Audience

Not everybody is starting up JDeveloper first thing in the morning in order to work with Oracle SOA Suite. Let’s face it: Instead of being an SOA expert, any given IT specialist is more likely a certified DB admin, a Java developer or somebody who was just told by his manager to take care of that Oracle Service Bus installation. In case you are one of them and looking into SOA and the related Oracle products this posting is written for you.

Technology and Oracle

The following two recipes provide firstly a no-nonsense explanation of Service Oriented Architecture (the first part is not related to Oracle at all !) and secondly an overview of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware (OFM) product stack.

The description is deliberately easy to read and I intentionally didn’t reuse any fancy marketing slides since they are often too generic and contain too many buzzwords.

Download

For everybody trying to get started and reading a 101, here is the link to download SOA and Oracle Fusion Middleware for busy IT professionals (PDF).

Enjoy!

PS. Actually these two recipes are taken out of my book Oracle WebLogic Server 12c – Distinctive Recipes.

AUSOUG Workshop Series 2013 with Frank Munz

 

This independent workshop is run by Frank Munz, Oracle Technologist of the Year 2011 and published author of WebLogic 12c: Distinctive Recipes and Middleware and Cloud Computing. Frank was running the popular Oracle and Amazon Cloud Workshops in 2012 and now presents a 3h workshop based on his new WebLogic 12c book in 2013.

Workshop Details

Duration: 3h including a short coffee break

Content: In the workshop we will cover worthwhile WebLogic 12c features, best practices (also applying  to earlier version of WebLogic), default settings that you should better change, security glitches, useful open source tools and other stuff Oracle doesn’t tell you about.

The workshop will be centered around the core WebLogic technologies. We will examine the interesting new features of Java EE 6, the merged JVM, configuration management, debugging of memory leaks, stuck threads, deployment of configuration settings with application modules, performance tuning tools and mistakes, custom JMX MBeans, etc.

Format: The workshop will contain lots of live presentations. An Oracle Virtual Box Image with all the examples will be provided at the end, so you take them away and use them any time you like on any computer. (Note: The Virtual Box Image won’t contain Oracle WebLogic Server which can be installed in a couple of minutes.)

Target Audience: Ideally you have some hands-on experience with WebLogic, but even if you are just starting and looking for an overview of the exciting parts you are most welcome. The workshop is suited for architects, administrators and those developers interested in more than just Java EE standards.

Links:

Frank’s WebLogic 12c book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0980798019

twitter:         @frankmunz
blog:              http://www.munzandmore.com/blog

Subscribe to the WebLogic 12c webcast channel on YouTube with over 30 free WebLogic 12c videos available online: www.youtube.com/WebLogicBook

Registration:

For registration check the AUSOUG site first.

$95.00 (inc GST) for members

Dates and Venues:

Seats are still available for the following venues:

Apr 8, 2013: Brisbane

Apr 10, 2013: Sydney

Apr 15, 2013: Hobart

Apr 17, 2013: Adelaide

Apr 19, 2013: Perth

Apr 11, 2013: Canberra

Apr 12, 2013: Melbourne

3h are too short? You’d rather prefer an in-house WebLogic 12c workshop? Feel free to drop me an email! All my workshops include course material, all lab applications to take away. Also typically a VirtualBox image is provided so you can ran any example at any time and anywhere.

About Frank:

Dr. Frank Munz has over 15 years’ global experience with top middleware vendors such as Sun and Oracle. A middleware and distributed-computing expert, Frank has a Ph.D. in computer science and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific papers and over 200 articles.

Frank’s consultancy, munz & more, focuses on Oracle middleware and cloud computing, offering a high-end training program worldwide.

Oracle rewarded Frank with the Oracle Technologist of the Year award in 2011.

Frank loves to talk about features and showstoppers at conferences all over the world.

 

Reviews and Attendee’s Opinions

Click here for the reviews of the WebLogic training course (Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth events)

My new WebLogic book is published now!

• Over 40 videos replacing the boring screenshots used in typical cookbooks.
• No “Click here. Click there.” instructions
• Useful recipes
• Download deployment modules: Web Services, EJB 3.1, Timer EJBs etc
• Q&As
• Best Practices
• Default parameters that you should better change
• Performance glitches you should be aware of
• Open source projects you have to know
• Stuff Oracle doesn’t tell you about…
• Published in Australia. Click on the book image to buy.

 

Check out the book’s homepage.

 

 

Situation

Can you easily find out which WebLogic servers are listening to which port numbers and addresses?

Imagine a multi-project machine with a dozen IPs and tens of domains. When trying to start WebLogic another process has already bound to the address and port so you get the following Java exception:

java.net.BindException: Address already in use

What is listening to a particular port on a certain IP?

Is it a WebLogic? If so, what is its domain name and directory?

Solution

There is a helpful UNIX command lsof (the name means “list open files”).

Description

Actually lsof is very versatile. Here are some examples of its usage.

Find what is listening on localhost and port 7001 on the local machine.

$ lsof -i @localhost:7001

COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

java    2802 oracle  397u  IPv6  37417      0t0  TCP ccloud:afs3-callback (LISTEN)

You can tell from the output it is a Java process with PID 2802. To find out more about the Java process, (is it really WebLogic or maybe the Derby database or node manager using a weird port number?) narrow it down with ps.

 

$ ps -ef | grep 2802

 

oracle    2802  2746 18 10:40 pts/2    00:03:10 /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_04/bin/java -client -Xms256m -Xmx512m … .
-Dweblogic.Name=AdminServer … weblogic.Server

Looking at -Dweblogic.Name=AdminServer in the output above tells you it is a WebLogic admin server running. Now if you’d followed recipe 7 you could determine from the username the name of the WebLogic domain. Then you could conclude the domain directory from the domain name.

Discover Domain Name and Directory

Even if you didn’t follow recipe 7 with regard to users and names, there is still a solution. Here comes another trick with lsof (this is why I mentioned that it is so versatile!).

You can still find out what domain the WebLogic instance belongs to by looking at the files it has opened. In particular, you want to see the log files it has opened, because they belong to the domain and unveil the domain directory.

$ lsof -p 2802 | grep ‘\.log’

The last line in the output looks as follows:

java    2802 oracle  348w   REG      253,0        0 261838 /u01/domains/surfandconsulting/servers/AdminServer/logs/access.log

You can easily narrow down the grep command above if you know that your domain directory contains e.g. the word “domain”.

 

Process holding a file

You can also do it the other way around. Find out which process has a particular file opened.

$ lsof /domains/surfandconsulting/servers/AdminSrv/logs/access.log

COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF   NODE NAME

java    2802 oracle  348w   REG  253,0        0 261838 /domains/surfandconsulting/servers/AdminServer/logs/access.log

The output is telling you it is a Java process with process ID 2802, so you could use ps again to find out what exactly this Java process is.

 

 

Binding  to name

Check if WebLogic is listening to a particular name, e.g. the host name of the machine.

$ lsof -i @ccloud:7001

 

COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

java    2802 oracle  397u  IPv6  37417      0t0  TCP ccloud:afs3-callback (LISTEN)

From the output you can tell it does!

Binding to IP address

Check if WebLogic is listening on the local machine to the address 192.128.9.1

$ lsof -i @192.128.9.1:7001

There is no output, so WebLogic is not listening to this address.

 

 

Hands-on Webcasts

I recorded a hands-on webcast available that walks you through the usage of lsof.

 

Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: Distinctive Recipes

Many more recipes are contained in my new WebLogic 12c book.

I will use this posting to collect my own recommendations for everybody starting with Oracle Service Bus (OSB).

- Get a formal training. Unlike SOA Suite, where 5 days of training merely scratch the surface, a good OSB training can cover most things you have to know in a week. There is a rather steep learning curve and the official documentation is slightly less brilliant than let’s say Weblogic documentation. “SOA” generally speaking involves more marketecture.

- If you are really new to OSB, then create a simple project with pipeline pairs and stages and find out the order how the actions are executed in the response pipeline. An easy challenge with at least two different approaches, yet sometimes the solution is not that obvious.

- After the training try it yourself. Develop a super simple web service, then call it through OSB, e.g. using SOAPUI or even the WebLogic admin server as a client.

Books

- Get the OSB cookbook from Schmutz and colleagues for further assistance. It’s a cookbook as it says in the title, so don’t expect a lot of explanation or too much background information. Yet it will support you doing more difficult tasks. According to an Amazon review the ebook has some problems (which well be fixed soon I hope!). I recommend it for everybody who is not working everyday with OSB. All examples worked for me so far.

- You may consider the OSB book from Davies, but I personally don’t recommend it for anybody who is not a real expert (then, why would you need a book?). At least don’t expect any simple explanations in the book.

Build

Check out Biemond’s blog posting for deploying OSB and OFM with Puppet.

 

Underlying Tech

If you need a refresher for XPath or XQuery I recommend the free and brief tutorials at w3schools.

Very readably introductions to XSD, XML Namespaces, WSDL and versioning of web services can be found in Thomas Erl’s book about web service contract design and versioning.

 

Links

- Check the following link on slideshare for the new OSB 11g features.

- Calling custom code: Java callouts and custom XPath.

Limitations of OSB

Understand the current OSB 11g limitations. It’s still using Eclipse but all the rest of Oracle SOA Suite has changed to JDeveloper already. So working with OSB and SOA Suite is a bit cumbersome at the moment (you need 2 IDEs when deploying an JCA adapter, XQuery functions differ etc.).

 

Make sure you have a good start with OSB – I personally think it’s a great product of the Oracle SOA stack!