A client has asked whether or not I can provide some support for his intranet which runs on Oracle Application Server Portal. Not having used this technology before I thought I'd ask if anyone else has and what they thought of developing for it.
I'm a c#/ASP.NET developer so I note with apprehension that there's no mention of .NET in the developers guide. Anyone tried to make the two work together and lived to tell the tale?
Oracle Portal was never meant to be a "platform," but instead to fulfull a specific need. When Portal was not the right solution directly, the pointer was to JDev and BC4J, plus needed other stuff. I have done extensive Oracle Portal development and for what it is, it did just fine (i.e. a "portal" to core data and applications with some exposure of that data via the portal).
The current direction of the portal product is to separate it out and have it under Oracle's "Web Center." The focus here is to make the development of portlets closer and closer to standard java development. You can find the official statement here:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdf/oracle_portal_sod_r11.pdf
Web Center is much more of a "platform" that has all the buzz words around the 2.0 technologies. Including content mgmt, portal, and a .NET WSRP integration feature/function. I would check that out in addition to portal (which does quick and easy portlets for web center too).
My company (a dedicated Oracle shop) and I have used Oracle Portal for many years and have been very successful with it. But I have to warn you against taking on this task if you do not have experience with PL/SQL (Oracle's proprietary database programming language).
An intranet built on Oracle Portal is likely to make extensive use of custom-built "portlets". You can build these in Java or PL/SQL; in my experience, 95% of all real-life portlets are built using PL/SQL.
Theoretically, if you use the latest version of Oracle Portal (10.1.4), you can consume WSRP 1.0 portlets. So if you can build portlets in .NET that will communicate using WSRP 1.0, you could integrate these. But if your customer asks for "support", they probably expect you to be able to tweak their existing portlets - and that would require PL/SQL programming experience.
There's a fairly good description of Oracle Portal on the Oracle Wiki:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+Portal
Strategically, Oracle has placed Oracle Portal is in the "Continue & Converge" category, which means that it's supported and will receive minor updates. Their strategic portal product these days is Oracle WebCenter, but that's a $125,000 per CPU behemoth; it's likely to be overkill for 99% of all sites built on Oracle Portal.
The only experience I've had with an Oracle Portal was obliquely, when I inherited a system that used one for a relatively simple maintenance web application. A large part of my opinion of Oracle's stuff comes from my background with SQL Server/ASP.NET, but Oracle is just plain harder to set up and administer and keep running, and that applies not just to the database but also to auxiliary stuff like Oracle Portal, their SOA suite, their Mobility Server etc. Even experienced Oracle people tend to agree with this, so hopefully I won't piss anyone off.
I would definitely not provide support for an Oracle Portal application (or any other Oracle product, for that matter) unless I had a lot of experience with the tools.
I have developed a dozen or so Java portlets for Oracle Portal over the past few years. If you are not necessarily tied into using .NET to develop portlets and do not want to use PL/SQL, I would recommend this approach. Oracle's Portlet Developer Kit (PDK) offers good functionality (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdk.html).
I've not tried the WSRP approach but have deployed ASP.NET apps using the Web Clipping Portlet that comes with Oracle Portal with some success.
I have found Portal to be difficult to work with at times and a good knowledge of the other components in the Application Server stack (OID, SSO, Oracle DB, etc) is very helpful.
I recommend that you take a look at Oracle's WebCenter 11g Suite. When Oracle acquired BEA, it took on a few portal products, but from everything I've heard, WebCenter 11g is Oracle's story as far as portals go for the future - all the active development will be concentrated there. You can find a decent amount of material out there. Here's a blog post to get you started on WebCenter 11g.
Related
Long time trawler and massive fan of the site (you guys effectively taught me to code so big props to you all :D).
So as for my first question:
My company is currently developing an application that is back ended by an Oracle database, now in production this is going to be deployed in a 12c multi-tenant architecture. However the issue is our offshore development house had been developing and testing on 11g and incorrect infrastructure, something I have pushed to and mostly fixed since joining the compnay some months ago.
We have now hit a stumbling block, it has become apparent that our development house have no actual Oracle expertise and are SQL Server developers playing at Oracle, as such they are stuck on how to implement the functionality of Continuous Query Notification (CQN) in Oracle 12c given that this is deprecated in multi-tenant architecture.
I want to ask if anyone here has any suggestions for way to achieve the same functionality of a CQN in Oracle 12c?
The use of external scripts or solutions is doable, basically no limit on suggestions as we are at a stage where could potentially factor in any possible resolution.
Any help greatly appreciated.
how to implement the functionality of Continuous Query Notification (CQN) in Oracle 12c given that this is deprecated in multi-tenant architecture.
From the Readme Information for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.2), Section 2.2, "Features Not Available or Restricted in This Release of Oracle Database 12.1.0.2":
Continuous Query Notification (CQN) is not available or is restricted for a multitenant container database (CDB)
It is not the only feature unavailable/restricted, but one of the many features mentioned in that list.
I want to ask if anyone here has any suggestions for way to achieve the same functionality of a CQN in Oracle 12c?
I don't think you could create an alternative at database level, you might just need to wait for further announcement from Oracle. If something could be done external to the database, you could do it at your own stake.
our development house have no actual Oracle expertise and are SQL Server developers playing at Oracle
That seems to be a bigger problem.
You have not provided much in way of details with how you are using CQN. If, as an example, the front end app wants a notification if inserts or updates are made in a table then there a few things you could do.
set up auditing on the table with "audit insert on your_table;"
create a custom view showing the actions on the table
run a job which picks up on the new actions and notifies the app by whatever method
Apart from Technology support , what are all the business benefits for oracle web logic server. For example in area of security,support etc.
What are all the new features supported by weblogic ?
TL;DR:
Support is great when you open ticket with Oracle Support (Weblogic strictly).
Great admin/read-only user implementation. We authenticate to Windows Active Directory. Developers get read-only accounts, reduces churn for them to wait for ops to transfer logs and validate settings.
Dashboard useful out-of-box to do real-time monitoring without additional tools or installs. Easily accessed by any one who is authenticated to login. We could give it to our CIO if he wanted in about 3 minutes by adding him to the right authorized group in AD.
Easier to clone environments.
I haven't worked with OC4J but I believe Oracle's roadmap is picking Weblogic as their preferred Java application server. You can see it is the base technology for some of their other products, such as Oracle Service Bus, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), and Oracle Line Planning.
I have opened 3 Oracle tickets in the past month. I was surprised at how fast they answered. For a Severity 3 ticket (medium), they usually have responded in 2-3 days. I can't say the same for their other services (over 2 weeks for a ticket on OEM).
Security is a pretty broad scope... so you'd have to be a little more specific on some of the topics of security.
One thing that is pretty awesome is the Dashboard. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/web.1111/e13714/dashboard.htm You can obviously add read-only monitor accounts so other users can get insight to the performance. We add developers to this so that they can validate any settings, or see performance whenever there is a production issue.
We used Microsoft Active Directory authentication in our Weblogic domains. People are not using the default weblogic administrator user so configuration changes are audited. When someone's account gets disabled when leaving the company, it disables their access to Weblogic similarly. You don't have to change the password.
Other useful settings I like in it is the ability to automatically archive config changes. Each time someone makes a config change, a backup is automatically created. This allows me to go fix something when developers break their environment without having to majorly reverse-engineer what they did.
I also like the fact that you can pack and unpack the domains. I've used it to move entire domains from staging to production with some minor changes... i.e. change all stg to prod variables. This should likewise make it easier to 'clone' environments when you want to build out a new one.
Although not related, I should mention Oracle Enterprise Manager. We are an Oracle shop because they seem to have given us a good deal on licencing. So we get to run Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is a tool slowly becoming more and more useful. The agent also reports how our RedHat Linux hosts are behaving, network input/output, CPU utilization, memory utilization, java heap stacks. We are going to move to defining groups within that has all the targets related to an application stack. This will give our operations team the insight to see where the bottleneck might be... the Oracle Weblogic web layer, network, Oracle Service Bus, or Oracle Database performance.
Supposedly, you can add jBoss, other JMX monitoring as well to OEM. It's on our to-do list for non-Weblogic instance. We're slowly rolling OEM out.
I found it easier (because I have been working on it) to create web applications using Oracle ADF and related tools but I am not sure of how much it will cost.
I am no entrepreneur or organization, I am just a developer but I had an idea of developing web application (a typical data input, store and report like) for which Oracle ADF will ease my development. The Oracle's pricing list looks complicated. My total operational budget(including hosting, and licenses) is around $50-$100 per month (which I know is very less, but GAE or AWS comes around this budget). I am looking at a small userbase here mayB grow slowly.
Thanks
If I'm not mistaking is the cheapest WebLogic Server license +- 20.000 dollar per CPU.
You can use ADF Essentials + GlassFish. Those are both free to use, the downside is that ADF Essentials doesn't support out of the box security.
Oracle does have a cloud offering where you pay per month and it can run ADF apps on WebLogic - see - https://cloud.oracle.com/mycloud/f?p=service:java_pricing:0:::::
But given the amount you had in mind you might want to look into the GlassFish+ADF Essentials option. http://multikoop.blogspot.com/2012/09/adf-essentials-in-redhat-cloud.html
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I am given a project which is very small project for small clinic which may be contains of five departments reception or registration and billing, pharmacy, store, laboratory, payroll so far, and as you know most of the operations for this project would be like CRUD operations if we will take first module as example:
for the first department "Registration and billing "
there will be form which contains the details of the patient and then the billing part will contain the entry fee and then if the patient goes to Dr then goes to pharmacy his details should be there in the pharmacy page where the medicine that he is going to buy will be added to his profile and then print the receipt.
My questions now are:
Can apex do this project.
Can I use the bar code to get the product details.
Can I add figure print machine for the employees attendance.
Can I integrate apex with some pages from JSP in case if I have dynamic module needs more control driven mechanisms.
Questions related to apex with 11g XE and cloud:
Can I use apex and 11g xe for free and install them in server in my organization? If yes, so What are the limitations ?
If am going to deploy it on cloud shall they will use Oracle 11g XE or Oracle SE or EE, or it depends on my request ?
If I greed to start apex and I would like to deploy it on cloud is there any requirements , like Do I have to first contact Oracle and ask them to give me the login to apex on cloud and work remotely , Or
Can first develop it here in my machine and then contact oracle and deploy it on cloud .
If apex is not recommended for such projects please tell me before I start , and I will replace it with Java EE6
Can apex do this project.
Yes.
Can I use the bar code to get the product details.
Client-side interactions are notoriously tricky with web applications. It you have a bar code reader which can turn the barcode into JQuery or something then yes. But this will be the hardest part of the project.
Can I add figure print machine for the employees attendance.
Same as 2. Can your FPS do JQuery?
Can I integrate apex with some pages from JSP in case if I have dynamic module needs more control driven mechanisms.
By default Apex operates out of the http server in the database. If you want to include Java Server Pages you need a separate web server and your architecture has just got way more complicated. The good news is that Apex is capable of supporting pretty sophisticated interactions, so the chances that you'll need JSP are slight.
Can I use apex and 11g xe for free and install them in server in my organization?
Yes. For limitations I suggest ion you read the documentation.
If am going to deploy it on cloud shall they will use Oracle 11g XE or Oracle SE or EE, or it depends on my request ?
What cloud? "cloud" is just a generic term of remote hosting. But generally the point about cloud is you get to choose. Also, remember that the Oracle licensing will still apply: when you deploy Oracle SE or EE you will need to pay the Per CPU license, so be careful if you plump for something flexible such as AWS Elastic Cloud.
If I greed to start apex and I would like to deploy it on cloud is there any requirements
Again, what cloud? Oracle don't host apps, so why would you need to contact them? There are a load of companies which do specialise in host Apex apps. Find out more.
(OTN does offer workspaces but purely for evaluating Apex, not for actually running - or even developing - production systems).
"I have several comments on your answer "
Your original questions rather strained the remit of SO, which is a programming site. Your follow-up questions are utterly off-topic, as they are largely business questions and the answer to pretty much all of them is "it depends".
Dependencies include:
budget
available skill set
privacy and data protection compliance
number of users
amount of data
usage profile
complexity of application
on-site facilities
reliability and availability requirements
If you don't know how to analyze these factors and use them to evaluate architectural solutions you really ought to hire somebody who can. This is work which would be measured in hours, if not days, and is way beyond what you can reasonably expect people to do for you on a Q&A site.
Remember: the free advice you get from some random bloke on the internet is worth exactly what you paid for it.
We are strongly considering using Workflow Foundation 4 in our products, however must support both SQL Server and Oracle. Does anyone know an Oracle Instance Store provider for Workflow Foundation 4?
I know I could use SQL Server Express for it, but some of our customers use Oracle, and don't want to have an SQL Server, even free, to manage.
Tks
If you do not mind using a commercial product then DevExpress has a very good solution. 16 database systems are supported along with re hosted designer and custom activities. Read more in this post XAF Workflow persistence storage
An updated devart link on the subject. It works well for me, for the persistance and the tracking participant also.
http://www.devart.com/blogs/dotconnect/?p=5566
AFAIK there is no publicly available version of the instance that works with Oracle. I have seen the question a number of times however so I can only encourage someone to publish one of those I suspect have been created privately on CodePlex.
Use this dll. We are using it and works well. Still need to check tracking and load testing.
http://www.devart.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21044&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=a5e672c431dafecb1e675b6fbecc5183