Oracle Kills Off The Java Plugin

 

Oracle has announced that they will be killing off the Java Plugin. Chrome and Firefox are removing support for plugins anyway, so the Java plugin is a vestigial security risk leftover from an earlier web.

 

eText woes

 

What is the worst report template to work with ? After 9 years of working on varous Oracle report template formats, I am happy and frustrated to report that that would the the eText BIP template from Oracle.

cleartext.blogspot.com

It is commonly used to generate Payment Texts, to be processed by banks and other financial institutions, like ADP. It is the only Oracle template which can generate output in .txt format. It has very little functions, and all the documentation can be summarized to this one page. That’s it. All the functions and settings which can be used on the eText template is right there. The output of this template is not meant to be human-read, it is always meant to be transmitted to a banking or payment system via secure ftp. From the initial version of the template system, no new function has been added. So it is kinda version independent, there is no dependency on what version of BIP you have installed. eText templates designed on older versions of BIP will happily work on newer versions. And vice versa. But this is probably the only good thing ever about this template format.

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Whereas BIP RTF templates also have some functions supported, there are ways to inject some xslt/xdofx functions in different namespaces into them. So this gives rise to redundant, but useful bunch of functions. And there is an added functionality of writing xsl templates within BIP RTF templates. And if even that does not work, one can link in external jars with added functions. But none of these can be done on eText templates. You have to make do with what you have.

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Well this makes working on eText templates extremely frustrating. And error prone. The fact that you are designing payment system integrations increases the seriousness of the situation. If there are even fractional errors during the processing, that would direct the banks to pay a different amount out.Scary.

The good thing is that there is a small community of eText developers/consulants which can be accessed via supportweb. Most of the usual issues one faces are documented with workarounds. If a requirement cannot be done , all you can do is blame Oracle and tell the customer.

Here is an issue: you use the Number command to print numbers in the eText output.

cleartext.blogspot.com

Internally the template uses the format_number function to convert the source into a number. But this function has a problem, it errors out if the source data has non-numbers in it. It cannot even handle a null. So if the PAYMENT tag in the xml contains null or any non-integer, the template will error out.

Simplest solution ? Just multiply the source with 1  !

Multiplying with 1 will work fine if PAYMENT has numbers in it. And in case of any non-number, it will just get converted to 0 ! No errors thrown !

Weird. But it works, no need to do a separate check of null or isnumber.

 

Originally published on cleartext.blogspot.com

Its Live !! Open Live Writer now works with Blogger !

 

The OpenLiveWriter project has just released a new version, it now works with blogger !  I am using it to write this post as well. Download the new version from the site and run the installer. During the installation, choose Google Blogger as your account type if you want to use it with Blogger.

 

The installer will prompt you to sign in, and will open up the authentication page on your browser.

 

Once you grant access in the browser, return to the installer to finish.

Awesome ! It works, and the interface is pretty much the same as Live Writer (though I found the tags option missing).

Hearty thank you to the good folk at the OpenLiveWriter project !!

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Siebel and Stackoverflow woes

 

Ok, we are nearing the end of another year, and there's one more month till Christmas. I have now fully moved out of Siebel, and embraced the new family of Oracle Fusion cloud applications. But I do keep track of what happens in the Siebel world. If things finally start to fix themselves (that would be a big miracle), Siebel might make a come back. I am a member of various forums where they track Siebel queries, and one of them is stackoverflow. In some of my previous organizations, I could not even access this site, due to firewall restrictions, but time and again the resources on the site have helped my own project problems. Though I have not yet asked any question on the site, just answered other's queries, and read what other's have left there. I have not asked direct questions because I want to solve my problems in my own capacity, Maybe its my ego, but I won't put up my requirement on the page and wait for some one else to solve it for me at no cost at all.

But that hasn't stopped others. And following the questions on the site gives you a good idea of what issues other Siebel developers are struggling with. At the moment of writing, these are the stats on the Siebel tag at stackoverflow.

Two years ago, there was a lot of activity around this tag, people were actively asking for and receiving help, the range of topics was wide. Here is a screenshot of the site from the waybackmachine from the start of this year.

Yep, back then, all questions were answered and there was more activity. But now the tag attracts weird questions mainly from css and jquery , because Siebel now uses OpenUI. There appears to be a bunch of noobs with only some basic Siebel training, who visit the site to mainly put up their own requirements, then wait patiently for someone else to solve it for them.

Like this guy:

Or this classical one which is a link issue, and  which is even documented supportweb.

Clearly, the Siebel pool of resources is decreasing in size. And its the same trend everywhere. Well, Siebel was always closed technology, at times the only place you could get help was on the Siebel support centre, specially about 10 years ago.

Others too have noticed the decline of activity on IT Toolbox and have created a new Siebel page on Slack.  Good old Neel of SiebelUnleashed fame too has abandoned ship. In a very candid and frank interview, he clearly speaks out the writing which has been on the wall for years.

 

"Siebel jobs are going to be there for a long time but unfortunately I don't see many new implementation of Siebel."

"People are sticking to Siebel either because they are heavily invested or they believe other products don't offer what they need."

 

So I am still (and thousands more) waiting for that miracle to bring Siebel consultants back in demand.

Anyway, back to Stackoverflow. I was pondering on these questions when I ran into a fantastic article about how stackoverflow may be the best and worst part of programming today. According to their stats, only 27% of question remain unanswered.

 

How to get Windows 7 Weather Gadget to work again

 

The weather here in Bangalore, India is acting funny again. Rain destroyed the city for the last three days, and just when the met department predicted more rain for two more weeks, it stopped raining. It is now bright and sunny (and dusty).  You have to depend on Google weather to find out the predictions for the coming days. When Windows 7 shipped, they had this cool new thing called Windows Live, and the sidebar, which had gadgets. And the weather gadget was my favourite, it would just stay there un-intruding your  work but tell you the weather outside. About two years ago, Microsoft killed the weather gadget's service, because they wanted to focus on stupid Windows 8 and 10…and this meant killing the ecosystem of 7. The weather gadget stopped workings, and simply showed the error : "Service not Available".

Here is how you can get it working again.

Step 1. You have to replace the cache file for the weather gadget with an older one. Download this file.

Step 2. On your Windows 7 machine, go to [\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live\Services\Cache]. Delete/Backup the  Config.xml file present there with the one in the downloaded zip file.

Step 3. Now go to the desktop and drag the Weather gadget back into the desktop

Thats it !

Now the default location will be New York. And changing the location from the gadget wont work. To change the location to your own, you will need these additional steps.

Step 4. Open up your task manager ( Ctrl + Shift + Esc) , and kill the sidebar.exe app.

Step 5. On your Windows 7 machine, go to [AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar]. Delete/Backup the Settings.ini file there

Step 6. Open up the Settings.ini file in a text editor and change the code of WeatherLocationCode to the code of the place you want to see.

Step 7. You can get the code from Weather.com. Just to there and search for the place, and take the code from the generated URL.

For instance, the code for Bangalore is INXX0012.

Step 8. Save the Settings.ini file.

Step 9. Open task manager again. And go to File -> New Task -> and run sidebar.exe.

Voila !

 

Have fun !

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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