SOA Suite 12c: Collect & Deploy SCA composites & Service Bus artifacts using Maven

An artifact repository has many benefits for collaboration and governance of artifacts. In this blog post I will illustrate how you can fetch SCA composites and Service Bus artifacts from an artifact repository and deploy them. The purpose of this exercise is to show that you do not need loads of custom scripts to do these simple tasks. Why re-invent a wheel when Oracle already provides it?

This example has been created for SOA Suite 12.1.3. This will not work as-is for 11g and earlier since they lack Maven support for SOA Suite artifacts. In order to start using Maven to do command-line deployments, you need to have some Oracle artifacts in your repository. See http://biemond.blogspot.nl/2014/06/maven-support-for-1213-service-bus-soa.html on how to put them there. I have used two test projects which were already in the repository. A SCA composite called HelloWorld_1.0 and a Service Bus project also called HelloWorld_1.0. In my example, the SCA composite is in the GroupId nl.amis.smeetsm.composite and the Service Bus project is in the GroupId nl.amis.smeetsm.servicebus.

Overview of WebLogic RESTful Management Services

Inspired by a presentation given by Shukie Ganguly on the free Oracle Virtual Technology Summit in July (see here); "New APIs and Tools for Application Development in WebLogic 12c", I decided to take a look at an interesting new feature in WebLogic Server 12c: the RESTful Management Services. You can see here how to enable them. In this post I will provide an overview of my short study on the topic.

RESTful management services consist of two sets of resources. tenant-monitoring resources and 'wls' resources. The first is more flexible in response format (JSON, XML, HTML) and more suitable for monitoring. With the latter you can for example update datasource properties and create entire servers. It however only supports JSON as return format. The 'wls' resources also provide links so you can automagically traverse the resource tree which is very useful. I've provided a Python script to do just that at the end of this post.

Sonatype Nexus: Delete artifacts based on a selection

Sonatype Nexus provides several mechanisms to remove artifacts from the repository. You can schedule a job to keep only specified number of the latest releases (see here). You can also specifically remove a single artifact or an entire group using the API (see here). Suppose you want to make a selection though. I only want to delete artifacts from before a certain date with a specified groupid. In this article I have provided a Python 2.7 script which allows you to do just that.

The script has been created for my specific sample situation. Yours might differ. For example, I have only used the Releases repository and no snapshot versions. First check if the artifacts are the ones you expect to be selected based on your criteria before actually performing the artifact deletion. If they differ, it is easy to alter the script to suit your particular needs.

You can download the NetBeans 8.0.2 project containing the code of the script here. I've used the NetBeans Python plugin you can find here. Also I have not used any third party Python libraries so a default installation should suffice.

Continuous delivery culture. Why do we do the things we do the way we do them?

Usually at first there is a problem to be solved. A solution is conjured and implemented. After a while, the solution is re-used and re-used again. It changes depending on the person implementing it and his/hers background, ideas, motives, likes and dislikes. People start implementing the solution because other people do it or someone orders you to do it. The solution becomes part of a culture. This can happen to such extents that the solution causes increasing amounts of side effects, other new problems which require new solutions.