First steps into the Oracle Database Cloud

Oracle provides a Database Cloud Service. In a previous post I've looked at the Oracle Java Cloud Service (http://javaoraclesoa.blogspot.nl/2013/12/first-steps-into-oracle-java-cloud.html). The database is of course also an important component used in most applications. In this blog post I'll describe my first experiences with the Oracle Database Cloud service. I've used two methods to connect to the Oracle Database Cloud service. The first one from SQLDeveloper. Next I created a webservice, deployed it to the Oracle Java Cloud service and fetched data from the Oracle Database Cloud service with it.

There are of course other methods to interact with the Oracle Database Cloud service. It is for example possible using SQLWorkshop from the Apex interface to expose RESTful services to access the database. See for example http://multikoop.blogspot.nl/2012/11/oracle-java-and-database-cloud-services.html on how to create these services. By default, calls to the Oracle Cloud are encrypted. See https://weblogs.java.net/blog/bleonard/archive/2013/05/02/calling-oracle-cloud-service-java on how to call services.

Oracle BAM. Looking at different integration options

In order to monitor process flow, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be used. Oracle BAM is part of the Oracle SOA Suite. What are the options for implementing Oracle BAM in the context of Oracle SOA composites? When should you use which method to integrate with BAM? In this post I'll describe the different methods of integration with Oracle BAM and the work required in order to get it working. The below screenshot was taken from; http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bam/callcenter-086652.html to illustrate what an Oracle BAM dashboard looks like.

First steps into the Oracle Java Cloud

Integration on premise has been there for quite a while. Oracle SOA Suite provides many tools to help customers accomplish that. The area of integration however is expanding. More customers start using cloud services. Integration with cloud services differs in several aspects from on premise integration. Management of servers/accounts differs. Usually there is a limited interface which the cloud provider offers to customize the behavior/scaling of virtual servers/services. Also development differs. You deploy 'to the cloud' and not to a local (on the same network) server. Automation of a business process expands to beyond the borders of the business firewall so security and identity management become more important.

Since this is my first blog post about the Oracle Cloud, I will not go into much detail here but will describe my experience with creating a trial account for the Oracle Java Cloud, deploying a simple helloworld webservice and calling it from outside the cloud.

Analyzing instances in an Oracle SOA environment: linking composite instances via references

To analyse a running environment, it is useful to know which process calls which other process and how often it does so (which instance is initiated by which reference from which other process). This provides insight in how composites are linked and thus how process flows are implemented. In a previous post I've looked at Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM) to achieve this insight (http://javaoraclesoa.blogspot.nl/2013/11/a-first-look-at-oracle-business.html). Oracle BTM can't analyse local invocations and requires quite some work to install/setup correctly. Also a license is required, for example SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition, in order to use this product. To make monitoring composite instances and their relations possible without this product, the dehydration store, can be queried. In this post I'll describe a method on how this can be done. Mind that this method is not fully tested and certainly not supported by Oracle. Use with caution!

A first look at Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM)

Monitoring and debugging Oracle SOA Suite environments is often a topic not paid much attention to. The people who write the software are often not much involved in the maintenance of the running software and the maintenance people do not have much application knowledge.

Usually Oracle SOA applications are composed of several components which interact with each other. These components are often of different technologies. Personally I tend to use databases, BPEL processes and Java Webservices a lot. For the maintenance people it is difficult to understand all application call chains and debug these in case of problems.

I was curious if the Oracle BTM product would provide a solution for this; http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/btm-496775.html. BTM is part of the SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition. It used to be a product from AmberPoint before Oracle bought them in 2010. I've used SOA Suite 11.1.1.7 with BTM 12.1.0.4.1 on an XE 11r2 Db for this tryout. I did not read much documentation about this product or followed any courses, so it would also be a test of intuitiveness.

Java Unit testing: Mocking JNDI, final classes, statics and private parts

To improve quality of an application, it is a good practice to provide unit tests together with the code which is written. This makes it easier to determine the impact of changes and fix them early during development.

Writing unit tests can be challenging. Often applications run inside an application server which provides services and a unit test runs outside of the server. Applications can depend on the services provided by the application server which makes testing outside of this scope difficult. One of those services is JNDI. JNDI makes it possible for an application to look up for example a datasource. Luckily JNDI can be provided outside of application server scope.

To make mocking methods in unit tests easier, the Mockito framework (https://code.google.com/p/mockito/) can be used. Mockito however uses a subclassing mechanism which does not work when dealing with final classes. Also static and private methods cannot be mocked because of this. PowerMock provides solutions for those issues; https://code.google.com/p/powermock/.

Sending HTML reports of JMeter integration test results from Maven

In this post I'll describe how I automated executing integration tests by using JMeter for several environments and sending integration test reports (HTML).

To accomplish this I've used Maven with several plugins;

- jmeter-maven-plugin (http://wiki.apache.org/jmeter/JMeterMavenPlugin) for executing JMeter tests from Maven
- xml-maven-plugin (http://mojo.codehaus.org/xml-maven-plugin/) for transforming the resulting JTL file to a readable HTML report
- exec-maven-plugin (http://mojo.codehaus.org/exec-maven-plugin/) for calling scripts
- maven-postman-plugin (http://doc.fortysix.ch/maven/maven-postman-plugin/) for sending e-mails

I've also used conditional profiles which act on the result from previous build steps to only send a mail in case of errors. In the following post it is described you shouldn't be doing this; http://www.blackbuild.com/how-to-really-use-maven-profiles-without-endangering-your-karma/ ('Using a profile should not result in a different artifact than building without the profile.') but I did it anyway because it seemed useful in this case.

I encountered several challenges which I will describe in this post and how I fixed them. The sample code can be downloaded here; https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6693935/blog/jmeter-test.zip