Monday, October 26, 2015

OpenUI lead to other frameworks from competitors

 

Three years ago people were talking about the end of the world, which know seems like a joke. But people in the Siebel business were talking more about the advent of OpenUI, and how the new UI layer will transform the Siebel landscape. Well, it was a case of too little to late. Siebel projects are now at their lowest ebb. Most Indian IT companies have changed their business models to either discontinue their Siebel practice, or to diminish and merge them with other CRM practices. There are upgrade and support projects , but greenfield implementation projects are the rarest lot.

But it turns out Oracle's launching of the ridiculously-difficult-to-implement OpenUI lead to similar offerings from other players in the industry.  Today I learnt about how SalesForcedotCom released their lightning system to allow for better UI designs for mobile and other portable form factors. Lightning uses opensource technologies like javascript ,css and HTML5, and the look and feel looks eerily similar to OpenUI.

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OpenUI also lead SAP to release a new UI layer for their systems, which they are calling OpenUI5 ! Same open standards and direct coding system, I watched a few videos on SAP's OpenUI5, and the framework requires tonnes of coding to get the layout up and running.

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SAP has launchen OpenUI5 as a repo on github, and are welcoming contributions from the public to take ti forward .Both these frameworks talk about being responsive and faster than their earlier UIs, and require tonnes of lines of code to bring up even the simplest UIs, like Siebel OpenUI. Clearly Siebel is leading the innovation in this regard, and its good to see others picking up.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

babun - the best Unix shell for Windows

 

Sometimes the best way to use a computer is via its command line. This is particularly true for developers, there are times when even the best IDE wont' do. And its then that you realize that the best command line shell is the one on Unix. Window's command support is weak and an afterthought. In the on-premise model of enterprise software development, most companies use Unix or its variant for the production systems, due its much better stability, but also lower cost. There is nothing like grepping through entire log files to find culprit code in the system. cleartext.blogspot.com

The Unix/Linux shell has over 160 commands, and different distributions can have extra packages. This gives a developer on Unix limitless power on the commandline, using simple chaining, it is possible to solve the problem at hand without having to download any extra program. But things are bleak on the Windows front, where all you can do is dir and findstr. Sure the bat files have some more power, but there are still a lot missing.  I wondered if there was a way to get a working Unix like shell on the Windows system which can access the Windows filesystem but still do its magic. cleartext.blogspot.com

And I stumbled upon babun. If you are a developer like me, babun is the only shell you will need on Windows. It is a simple installable exe shell which accepts all unix commands, and then runs them on Windows. You don't have to set it up like cygwin. It does not even need administrator rights to install, and installs silently. After installation it creates a simple shortcut on the desktop, and runs a full xterm color interface.

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And the shell understands  every standard Unix command, the usual grep, sort, wc,head , tail are all supported along with pipes. It periodically on startup, checks for updates. cleartext.blogspot.com

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Installation of software on Unix is the biggest roadblock even today, and babun makes it easy to install anything easily. The installer is called pact.

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But the best part is that it can access your native Windows disks, so you get the best of both worlds. cleartext.blogspot.com

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So now you can have all your Unix power in Windows ! cleartext.blogspot.com

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cleartext.blogspot.com

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Excel turns 30 !

 

One of the most popular and widely used software utility, the backbone of countless projects ,graphs, and computations, turned 30. No, this is not about JAVA or any other programming language. I am talking of Microsoft's gift to the modern software engineer: MS Excel. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987. The reason they released it first for Mac was due to the huge popularity of Lotus 123, the king of spreadsheets at that time. Gradually though, Excel has worked its way up and today is the default spreadsheet application of choice.

Its surprising that even the most die-hard fans of Excel do not know of this little bit of trivia, and Excel continues to be the downtrodden, faithful servant it has always been. Excel's history is really colorful, they started with copying off the features of Lotus 1-2-3, but then started adding features of their own, adding a mountain of functions to VBA, its automation script tool, and even changed the file format multiple times to incorporate new features. Today, it is even available on the cloud, and Google too has taken a few ideas for their Google sheets system. But what had set Excel apart is the Recalc feature, instead of re-computing the values of every formula cell, Excel smartly re-calculates only the values of cells required, nothing more. The original project team members reveal that this was done for optimization and speed, but only a handful of people knew the exact underlying workings.

My first tryst with Excel  was in circa 1993. We had to learn computer applications in school, and Lotus 1-2-3 was the software of choice, both in offices, as well as in school curriculums. I quickly figured out that Lotus 1-2-3 had this nifty macro system, which could be used to write quick and small functions to automate tasks. It was difficult to write the macro code, I remember one had to use the '=' key to access macro functions. But someone had installed MS Excel on the school machine assigned to me, and I found what I thought was the newer and improved version of Lotus. It had mouse support and had more colors for its graphs, and was faster. Way faster. It was fun to use, and easy to learn. Even in my wildest dreams, I could not foresee that this little piece of software would end up being the main part of my day-to-day work as a Software Engineer. I have built various tools during my work on Siebel and BIP using VBA macros, and maintain project information and even my loan and finance details on good ol Excel. Who would have thought that a simple idea of maintaining data in rows and columns would be the best way to start out any project.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Fusion HCM: Integration woes

 

Looks like Oracle does not want customers/consultants to integrate other applications to its new fusion cloud based applications. There is close to NO documentation available on Oracle SupportWeb about setting up and invoking webservices, the only information available is on some Oracle blogs, and even they don't cover the full extent of APIs. Some Oracle champs have shared information on using REST services of some Oracle cloud apps, but it is clear that each of Oracle's cloud offerings have a different topology and architecture driving the integrations. I have been playing around with the Fusion HCM webservices for some time now, and I have to say that Oracle definitely needs to work on their documentation.

All of Oracle's cloud apps are following a standard approach: they will not (read cannot) consume a WSDL of another system, but they expose a WSDL/REST service of their own, which has to be invoked from outside to get the integrations working.

Consider the Fusion HCM Wsdl, the location of which has to be taken from Oracle repository. Using the get/find methods in the WSDL proved easy, but using the create/update methods proved to be a different challenge.

Problem 1: Every element in the WSDL is optional !. Check out the CreateWorker service, which is meant to be used to create the employee records in the HCM system. Usually the XSD/WSDL gives a good understanding of the structure of the system's data model, the required fields are marked so the end system has an idea of what fields to send to create a record. In  Oracle's Fusion HCM wsdl, every element is marked as optional, even the name elements. This means the developer/consultant has to have an in-depth knowledge of the HCM system to start using the wsdls. cleartext.blogspot.com

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Really, Oracle ? cleartext.blogspot.com

Problem 2: No useful/meaningful validation me ssages. As soon as one starts triggering the methods of the HCM wsdl, the errors come back. Or, shall we say, NO errors come back. Looks like Oracle developers have not handled every exception properly.

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WTF is  "JBO-29000: Unexpected exception caught: java.lang.NullPointerException, msg=null: null" supposed to mean ?

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Problem 3: No documentation whatsoever. Oracle has two kind of cloud applications running now. One is the group of apps they have acquired, like Taleo, Rightnow CX etc…The other are cloud applications built by Oracle from ground up, from square one. For the former group of apps, the original developers have , thankfully, provided considerable documentation of the APIs. But for Oracle's own offerings, they have decided that less is better, and there is no detail documentation of the APIs. On these new cloud applications, the APIs are the only way to interact with the system, in traditional On-Premise systems, you could always have access to the application, filesystem and even database.

 

cleartext.blogspot.com

Saturday, September 5, 2015

HCM: WebService integrations

 

I am turning over a new leaf and starting with Oracle's Fusion HCM Cloud Service, looking into its integration system. Looks like Oracle does not want developers to use its webservices, because there seems to be no concise document available on how to set up a simple webservice integration. After sifting through numerous blogs and forums, I finally decided to explore the Oracle Enterprise Repository for information. And this seems to be the unwritten golden rule for Fusion applications: if you need information, go to OER.

After logging into OER as guest, run a quick query in the left pane to get started. If you want to know about Fusion HCMs webservices, select "ADF Service" under Type, and "Human Capital Management" under Product Family. You can also choose an appropriate Version, though everyone will be on the latest version anyway.

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Running the query gives a  list of Fusion ADF services which can be used for external integrations. For main Employee related webservices, choose the Worker services at the end of the list.

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To find the WSDL address of this service, choose the detail tab and go to the end of the page.

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And there, right at the end of the page, is the logical address of the service. You will have to replace the <hcm server> part with the actual hostname of your cloud service.

Simply entering this URL in a browser gives us the WSDL:

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And providing this URL in SOAPUI downloads the WSDL and schema. The WSDL is very big, SOAP UI takes a couple of minutes to completely consume the WSDL and generate the sample messages.

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And now for the really tricky part. The search request has to be built in the SOAP message so that the system can respond with data. After trying numerous combinations, I just tried a simple empty SOAP request. And…it returned successfully !

 

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:typ="http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/hcm/employment/core/workerServiceV2/types/" xmlns:typ1="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/svc/types/">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <typ:findWorker>
         <typ:findControl>
       </typ:findControl>
      </typ:findWorker>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

cleartext.blogspot.com

 

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cleartext.blogspot.com

 

 

Important: The userid and password has to be provided either in the soapenv:Header section, or in the userid/password fields of SOAP UI. If you enter a wrong password, the fusion system does not respond with an error message or exception. Instead, it simply sends back the request which it received. Completely. Without any indication of any error. So if you start getting back your request payload in the response, check the credentials.

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).