Exposing JMS queues and topics with a JAX-WS webservice

Everyone can do HTTP calls and thus call most webservices. Interfacing with JMS queues or topics though is a bit more difficult (when not using Oracle SOA Suite). An alternative is using custom code. This usually requires libraries, JNDI lookups, opening connections and such. Because I wanted to make it easy for myself to put stuff on queues and topics, I created a simple JAX-WS wrapper service. By using this service, JMS suddenly becomes a whole lot easier.

Deploying SOA Suite 12c artifacts from Nexus

SOA Suite 12c introduces Maven support to build and deploy artifacts. Oracle has provided extensive documentation on this. Also there already are plenty of blog posts describing how to do this. I will not repeat those posts (only shortly describe the steps). What I couldn't find quickly enough though was how to deploy artifacts from an artifact repository to an environment. This is a task often done by provisioning software such as Puppet or Jenkins. Sometimes though you want to do this from a command-line. In this post I'll briefly describe steps required to get your Continuous Delivery efforts going and how to deploy an artifact from the Nexus repository to a SOA Suite runtime environment.

Oracle introduces API Manager!

Oracle has introduced a new product; API Manager (you can find the official documentation here). API Manager is an important addition to the already impressive Oracle SOA stack. In this article I'll explain what this new product does and how it helps in managing your API's. I will focus on the features and benefits you can have of this product and will also elaborate a little about my current experiences with it.

Sonatype Nexus: Retrieving artifacts using the REST API or Apache Ivy

Sonatype Nexus is an often used artifact repository. In a previous blog post I have shown an example how Maven can be used to assemble and release artifacts to Nexus. In this blog post I will describe two ways how artifacts can be fetched from the Nexus repository; by using the REST API and by using Apache Ivy.

Oracle SOA Suite 12c: SOA instance purging with the Java API in multiple threads

Let's tackle a single topic at a time in this blog post ;) SOA Suite 12c provides a Java API to perform operations on the SOA infrastructure and things running there such as composites and instances. There are several blog posts available on how to do this in SOA Suite 10g and 11g. However since 12c is relatively new, I decided to try if I could easily access the Java API in 12c and if the API was still similar to 11g or had undergone major changes. As a usecase I decided I wanted to purge instances. This is usually done by database scripts on the SOA infra database. If however you do not have direct access to the database, this can be used as an alternative. I could of course have done the same by using WLST. I found that purging instances by using the Java API was slow so I decided I would like to try this using multiple threads working in parallel. The resulting code is provided in this post.

Oracle SOA Suite 12c: The Coherence Adapter

Oracle SOA Suite 12c ships with a new technology adapter, the Oracle CoherenceAdapter. This adapter allows easy integration with a Coherence Data Grid (a distributed cache). The excellent post by Antony Reynolds provides the information required to setup your Coherence cache and get started with the adapter. In this blog post I will describe a pattern which can be used to use Coherence Data Grid as a cache for a database table (or view, or...). Also I did some performance measures on the Oracle quickstart JDeveloper installation with Integrated Weblogic server with surprising results!

Weblogic LDAPAuthenticator configuration; the GUID Attribute

LDAP servers can be configured to use as authenticator in Weblogic Server. In order to efficiently use an LDAP server, it must be possible to uniquely identify LDAP objects. GUID attributes can be considered a unique identifier for an LDAP object. There are several specific and some more generic LDAP authentication providers available for Weblogic Server. The specific authentication providers have default GUID (global universal identifier) attributes (see here at 'Use of GUID and LDAP DN Data in WebLogic Principals'). When using the generic Weblogic Server LDAPAuthenticator, there is no default GUID attribute. In order for LDAP caching to work and to allow browsing of group memberships for users, the GUID attribute needs to be defined. The entryUUID is a good candidate for this since every LDAP server should support it. See RFC 4530. Also see here.