the revisions from content server during the export process. If you place a check mark in the check box the content will be REMOVED from content server. The content will continue to exist in the archive you just exported as long as you don't crack that open and delete it in there as well.

In his keynote, Larry had several interesting things to say. First, he announced a new product from Oracle. This is, in fact, their first ever hardware product. It is called The Exadata Storage Server. I wonder what Network Appliances (a major sponsor of OpenWorld) thinks of this? The Exadata Storage Server can be standalone or placed in a grid of these things. He also talked about a new connectivity model between the database and the storage server, named InfiniBand. This allows more data, faster, from the disk system to the database.

Hey look, another new product! This one is called The Oracle Database Machine. Good Lord, it has 64 Intel Cores for database processing and 112 cores for storage processing and gigabytes and gigabytes of RAM. And it holds some ridiculous number of Terabytes of data, something like 168.

Get More Info

While I’m waiting on Larry for his presentation I wanted to recap one of the session from earlier today that I have not got around to posting about yet. Yeah, I’m a slacker. The presentation was an overview of JDeveloper and the Application Development Framework.

The presenter was very good, and he moved very quickly from topic to topic. The points of the presentation were very good, but the demo was better. It was awesome. I’m getting ahead of myself. Oops. I am going to try to sum this up: ADF allows Oracle themselves to utilize developers of various degrees of expertise to quickly and efficiently build useable, robust, efficient applications.

Ok, let’s talk about the demo. That’s why we were all there anyway right?! In just a little under 25 minutes the presenter (Shay? I’m probably spelling that wrong) created a page that paged through data, displayed several master detail scenarios and allowed updating. The whole thing looked nice and worked quickly. A lot of AJAX was built in out of the gate. Graphing was built in. All in all, it was very, very cool.

I have to do some thinking on how this works with ECM. I hope they will soon have prefabricated ADF components to work with the Content Server, or even WCM. How does the Open WCM concept fit into this? How? Why? So many questions, so few answers....

Session-wise, I would like to hit these today:

Time	Room	Description
9:00 AM	Marriott Golden Gate C1	Basics of SOA Deployment for Enterprises
11:30 AM	Marriott NOB Hill AB	Using Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPEL Process Manager to Integrate and Extend
1:00 PM	Marriott Salon 5	Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0
5:00 PM	Marriott NOB Hill CD	Optimizing User Engagement, Using Oracle Real-Time Decisions

In between all of these sessions I am hoping to finally get down to the demo grounds today. The overall goal for the day is to learn as much as possible about SOA Suite.

This session opened with a recap of active content versus historical content. Active content was defined as documents, web content, images, etc. that are being actively developed. Historical content was content that was not accessed, forwarded or replied to in the last thirty days. It was noted that do to various litigation/liability issues historical content needs to be online and discoverable instead of collecting cobwebs on tape in a remote location.

We learned not to forget about the traditional reasons for storage of historical content via an archiving solution such as reduced, consolidated storage and the most common scenario: disaster recovery. These things still exist, but the legality and liability points are much stronger drivers and are immediate, real, substantial threats. Alongside these reasons for needing archiving it is important to note the difference between an online solution versus near-line or offline systems.

The basic idea described was to archive content out of a source system with the OPTION of leaving behind a stub or links and then take the core content and place this into the Universal Online Archive. A tool named High Volume Importer was described for loading content to the system. The system (somewhat because of the underlying requirement of Oracle 11g Database) supports optional compression and de-duplication of content. An example of an 8 core machine was used as a baseline in which they outlined a test case of accomplishing the ingestion of 15 million emails a day.

A set of services were outlined to work with or on top of UOA. The first was the currently shipping Oracle Email Archive Service. In addition a service named File Server Archive Service got some discussion, and it sounded pretty neat. The intention of this service was to archive files from a windows network share or file server. The Oracle Archiving Interface is a set of services that comprise the High Volume Importer and a basic API for developers work with so that you can develop your own services on top of UOA. The coming soon list of services included: Application Archive Service (transactional data, etc.), SharePoint Archive Service, ECM Archive Services (includes non-Oracle solutions such as Documentum), Image Archiving, and finally Desktop Archive Service.

It would appear that ZL Technologies has a death grip on the market for services built upon UOA at this point. It sounds like they have several of these services built out and even a few more. All of their services were noted as being developed against UOA via the Oracle Archiving Interface.

It was unfortunate, but this session seemed more like a long advertisement for partner based services built on top of UOA. This information is important to get out, but there was little discussion UOA itself or any form of deep, let alone middle, dive into UOA itself. Other topics were covered, and overall this was very informative, I just wasn't the right target audience. :)

They did give a really killer example of using this with email archiving though and in the examle the cost of storage of email was reduced by 98%. This seemed to not take into account the COST of buying UOA (oh, and it requires a license of Oracle Enterprise Edition Database), but was neat anyway.

Bob Fraser, a Principal Product Manager for Enterprise 2.0, presented a session named No REST for the Weary: REST APIs and the Activity Stream. This centered around working within WebCenter. Of course, we start off with an overview of what Web/Enterprise 2.0 is. For the 3 people at the conference that don’t know.

Interestingly, this session was less about REST itself and more specifically about where and how it can be used in WebCenter, which was great. He also talked about security with REST/WebCenter so he satisfied that basic need.

A small byproduct of the demo was some discussion of curl, a command line URL invocation application. Available out of the box on most new Mac and Linux systems this application can be handy for automation scenarios and development. It is also available on Windows.

This was really my first look at WebCenter Interaction, a product in the WebCenter Suite. It is neat, but I am again surprised at the level of overlap with other products. Certainly if you wanted get an application with features X, Y and Z you would have several options from within Oracle alone.

References:

cURL
Presentation [PDF] (2.33 MB)

I figured I have seen the Multisite Web Content Management presentation seventy-four times now so I opted instead to go see a session about WebCenter/WebLogic/UCM. Just prior to that we stopped by the Fusion Middleware Lounge to visit with Brian Dirking and see who was out and about already. Then it was off to the session. Official title: Deploying a Web-Oriented Architecture with WebCenter/WebLogic.

A quote about WOA (Web Oriented Architecture) from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Blog:

"In other words, the Web model provides a single, open, and unified information architecture that is consistent, easily consumed, extremely scalable, securable, very reusable, resilient, and highly federated." Wow, that sounds very sales-ish to me.

There was, once again, more advertising about REST. This has been mentioned again and again. Remember, REST is not really a new technology in the sense of age or implementation. It is simply a different way of looking at web services. Make the time to learn about it though, fairly easy once you get into it. Having said that though, I do not know as though I’ve seen anyone implement a REST style call system for Content server…anyone else? Something like:

http://myserver/idc/DOC_INFO/

or

http://myserver/idc/DOC_INFO_BY_NAME/

Would this be useful, would anyone care? Forever and ever Stellent, oh sorry, I meant Fusion ECM Content Server, already had URL based accessibility, though I wouldn’t call it strictly REST.

Anyway, back to the session. They showed a little bit of AquaLogic Ensemble which was used to pull some information off Facebook and then integrated that with a CRM solution. Kind of neat.

There was also a fair amount of discussion about using Dojo JavaScript Library with WebLogic and a thing called Disc, some other framework. They also promoted JSON a little bit. The WebLogic demo was very Web 2.0 oriented demonstrating changing things in real time on the client side of the interaction.

In the end, the demos were somewhat hurried and the message seemed to be more about REST/JSON than about WebLogic. While WebCenter was in the title I do not believe it was ever mentioned again. Maybe that was the brief look at Ensemble in the beginning?

References:

WebCenter
WebLogic Portal
Dojo
Example WebLogic Portal Site

Several sessions look interesting today, especially at 5:00 p.m.  Like six of them.  Sheesh.

9:00 a.m. Deploying a Web-Oriented Architecture with WebCenter/WebLogic

9:00 a.m. Multisite Web Content Management

11:30 a.m. REST API's with Activity Stream

1:00 p.m. Oracle Ensemble and New Integration Patterns

5:00 p.m. Universal Online Archive

5:00 p.m. Oracle Total Recall Hands-on Lab

What to do, what to do.  I have until 9 or so to figure out how to split myself to go to multiple places at the same time.  Don't hold your breath.

Brian "Bex" Huff and Andy MacMillan delivered a session called "A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle ECM" which pushed some of the integration and cooperative concepts that have been pervasive among the keynotes and sessions today. They describe their approach to content management as more realistic than the message presented by many vendors as "Hey, we’ll do it all". Their approach is also more tolerant of your existing content repositories and your investment in those elements.

They describe a situation where a client has several existing content repositories. Some of these can be consolidated into your new strategic content management repository. Some of them cannot. This can be due to technical issues or the fact that you have spent a lot of money on those repositories and/or users are entrenched in using that repository already. These previously existing repositories that perhaps service tremendous load or importance but are not capable or selected as the strategic repository are termed tactical repositories.

The session then moved on to discuss federated software solutions to help control and integrate your existing, tactical repositories with the feature set of your new strategic enterprise wide solution. Examples of these federated software applications included Secure Enterprise Search and Information Rights Management.

Additionally, these two guys are writing a book together, potentially entitled "Transform Infoglut: A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle Enterprise Content Management" and it will hopefully be delivered sometime around January 2009.

I attended Brian "Bex" Huff's session entitled "Enterprise 2.0: What it is and How You'll Fail". At first attendance was a little sparse, but by 20 minutes in we got more than 15 people in the room. One of the biggest themes of the message was about focus. Focus on Culture versus Technology. This is one of those points that is so foundational to the concept at hand that once you hear you say to yourself, "Well sure, that's obvious", but you wouldn’t normally come up with it on your own.

We also heard an echo from the old Stellent days when he reminded us of the importance of "Getting the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format and context". This reminded me of the big launch of Profiles with 7.5.x Stellent Content Server. It was true/relevant/important then and it still is today.

There were a lot of concepts presented in the presentation and of them all the concept of Social Capital was my favorite. This was somewhat new to me. The concept was not new, but being able to linguistically wrap a name around the subject was a neat discovery. The concept of Social Capital is described on Wikipedia. Basically it can be thought of as referring to the value of the connection between employees and potentially even vendors. People like to work with their friends and so projects get done quicker or more thoroughly.

In the end, I wonder how much push back corporate America will engage in when liability of all this Enterprise 2.0 culture and technology come to bear. While companies may accept it at first, I am concerned about a backlash that comes from committing so much of what would have been hallway conversations, water cooler talk, quick phone calls, etc., into a written, searchable, liable format.

All in all, great talk. It is certainly though provoking.

I attended a session named “Oracle Portal Products (Oracle Portal, Oracle WebCenter Suite, and Products from Stellent and BEA): Which one should I use?” Out of the gate the session tried to define what Web 2.0 is. I kind of felt this went on and on, but I am sure a lot of people found it helpful and it is always good to have a firm base to build the conversation on. Once we got through that the discussion turned to development platform which was a plug for JDeveloper. They also touted REST a lot, which should tickle/torture some of the others in the Blogsphere.

I noticed that the first product of the group they started out featuring was WebCenter. They had a little about Ensemble, but then they jumped directly into a demo of WebCenter. Similar to the demo of Beehive this morning they demonstrated again with WebCenter that IRM is deeply integrated. They also had a really nice demo of using a Mobile device to access and update a list of data in WebCenter.

They talked a little about a Roadmap for the portal products split into features of today, 100 days from now and an 11g 2009 time frame. It looks like full integration between WebLogic, WebCenter and the former AquaLogic frameworks is now slated for the 11g/2009 era. Introductory integrations and rebranding is to occur in the 100 day timespan.

In the end, it kind of looks like WebLogic will be the favored application server foundation and WebCenter will be the favored application written on top of WebLogic. AquaLogic functionality will be rolled into WebCenter. The former Stellent products appear to be a portion of the backend solution for WebCenter/WebLogic. Don’t take this as law, someone will correct me!

Finally, there was some discussion about a Unified Portal Framework, but it seems so far off I am having a hard time coming to grips with it. Maybe that is a better topic for next OpenWorld. Was the question of which one should I use answered? For me it was, WebCenter seems to be the chosen one. They also put in a big plug for Ensemble at the end.

One of the final taglines: "Oracle WebCenter provides Enterprise 2.0 foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications"

The opening keynote is being delivered by Charles Phillips. He discussed Oracle growth in areas such as employees and skill sets as well as the breadth of product line. The big tagline right now is a three word message:

Complete. Open. Integrated.

As the discussion moves on I think web services were mentioned forty-six times. What’s SOA? What’s SOAP? What’s JSON? What’s REST? Don’t know? Better get on that. Integration is key. Do you need to know all these buzzards…erm…I mean buzzwords? Well, you should eventually.

He goes on to describe applications and implementations specifically around the four basic areas of the “Oracle Stack”, starting at the top. Applications, Middleware, Database and then Infrastructure comprise the stack. The first part of this discussion that really got my interest was the release of JDeveloper 11g and WebCenter Suite.

Looks like my previous post may have jumped the gun a little bit on Beehive. Oops. We are now covering an official launch on Beehive. It reminds me of the big launch of Oracle VM at last year’s OpenWorld. I’m still trying to find out whether this is a competitor for Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Groove, or if it is more of something that operates alongside those applications.

Besides the huge room and at least six theatre size screens the first thing I noticed when entering the keynote arena was little plastic wrapped candies advertising Oracle Beehive. I first viewed a demo of the then unreleased Beehive collaboration platform at last year’s OpenWorld. Since then, Beehive has been “released into the wild” and you can use it today.

As the actual keynote was kicked off the messages about Oracle’s commitment to staying “Green” and actually listening to customers was prominently featured. Oracle was set to eliminate the conference guide all together in paper format for a more eco-friendly conference but the customers/clients said they would still like a guide. To straddle the fence Oracle had printed a guide a third the size on recycled paper with recycled ink. I thought this was a pretty cool example of both trying to listen to customer feedback as well as being environment aware.

Some good advice just dropped in the introductions included how to make your conference visit the most comfortable. Tips described included wearing comfortable shoes (check!), lighten your bags (uh oh), and drink lots of water (check!).

Finally, during the introductions they gave out some stats to help you visualize the magnitude of the conference. 45,000 hours of setup, 3,639 staff, 295,000 sq foot of exhibition hall and attendees came from all over the world (133 countries).

I arrived at the airport for leg one of the journey to San Francisco at about 4:30 a.m.  Suffering through security and breakfast (avoid airport food if you can) and we finally arrive in Chicago, IL. for the second leg of the journey.  We enjoyed three delays as they attempted to install a new windshield on our Boeing 767.  I assume they got it all sorted out because we FINALLY left.

Arriving in San Francisco we promptly hailed a cab and hot footed it to the hotel for check-in and then we landed at California Pizza Kitchen for some lunch.  With our primary needs now under control the hunt was on for the partner event location.

We attended a few partner sessions and collected some interesting pieces of information.  Of course the WebLogic acquisition has yielded a lot of excitement around those products and they seem to be on the forefront of many minds.  I also noticed a heavy dependence/integration of BPEL Process Manager with a lot of products.  This included what looked like a potential limited use license of BPEL PM with UCM, but I have yet to confirm whether this is true or any of the parameters around this connection.  There has been an integration path with BPEL PM around for a while now, but the license ramifications may have changed.  More on this later.

The political speakers and the discussion on being “green” and Oracle’s dedication to being eco-friendly certainly passed the time and were entertaining.  It again reminds me of the many things I’d like to be into more than I really am.  If only there was more time.

Finally, to wrap up I wanted to point out at least two other chaps that are actively reporting on the event.  David Roe already has several posts and so does Billy Cripe.  David even mentions some embarrassing blogger badge they saddled…I mean presented him with that kind of made me chuckle.

This was my first chance to see Oracle Executive Safra Catz in action and I found her to be very personable.  You just never know what large corporate executives are going to be like.  Will she be arrogant?  Will she be emotionless?  She spoke on several occasions, including introducing political advisors James Carville and Mary Matalin.  In the end I got to see her and hear her in several forums and overall I was impressed.  I'm hoping to be as satisified with presentations by the other Oracle Executive team members!