Under the hood of Oracle 11g

Client is heavily invested in ALSB 2.6. They are planning to migrate to latest version of Oracle 11g SOA product suite. Apart from normal technical challenges there are strategic questions like a) How to, future proof the migration? b) what will be composition of next oracle soa release? c) Is SCA composition required, does OSB need to be part of it? d) scope of weblogic based web services and adapters ? ... etc.. some obvious technical one are a) how difficult is migrate, are there any tools to available from Oracle..
My recommendation would be migrate to Oracle Webservice
But looks like they are going with Oracle SOA 11g OSB suite which means.

WFC Contracts

I haven't used Microsoft's Web Services stack, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). What I like about it is how defines (codes) webservice. It bring it closer to SOA and separates it from bunch of communication endpoints. It uses contracts inside webservice code, I think this will make programer think more about SOA approach than pure intergration approach.
ServiceContract consist of DataContracts, instead of java beans, schemas, MessageContract instead of messages, OperationContract instead of operation and methods! . A simple naming change can make you ponder why contract word? It good start building your SOA architecture.


Learn The ABCs Of Programming Windows Communication Foundation

Weblogic webservice hiding behind a network switch

The webservices are either deployed on weblogic server or as aqualogic(alsb) proxies. Services are deployed in weblogic cluster in test and prod environment. A network switch separates client and services for load balancing, fault tolerance and security purpose.
when client (jws using sun impl) makes request, it fetches wsdl which contains service url location (sometimes such wsdl is called concrete wsdl, as it has exact loc and protocol details). the client worked well in dev environment. But in test environment when we switched off node1 in the weblogic cluster, the service became unavailable. The issue was in case of java webservices wsdl url contains private IP of node1. so client makes specific call to node1.
there were two possible resolution.
a) on client side ask it go to vip rather than node1 to get to the service.
the code
----------
port = (TestServicePortType) service.getTestServiceSoapPort();
((BindingProvider)port).getRequestContext().put( BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY, "https://test.x.abc.xyz.us/TestService/TestService?WSDL");

b) option B web service server option - create weblogic deployment plan. Provide wsdl uri pretext should be switch entry url, followed by context.
https://test.x.abc.xyz.us/TestService/TestService?WSDL

but it always worked for alsb, reason being alsb wsld query contains machine name which switch is able to resolve rather than private IP address.

TOC removed from Power Point 2007

I send 15min looking, how to add TOC/Index in MS PPT. check help, realised that TOC functionality is removed from 2007 !! workaround is to create index slide and add all slide header in right sequence.. ya i get that .. are we moving backward ?

Separation of concerns

I was introduced to to modular programing at start of my career .e.g. SWIFT ( an online payment gateway kind of banking b2b) had kept bank/branch party code in shared location called BIC ( bank information code ) lookup share directory. I say a common sense .. I was amazed when I entered Java world of patterns.. I was told to think about separation of concerns as if it was attribute of java !.. i latter realize that in good java programing practice separation is more subtle than example. above.. i never like the term separation .... I always like terms common services .. shared services.. i mean modularity may be different but idea is same !! ..

What the difference between HTML and XML?

Manager: What difference between html and xml ?
me: XML represent application data . HTML tells browser how to render webpage. It also contains data for webpage.
A short answer but not technical exact defn.. should work for manager. should it ?

Windows SearchIndexer

SearchIndexer - XP pro. machine has new utility searchindexer, which intend is to provide a better localfile system search. all know how good earlier search was.. some pro use to install cygwin to search windows FS.
I recently downloaded tons of source code. searchindexer kicked in start indexing file it took 2gb!1 of memory..
so i tried to reschedule it, to weekend. but there is no such option
next thing was to deselect filetypes to index, it list 1000 of file types, i am bit confused why are there so many file types ? in theory there should be 3 file types a ascii text file , binary files and ms document binary which you should be able to search from ms platform if was plain xml doc then things would have been easier .. that for another day.!!
Nor it has option of bulk select and deselect "select all" you have to click on individual box !!
hope they come with some simple interface and provide more tuning options for such resource intensive tasks.