Communities and Software vendors did not wait for me, and I discovered many prebuilt containers, ready to use.

The list below references official builds, i.e. the ones created and maintained by the software vendor. (by alphabetical list)

• Oracle – GlassFish 4.0.1 (thanks Alexis)
• IBM – WebSphere Liberty Profile
• JBoss – Wildfly
• Oracle – WebLogic 12c

I also built my own Dockerfile for Glassfish.

Feel free to comment this post, I will update the list.  (Official builds only)

Enjoy !

After Oracle abandoned the suite – and many other solutions in Sun Microsystems’ portfolio – the situation around Open Office is not easy to follow, let’s try to recap.

• A group of original developers from Sun, sponsored by Canonical, Novell, RedHat amongst others, forked OpenOffice and created LibreOffice.
• Oracle donated the original Open Office code base to the Apache Community, now published under an Apache v2 license
• Several large software editors have created derivative based on the OpenOffice code base, one of them being IBM’s Lotus Symphony (freely available)

Now that OpenOffice code base is not controlled by Oracle anymore, IBM decided to contribute its enhancement to the Apache OpenOffice project.  This is important news for all OpenOffice users.  This means that all improvements and changes made by IBM for Lotus Symphony will be made available for all in OpenOffice.

We are all looking forward the first release combining Apache OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony.

In the mean time, IBM released an iOS viewer application.  It allows you to view Open Document Format (ODF) text documents, presentations, and spreadsheets downloaded to your phone or tablet without the need for any network connection.

IBM OpenDocument Viewer for iOS is freely available on the Apple App Store.

This application is similar to Apple’s Visual Voice Messaging application that is deployed for some carriers.

Testing an iPhone application before it is deployed through the App Store might be tricky and is reserved for users having a minimal technical knowledge.  This article describes the steps required to join a testing program and to collect logs and debugging information to be reported to the developer.

Before installing an application on your iPhone, it has to be digitally signed by the developer and by Apple (when distributed on the App Store).

For ad-hoc distribution, i.e., without going through the App Store, the application will be signed specifically for your device.  The developer needs to know your Device ID (UDID).

Step #1 – collect your UDID and send it to the developer

First step for beta testing an iPhone application is to collect your UDID and send it to the developer.

To do this, connect your device to your Mac/Windows and launch iTunes. In iTunes, select your device in the ‘Devices’ section and navigate to the Summary tab. Click on the Serial Number label to reveal the Identifier field and the 40 character UDID. Press Command+C (CTRL-C on Windows) to copy the UDID to your clipboard.  Then paste it (Command+V or CTRL-V) in a mail message.

Step #2 – Install application

Once the developer knows your UDID, he will generate an application’s release authorized to run on your device.  Most of the time, you will receive the application as a ZIP file through email or web site download.

• Unzip the file you received
• Drag’n drop the application in iTunes
• Sync your device with iTunes to install the application

You should then see the application icon on your device.

Step #3 – Provide feedback and collect log files for crashes

We are interested to collect all kind of feedbacks and testing conditions

• General application usage, ergonomy, performance etc … many of these are subjectives but all suggestions will be considered.  Sometimes suggestions will be integrated immediately, sometimes they will be planned for a future release.
• Different devices – you’re mostly welcome to test on older iPhone, iPod Touch or even iPad.
• Slow / poor network connection.  Real life network conditions are difficult to test on a development machine, only real life usage, on the street, in a cab, in an airport etc …

If the application crashes or if you think you’ve find a bug, please report it as precisely as possible, in particular, I would like to know

• what version you are using ? (version number is provided in the mail with the application)
• what device you are using ?
• what are the precise steps to reproduce ?
• is it always reproducible or not ?

The application generate a log file that contains a precise description of what happens within the application.  Here are the steps to collect and send me log files.

1. Download Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility (Mac and Windows)
2. With your device connected, run the iPhone Configuration Utility
3. Click your connected device
4. Go to the Console tab (see screenshot below)
5. Clear the log (button at the bottom to the left)
6. Try to install and/or launch the application and reproduce the error
7. Select the relevant log lines (or just everything)
8. Click the Save Console As… button and save the file
9. E-mail the file to me

That’s all for now.  Thank you for your valuable feedback !

What’s new ?

• The plugin system has been revamped and is now based on OSGi
• The startup time has been dramatically reduced.  (We will need to find another activity to allow us for a cup of coffee – or two – in the morning)
• Integration with Maven 2
• Support of JSF 2
• And, for Mac users using OpenJDK 7, no more need to hack your Java installation to make the installer happy. (when using Apple’s provided JDK 1.6, you still have to follow these instructions)

You can download it from OTN.  Have a look at the release notes and the user documentation.

enjoy !

[UPDATE]

I have to admit that the startup time has improved much !  On my Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz / 4GB RAM – Apple JDK 1.6.0_24), a warm start gives the JDeveloper 20 secs to get the main Window. Weblogic seems to follow this path too with an impressive 11 secs to status [RUNNING].

This is a maintenance only release, no new feature has been added in this release. You can download it for free from Oracle Technology network.

Release Notes are available here

As usual, should you try to install it on Mac OS X, don’t forget to symlink classes.jar to rt.jar in your JVM installation, as per instructions on this blog (or from the official documentation)

The major new feature of this release is the support for the upcoming Java SE 7 specification, in particular project Coin (diamond operator, String in switch, multi catch for exceptions …).

Others new / improved features is the support for Maven 3, Git etc … and the support for GlassFish Application Server 3.1, Oracle Weblogic Server and Oracle database (simplified connection wizard, guided installation to JDBC driver, editing and deployment of stored procedures)

Download is free for everyone, release notes are full of details.

Enjoy !

Beside paving the way toward Oracle Solaris 11 and being one of the first Oracle branded release of Solaris, there are many new functions for developers and system administrators.

I was particularly impressed by the extremely simple installation process, that started with OpenSolaris and is now live for all current and future Solaris users.  You can have a preview with this video.

You can also download a prebuilt Virtual Box VM, ready to use.

Give it a try !

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Attend the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit to learn how to:

• Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture
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Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud.

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This event is organized in collaboration with

XE is less than 220 Mb download and Installing it on  a Linux system is as simple as

rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm

However, there is some caveats, i.e. some system parameters to tweak before installing SOA Suite’s database schemas using Repository Creation Utility (RCU).

In the same spirit as my previous blog entry : here are the magical incantations for the database gods, to be executed before RCU.

First connect to the database :

sqlplus sys/yourpassword@XE as sysdba

(be sure to have /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin in your PATH)

SQL> show parameter processes //processes should be 40 – must be 200

SQL> alter system set processes = 200 scope=spfile;

SQL> show parameter session;

SQL> alter system reset sessions scope=spfile sid='*';

SQL> shutdown immediate;

SQL> exit;

then restart XE with :

sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe start

Finally, as stated on SOA Suite download page :

“If you want to use XE you can set the RCU_JDBC_TRIM_BLOCKS environment variable to TRUE *prior* to running RCU. As a reminder as to support level, when running RCU against XE you will receive a warning stating that the database version is not supported by Oracle.”

You must issue

export RCU_JDBC_TRIM_BLOCKS=true

before starting RCU. Failing to do so will cause WebLogic to issue a bunch of database related exceptions at startup time.

That’s it !  You can now proceed with RCU to install SOA Suite’s database schemas.

Enjoy !

If, like me, you like to install the minimum set of components and then add whatever is required at a later stage, you will soon find that you can not install the Virtual Box Guest Additions : the installation procedure will complain for missing packages.

Actually, the installation procedure is compiling source code, hence it requires some development tools and the kernel header files. None of these are installed by default when you choose a minimal installation.

First Step : add Oracle repositories to YUM configuration (as root)

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo

Then ensure that the repositories are enabled, i.e. enabled=1 under [ol5_u5_base] and [el5_u5_base]

Second Step : install missing packages

sudo yum install gcc  make  automake  autoconf kernel-headers.i386 kernel-devel

Then you can proceed with normal VirtualBox Guest Additions installation.

Enjoy !