Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Joy of Programming

 

The past four weeks have been very rewarding for me. After spending eight years as a Siebel consultant, and the last one year on various Oracle cloud technologies (Taleo, HCM) , I somehow ended up with a pure coding project. No packaged-application-configuration nonsense. No composer-nonsense. No fast formulas, and no flex fields. Just pure windows programming, in dot net C sharp (C#), and REST apis. I was tasked with exploring some new cloud apis, and how they can/should be leveraged via integration. After almost nine years away from pure programming language projects, I was sceptical if I could pull it off. But the last many weeks I have been tapping away in Visual studio's IDE, googling the interwebs for code snippets, and going back to the watch window in debug mode.

Boy I missed it.

I am going back to pure programming after more than 10 years now. And a lot of things have changed. I only recently learned that Microsoft have become generous with their tool offerings, there is now an express edition of Visual studio or the community edition. It is more than enough for you general coding needs, and it is completely free. All you need is an outlook email address to register. And the Visual studio system too has had multiple facelifts. You can now develop mobile apps for Windows on it. The IDE does on the fly syntax checks and even pretty prints the code as you type. The language itself has grown, now you can code a windows application with very few lines , its leaner than ever ! I remember when used the Win32 api bible to code things…and then was relieved to see MFC reducing the final code. And today even VB.NET has new functions borrowed from C languages…like local exception control..try catch. Code written in VB.NET is very easily convertible to C#.NET , this was never the case. And even support for integration standards like REST has never been better. Developers today can achieve much more writing very few lines of code, and therefore focus on the application design, instead of worrying about type casting variables and handling database cursors.

Even on the open source world, new languages are coming up designed for simpler and leaner code, which can achieve more functionality. And the community support is awesome, every problem I faced was solved looking at community code.

Now I have to check whether Oracle was able to keep up with the others, I am going to try Oracle PaaS services, their Java Cloud service and Integration Cloud service. Personally I hate the creepy world of Java, the multi-line error codes still scare me. But there is no denying that there is a special Joy in Programming, when you are able to create things without constraints.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Oracle Offers New PULA Database License

 

Following mounting criticism over the recent years for its software licensing and audit practices, Oracleappears to making a change with PULA.

The PULA was reported originally by The Register and confirmed by Craig Guarante, Co-founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance who said, “It’s not a rumour—Oracle is putting that in front of customers.”

The change involves a new license that will offer flat-rate pricing for unlimited use for Oracle’s namesake product in perpetuity.

Oracle had previously offered what it called an Unlimited License Agreement which ran for a set period of time before customers had to certify their usage of Oracle and pay for anything additional they had used during the license period.

According to the Register, the Perpetual User License Agreement (PULA) removes the time requirement and is priced on a yearly fee based on estimate usage. This change would minimize the risks of additional payments down the line and software audits from Oracle.

The PULA Licenses are still being rolled out and Oracle is likely still in the process of setting the exact requirements so there could be radical differences between PULAs held by different companies.

Speculation over why the change is being implemented focuses on two areas, Oracle’s latest financial performances and the rise of the competitors. With the PULAs requiring customers commit to Oracle over competing outfits and following the SaaS model which has produced better revenue, Oracle will hope to retain its dominant position in the marketplace.

However Guarante has questioned the likelihood of terms that restricted customers to Oracle forever citing restraint on trade concerns.

The real question is for Oracle’s customers, according to Duncan Jones of Forrester Research is if they’ll risk a ’till death do us part deal’ with Oracle.

 

 

 

Oracle Adds New Android Versions To Copyright Battle With Google

Oracle Corp. added claims covering newer versions of the Android operating system to its copyright lawsuit first filed five years ago against Google Inc.

Oracle’s supplemental complaint filed in San Francisco federal court extends infringement claims to cover newer Android versions. Oracle contends Google’s Android copies source code from its Java platform.

The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10-cv-03561, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

TCC: Complete list of Filters and Functions

 

The Taleo Connect Client has a lot of filters to form queries, and a bigger bunch of functions which can be used in the export definition. Knowing the complete list of supported filters and functions will help when one has to write complex projections. Some of the functions are documented in the official TCC developers guide.

Here is the complete list of all filter criterion which TCC understands:

cleartext.blogspot.com

and
between
contains
containsIgnoreCase
customFilter
customLogicalOperator
customOperator
equal
equalAllowNull
excludedFrom
greaterThan
greaterThanOrEqual
hierarchicalContains
hierarchicalContainsOrWithin
hierarchicalWithin
includedIn
isFalse
isNotNull
isNull
isTrue
lessThan
lessThanOrEqual
like
likeIgnoreCase
matches
matchesIgnoreCase
not
notEqual
or
predefinedFilter
returnsResults
textuallyMatches
lrd

cleartext.blogspot.com

And here is the complete list of TCC Functions cleartext.blogspot.com

 

add
addDays
addMonths
addWeeks
addYears
allCustomFields
amount
anyQuery
average
boolean
castAsDate
castAsNumber
castAsTimestamp
classType
column
concatenate
count
currency
customFunction
customValue
date
decode
divide
double
field
firstValue
float
greatest
integer
key
lastValue
least
list
lobCompare
lobIndexOf
lobLength
lobSubstring
locale
long
maximum
minimum
multilingualColumn
multiply
nextValue
overRows
overValues
parameter
power
predefinedValue
previousValue
projection
replace
replaceNull
replaceNullOrNot
round
string
substring
subtract
subtractDate
sum
switchByCriterion
switchByValue
toChar
textAbout
textAnd
textCustom
textInPath
textNot
textOr
textWeight
textWithin
toEndOfTheDay
toLowerCase
toStartOfTheDay
toUpperCase
trim
truncate
undefined

 

Enjoy. cleartext.blogspot.com

Friday, July 3, 2015

Inserting images in BIP templates for HTML output

 

Just documenting a BIP trick to insert images when the output will be in HTML. Time to time, report designers have to embed static images like logos or emblems on reports which have to be rendered along with the final output. Simply inserting the image into the RTF template will work fine if the output is in RTF or PDF format, but the images will be blank if the output is in HTML. This is , of course, because HTML does not embed the image, it just adds the the url reference to the image. Here is how to place an image in the RTF template so that it renders properly no matter what the output format.

cleartext.blogspot.com

First of all, you will have to place the image to be rendered in a public server somewhere, this can be anywhere on the internet which can be accessed via a url. Do not place this image on any server behind corporate firewalls,or it won't be rendered.

cleartext.blogspot.com

 

1: First, enable 'Developer Mode' in your Word. For this, go to File->Options->Cutomize Ribbon, and check the box next to 'Developer' in 'Main Tabs':

tmpB0AE

2: Now under the new 'Developer' tab, click on 'Design Mode'

clip_image001

3: Now, from under "Legacy forms", choose the image holder: cleartext.blogspot.com

clip_image001[5]

4: This will put a nice grey square in your template. Right click that,  choose 'Format Control' , and go to 'Alt Text'

tmp46C

5: Under the alternative text, insert the url to the final image to be rendered.  cleartext.blogspot.com

tmp9EE7

6: Thats it ! Now when you generate the output of this template, the image will be rendered properly in any output format, including HTML.

7: Bonus ! You can even add a unique URL to the image, so that when it it clicked, the user it re-directed to another website. For this, right click the image (or grey square) and choose hyperlink. Insert the url in the hyperlink box. The re-direction also works regardless of output type.

cleartext.blogspot.com

 

Cheers !

Monday, June 15, 2015

Oracle Sales Erode As Startups Embrace Souped-Up Free Software

 

While the threat to Oracle has been around for years, it’s becoming more intense with recent improvements that make open-source technology more reliable -- and appealing to a new generation of multibillion-dollar startups, said Terilyn Palanca, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

488x-1

“There was pessimism for a decade on whether those things could stand up. The question is largely resolved,” she said. “This open source, this open core model, is something we’re going to see growing and growing through the years.”

Sales Decline

The impact shows up in Oracle’s sales of new software licenses, which have declined for seven straight quarters compared with the period a year earlier. New licenses made up 25 percent of total revenue in fiscal 2014, down from 28 percent a year earlier -- a sign the company is becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from supporting and maintaining products at existing customers and having a harder time finding new business. Oracle reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings next week.

To blunt this, the Redwood City, California-based company is expanding efforts in cloud computing, which will let it sell packaged high-margin services to customers. That may help balance the slowdown in the basic business. It also operates an open-source database called MySQL.

“Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co., who has a buy rating on Oracle. “I would expect to see Oracle continue to gain market share within the cloud.”

Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, declined to comment.

Companies contemplating a move away from traditional database sellers such as Oracle have essentially two options: hire internal engineers to corral various free open-source databases, or pay the startups behind the free technologies for some must-have features. Licensing Oracle’s database can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on which of its numerous features customers choose to use.

Free Programs

One of the open-source technologies is the Cassandra database, which was created last decade and has been widely used by companies such as Apple Inc. and Netflix Inc. Though some companies develop and run Cassandra themselves, others go to the main backer, the startup DataStax Inc., for technical features they may not have the expertise to develop themselves.

DataStax, for example, has a customer that paid about $500,000 in Oracle software licenses and now spends $90,000 with DataStax for a similar project, said Matt Pfeil, DataStax’s co-founder. That price difference has started to have a major effect in the industry.

“I think I’ve been in this industry too long to use Oracle,” says Kellan Elliott-McCrea, chief technology officer of Etsy Inc. “I saw so many of my peers in the late ’90s crashing and burning and spending all of their money on Oracle.” Instead, Etsy, an online marketplace for hand-crafted goods, runs on a hodge-podge of open-source databases, primarily MySQL.

‘Sweet Spot’

Not all applications are well-suited to open source, as the systems made by Oracle and others still have capabilities far in excess of the free systems, Palanca said.

“You’re still going to have a class of applications for which these open-source solutions are not yet ready, and that is the continued sweet spot for Oracle,” she said.

Even some really big customers are finding ways to increase their reliance on upstarts. Open source is changing the type of technologies Goldman Sachs Group Inc. deploys in systems relating to messaging and databases, said Don Duet, the co-head of technology at Goldman Sachs. Many of these technologies became “standard parts” of Goldman’s computing infrastructure in the last two years, he said.

“It’s hard not to go into our datacenter and see a tremendous amount of open source running our applications and middleware,” he said. Goldman Sachs recently invested in a funding round for MongoDB Inc., another open source database provider.

Startups’ Shift

A Bloomberg survey of 20 startups valued at more than $1 billion supports the trend. The survey, which included companies such as Cloudflare Inc. and Pinterest Inc., found they placed open-source technologies at the heart of their businesses, with the exception of DocuSign, which had built around Microsoft’s SQL Server.

None of the companies surveyed indicated they had a large Oracle database deployment for their main services, though many used bits of Oracle software to run aspects of their organizations. Uber Technologies Inc., the car service, has committed heavily to Oracle via a worldwide rollout of the company’s E-Business Suite software, but job listings and presentations by Uber employees indicate it relies on a customized version of the free MySQL for its software.

“A lot of the startups now go with MySQL or less expensive options,” said David Wolff, the CEO of Database Specialists, a database consultancy. “The only thing that people complain about with Oracle is how much it costs.”

Extra Features

Companies can pay Oracle to get extra features of MySQL for $2,000 to $10,000 per computer it runs on, but none of the companies indicated this was the case. Others including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Facebook Inc., and Google Inc. have even built on MySQL to create their own free variant calledWebScaleSQL.

Still, Oracle has its fans. Zach Nelson, the CEO of NetSuite Inc., a cloud enterprise resource planning company, described Oracle’s software as “the best transaction database,” and said it made sense to use it.

“It only costs us 6 percent of revenue, and that’s nothing,” Nelson said.

As open-source databases continue to improve, there may be less reason to pay for Oracle’s products.

“I think more and more organizations are starting to realize the reason Oracle is charging that much is because there’s incredibly sophisticated technology in Oracle,” Palanca said. “Organizations are realizing they don’t need that for everything anymore.”

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Siebel IP 2016 - No More High Interactivity

 

This is from Siebel Innovation Pack 2016: Client Platform Support - Statement of Direction (Doc ID 2017902.1)

tmp2540

 

 

Also it adds:

 

tmpBDD8