Installing PMD Plugin for WebLogic Workshop 10gR3

Scott S Nelson3 Comments

For those that read my Cleaner Code with the PMD Eclipse Plug-In article on Developer.com, you will know that PMD is one of my favorite tools for saving time in code reviews. I recently wanted to review a project built for WebLogic Portal 10.3 and was frustrtated to find that it would not install through the Eclipse updater.  At the time I wrote the article, I was unable to find zip install for the more recent PMD versions. Today I found a new location for  the old download and unzip install files for PMD on SourceForge today at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd/files/, and it seems to work fine when installed with this approach.

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© Scott S. Nelson

WebLogic Workshop 8.x Out Of Memory Fix

Scott S Nelson

A clip from the release notes:

Large Applications May Require Additional Memory Allocation If you are building and testing a large application, WebLogic Workshop may run out of memory, which can cause it to run slowly or shut down. Workaround: You can increase your memory allocation by modifying the Workshop.cfg file, located in the BEA_HOMEweblogic81workshop directory. Add this flag to the command-line arguments: VM flag -Xmx512m

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© Scott S. Nelson

WSRP over HTTPS in WLP

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Ever run across a problem that sounds real familiar, but you don’t remember all the details of the solution? Recently someone was telling me an issue they were having with WSRP where the WSDL when accessed over the HTTPS port still showed the HTTP end point.  That is when I experience De Ja Vue (I’v seen this before).

When using HTTPS with WSRP in WLP you must edit the wsrp-producer-config.xml in the producer application:

<!– This element describes the capabilities of this producer. Set the secure attribute to “true” if you require this producer offer any port over SSL. –>
<service-config>
<registration required=”true” secure=”true“/>
<service-description secure=”true“/>
<!– Set accepts-mime to true to more efficiently process uploaded files when the consumer is a WebLogic Portal. –>
<markup secure=”false” rewrite-urls=”true” transport=”string” accepts-mime=”false”/>
<portlet-management required=”true” secure=”true“/>
</service-config>

The bold is where the default value has been changed to true. My conclusion from this is that with WLP your WSRP portlets are either available over HTTP or HTTPS, but not both. I haven’t tested this theroy, however, as I have not yet worked on a WSRP project that was not over HTTPS.

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© Scott S. Nelson

What is Web 2.0?

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I saw this question posted on Linked-In today and thought I would blog my input, especially as I have been tied up with some paid work and haven’t been blogging as much lately…

Q: What are the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

A: In addition to answers already provided, Web 2.0 is often a battle cry for selling new IT products and services rather than an actual technology. It encompasses AJAX, blogs, wikis, RSS, mash ups, and just about everything else that is currently popular.

What is the same between the web before and Web 2.0 (no one ever referred to Web 1.anything until the Web 2.0 marketing banner was raised) is that these technologies can be a huge benefit when implemented well against a solid design and massive headache if done wrong.

Not all of the technologies are mature yet, which is where the big push to use them can be beneficial. Why? Because as development teams run into the issues and limitations vendors will be pushed to fix them, which will accelerate their maturity.

IMHO 🙂

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© Scott S. Nelson

Speed Up The WebLogic Portal Admin Tool

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Large WLP applications usually have many desktops. For speed and convenience, these are often based on a .portal file. You may notice a long delay in the loading of the list of .portal files when creating a new desktop. If you do, you can greatly improve the speed of that list being created with one or two steps. The firs step is to store all of your .portal files in a single location. Many people do this already, which is why for them this will be a one step process. The final step is to add the path in web.xml like this:

<context-param>
 <param-name>portalFileDirectory</param-name>
 <param-value>/</param-value>
</context-param>

 

This can be found in the performance tuning manual that comes with WLP, but we all know how often we get to read the whole manual 🙂

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© Scott S. Nelson