Running Two WLS Domains with Pointbase

Scott S Nelson

I hope this guy’s blog lasts forever so I don’t have to manually write the steps to run two WLS domains using Pointbase on the same machine: http://www.jroller.com/gmazza/entry/reconfiguring_pointbase_databases_on_weblogic.

You would think that you could plan ahead and simply change the values for DBMS and Port on the Configure JDBC Data Sources screen, but the “wizard” still spits out config files using the default 9093 port for Pointbase.

My alternative approach is to search for .cmd, .properties, and .xml files containing “9093” and change it to “9094” for the second domain. Not as step-by-stepish, but easy to remember 🙂

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© Scott S. Nelson

Creating SAML Token Tip for Non-WLS Admins

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The documentation for setting up SAML for WLP WSRP is very straight-forward except for one small item that us non-admins may not think of: Once you have your command window open, you need to run the setDomainEnv script in that window before calling the keytool. Otherwise, you get a nice response from the commands, but the domain is not configured to use the results!

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© Scott S. Nelson

Three Types of Product Consulting Engagements

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Barring the long-term partner projects, I find there are three types of consulting engagements when you work for a product company:

Strategic: Getting the project off the ground

Tactical: Providing a solution to an isolated slice of the client project

Rescue: For the clients who thought about the first two engagements, rejected them, and then got stuck

An experienced product consultant will have experience across the full SDLC, but rarely for a single project. This is simply an observation and not positive or negative outside of the subjective context of the individual consultant.

Have you experienced another type of engagement? Post it here as a comment!

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© Scott S. Nelson

Useful Eclipse Update Sites for WLP Developers

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Two handy plug-ins with the update URLs that work with OEPE:

SQL Explorer –  http://eclipsesql.sourceforge.net/

Subversion for Eclipse –  http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/1.1/update-site/  http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/downloads.php

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© Scott S. Nelson

Remember: Examples are Just Examples

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For example, the documentation at Using the WebLogic Server JMX Timer Service gives a very straight-forward and standards-compliant example of how to run a task at intervals.  I used this example almost in its entirety to create a module to poll a database for a specific change every 2o minutes. I then noticed that the timer would stop for no apparent reason at no obvious interval.

After many hours of digging through logs looking for some cause, I was ready to give in and post a plea for help on a mailing list. It just so happened used a text editor to grab the code to post, and noticed in the text editor that there was one place where unregister would be called on the bean: under contextDestroyed in the servlet to at registered the timer.  In the clarity of hind-sight I realized that the timer was stopping more often in environments that were accessed less often because the efficient WebLogic Server was garbage collecting the unused servlet handle, resulting in contextDestroyed being invoked, thus killing my timer. As it normally should, except in the case where the timer should continue running as long as the server was running.

Lesson learned: Think it all the way through between copy and paste.

For those who like links and confessions:  There is an example of using a timer in my JavaBoutique article that contains precisely the same flaw in logic.

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© Scott S. Nelson