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· One min read

Dashcode is a new application for developing Dashboard widgets coming in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). This tools is already available as developer preview on Tiger.

I have installed it and it is really great, easy to use, helping you to create good looking widgets. As usual, like all the Apple development tools it is really intuitive. More than a long blog entry on this I am just pointing you to the DashCode page on the Apple site:

· 2 min read

Oracle just released on OTN a new product "Oracle Data Integrator" (ODI), I wanted to quickly take a look to the product, so I have downloaded it and installed it on my Mac. This product is a 100% Java based solution that you can quickly installed on mac following these steps:

1- Download and unzip ODI from OTN download page (bottom).

2- Open a terminal Window and go to the folder where you have unzipped ODI, you should have the following content:

- external
- index.htm
- oracledi
- oracledilwd
- oracledimn
- setup

Open the index.html and select the Getting Started Guide, this will help you to learn more about ODI using a comprehensive scenario.

3- Setup the environment variables:

export ODI_JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/   (need to be Java 5)

export ODI_HOME=<path to ODI installation folder>/odi/oracled

4- Go to the $ODI_HOME/bin

cd $ODI_HOME/bin

5- Start the HSQL databases that contain the sample application and data:

./startdemo.sh &

This command starts 3 different instances: repo (metadata repository), src (source db), trg (target db) that are used in the Getting Started guide. To stop the DB run the script ./stopdemo.sh.

6- You can now start the designer too using the command:

./designer.sh &

Select the Getting Started project and when you are in the designer switch to the Mac OS X look and feel ;-), using the Menu "Look And Feel > Standard > Mac OS X".

These are the first steps to start with Oracle Data Integrator, you can now follow the Getting Started Guide, to learm more about the product, and since your environment is set you can run any of the command documented in this guide.

· 3 min read

HTTP compression has improved a lot the download time of content from servers. In the context of Web Service it could be very interesting to also use HTTP compression to improve the network traffic. Firs, I am explaining how to compress a SOAP response when you have a Web Service running in Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) using a generic servlet filter. I have to give credit to http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ since he has created the Filter and documented how to do such thing using Axis. 

So you can take a look to the following article for more details, you can read the 2 following article, or jump to the next paragraph that explains how to configure your JAX-RPC based service to send compressed HTTP response.

In this sample I am showing how to compress the SOAP response using a servlet filter, it is also possible to use some other Oracle infrastructure element to achieve that such as Oracle HTTP Server/Apache, or Oracle Webcache.

1- Install the compression filter library in your application​

Download the compression filter library 2wayfilter-1.2.jar and copy it into the Web application's WEB-INF/lib folder

2- Configure your application to use the filter​

The configuration of a servlet filter is done using the web.xml where you reference which servlet or URL will be using the filter. As you may knowin JAX-RPC, the HTTP endpoint of a service are exposed as servlet and defined in the web.xml. You can choose to compress all the endpoint/URL or create a new servlet mapping, that will become a new SOAP endpoint and only compress this one. If you take the option of creating a new endpoint keep in mind that it will not be added to the WSDL automatically, so the client application will have to point explicitly to the compressed endpoint URL to take benefits of it.

<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
  version="2.4">
  <servlet>
    <description>Web Service CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</description>
    <display-name>Web Service CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</display-name>
    <servlet-name>CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>demo.oracle.CustomerServiceImpl</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

  <!-- New servlet mapping to handle compressed SOAP Messages -->
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>CustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>CompressedCustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>


  <!-- Filter definition with mapping on the compressed endpoint -->
  <filter>
    <filter-name>2WayFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.osmoticweb.gzipfilter.GZIP2WayFilter</filter-class>
  </filter>
  <filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>2WayFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>CompressedCustomerServiceSoapHttpPort</url-pattern>
  </filter-mapping>

</web-app>

You can now package and deploy your application.

3- Create & Invoke the service​

In this basic configuration you have only changed the servlet that is the HTTP endpoint of your service. So the compressed endpoint is not present in the WSDL, but you can use any of the URL to create your proxy.

When you have created your proxy, if you want to access the endpoint that will return the compressed response you must be sure that you are calling the correct endpoint. You can set the endpoint using the setEndpoint method, of your Web Service client.

This is it!

I will in a next post explain how you can using the Oracle Web Service client API send a compressed request that will have to be uncompressed on the server using the same filter.

· One min read

Groovy release 1.0 is here now !

You can find the release at the following location:

Congratulations to all the Groovy developers, and users that have done a great job with this language that is here in production. And it is interesting to see that more and more projects are using Groovy as part of their infrastructure to simplify development:

  • SOAPUI
  • XWiki
  • Spring 2 integration
  • Grails
  • ... and many development teams in custom projects

So once again happy new year to all... and enjoy it with Groovy !

· One min read

As Mac user I sometimes need to use Windows (too often...) or Linux computer, and for this I have been using either my PC or Parallels. Parallels is great but in my daily job my coworker are mainly using VMWare images....

VMWare has now open the VMware Virtualization for Mac Beta Program. If you like me need virtualization jump on it and give feedback...

· One min read

The groovy project gets funding for its development. Big Sky is hiring Jochen Theodorou one of the Groovy commiter. For the people that do not know Big Sky. Big Sky is the company behind the the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. Talking about this symposium, in 2007, Groovy and Grails will have a dedicated track.

More about this funding:

In addition to this very good news, here some other activities around Groovy and Grails:

  • Releases of Groovy 1.0 and Grails 0.4
  • Two books on Groovy and one on Grails.
  • A dedicated Groovy and Grails website: aboutGroovy.com
  • Also a dedicated Groovy and Grails conference: theGrails eXchange 2007
  • And the third Groovy Developer Conference in Paris at the end of January

· One min read

Jesus Rodrigues has published on his blog multiple articles on interoperability between OracleAS and Microsoft WCF:

MTOM Interoperability:

WS-Security Interoperability: