Today’s Cool Tool is yet another one you already have but probably didn’t know it: Internet Explorer’s Developer Tools. In an IE8 or IE9 browsing session, just hit F12 to bring it up, and you’ll have virtually all of the functionality offered by those tools other tools – DOM analysis, Javascript debugging, and HTTP traffic monitoring.

Happy Debugging!

Such is the case with New Relic, a code-level monitoring tool provided as a service. It supports Java, .NET, PHP, Rails, and others through the use of client-side agents that report to New Relic servers, which provide an unprecedented level of diagnostic reporting for your monitoring needs. Unlike most monitoring services, New Relic actually instruments your code (or even out-of-the-box applications) with diagnostic capabilities that not only tell you if your app is performing slowly, but exactly where in the code it’s taking the most time:

And that’s just scratching the surface – here’s a chart showing that, for our Atlassian Confluence installation, response time stays flat as load increases (indicating that we’ve got good scalability built into our system):

So now what? You still have requirements to easily build forms and workflows and reports, but aren’t planning on a full move to another platform in the short term. Well, at a recent project where we’ve deployed Atlassian’s Confluence (also integrated with WCI), we came across this great form-builder plugin called Frevvo Live Forms.

In a word, it’s awesome – check out this quick demo (more videos here):

That got us thinking: what about using Frevvo as a replacement for Studio? We could develop the integration so that forms could be added as portlets and administered just like Studio. It’d do everything Studio can (integrate with portal security settings, custom-define forms and fields), have great new features (new data types, drag-and-drop form building, workflows), and, well, it wouldn’t suck like Studio.

So, that’s exactly what we did:

Interested in how to dump Studio and move on to a more powerful form-builder with workflows and much cooler reports? Contact us.

The problem is, Studio is ancient, so while we can easily update the following code:

  protected int mUserColumnWidth = 1000;
  protected int mUserColumnWidthChars = 1000;

… we can’t just recompile the file using the latest JDK without expecting problems.

So, we need to figure out what Java version was originally used to compile this file. To do this, we need today’s Cool Tool: HxD Hex Editor. Why? Because all Java .class files have the same set of bytes at the beginning identifying them as Java files, along with the JDK version used to compile.

HxD allows us to view the actual bytes, and and it does it well. Opening the TableDAO.class file in HxD, we see:

Bytes 6 and 7 are “00 2E”, which represent JDK 1.2.

Once we’ve made our changes and have the correct JDK downloaded, we rebuild the file, making sure to include the proper .jars in the CLASSPATH:

set CLASSPATH= %CLASSPATH%; C:\code\studio\ WEB-INF\lib\log4j-1.2.8.jar
set CLASSPATH= %CLASSPATH%; C:\code\studio\ WEB-INF\lib\jakartaRegexp1dot2.jar

C:\jdk1.2.2\bin\javac -classpath %CLASSPATH% com\plumtree\ studio\model\ data\access\ TableDAO.java

Take the TableDAO.class file, jam it back into your studio.war file, and you’re good to go – assuming you haven’t increased that value over 4,000 characters! There’s still one more glitch in this journey…

The package export capability is excellent when you’d like to see what has changed between portal releases; you just decompile the WCI code before and after, and use Beyond Compare to highlight the differences between builds.

JD-GUI has been my tool of choice for many posts on this blog, and if you’re into getting down and dirty with your WebCenter Interaction Java code, I highly recommend this bad boy:

JD-GUI is a free download here, but I suggest throwing these guys a couple bucks for the donationware.  C’mon, 20 bucks, anyone?  (before you ask, yes, I contributed to the cause..)

It’s also (mostly) official that WebCenter Interaction is winding down as a product line, and many clients are formulating their strategy for the next couple years.  While WCI isn’t going to go away tomorrow, at Integryst we’ve been working with a lot of different technologies to help clients evaluate “what’s next”.  It’s clear that there are pretty much three directions clients may pursue:

1. Stay on the Oracle Gravy Train and work on a migration plan to WebCenter Spaces and the rest of the Oracle stack
2. Move to a similar competitive enterprise project – particularly, Microsoft SharePoint
3. Look at building a best-of-breed open-source/inexpensive solution by tying together a bunch of great products

None of these are bad approaches, and in fact all of them are appropriate in different client situations, depending on the portal profile and business requirements.  But expect to see more of option #3 in these pages in the coming months.

As such, let me introduce you to Atlassian’s Crowd.  Crowd is a Single Sign-on product that allows you to stitch together a bunch of disparate web applications together by allowing users to log into one application and navigate to another without having to log in again.  It allows you to create various directories (LDAP, AD, custom sources), and surface those user accounts to different applications (Confluence, Jira, and even – with some custom code – applications like WebCenter Interaction), and has integration points at pretty much every level of the stack.

You’ll be hearing more about Crowd in upcoming posts, as well as some pretty slick hybrid integration solutions that won’t completely lock you in to the Oracle stack, if that’s the way you might be rolling.  Stay tuned!

For this, I’ve found no better tool than DivlocSoft’s Actual Search & Replace.  The tool is simple to use, inexpensive at $30 bucks (free if you just want to use the trial version for a quick one-time task), and allows a great deal of tailoring folders and actual strings you may want to replace.  For example, updating those Plumtree style sheets to fix all the broken crap when upgrading ALUI to WCI 10gR3 requires only a couple of regex search and replace strings like this:

Give it a shot, and let us know what you think!

I don’t use it every day, but I do find myself using it when I’d like to run a quick grep to parse huge PTSpy Log files that Plumtree Logging Spy can spit out.  You may also find it a simple way to brush up on your Linux skills from the comfort of your Windows environment.

There’s no installation – you just download the binaries, and add the bin directory to your Windows path.  Then just use the Unix commands like you would at a DOS prompt:

UnixUtils is free, open-source, and available here.

The problem ended up having to do with Reverse DNS lookups, which I’ll write about soon. 

For the purposes of this post, though, the Cool Tool is CACE’s WireShark, the Big Brother (read: later version after a name change) to Ethereal (see this post for a clarification to that comment: “ethereal is still ethereal, but ethereal development has ceased. All the core developers are currently working on wireshark. So do not expect new releases of ethereal any time soon, Wireshark is what’s being developed.”).

WireShark allows you to sniff all traffic going into and out of a network interface, which is hugely valuable (if not a bit more complicated as you get acquained with network protocols and WireShark’s powerful filtering capabilities).  As a portal administrator, you likely won’t need it daily, but when you do, it’s hands-down the best network sniffing tool for the good guys – and potentially dangerous for the bad guys if you haven’t, say, locked down your search server.

The “Cool Tool” is the Microsoft’s BizSpark program.  Started in 2008, BizSpark is Microsoft’s idea to incubate the startup community developing software around its own products.  It’s a great concept, although as a startup and mostly Microsoft shop myself, I honestly haven’t leveraged it as a way to “get my company name out there”, which is how the program is positioned.  Instead, as a consultant, I use it as a way to get almost-free ($100 or so) access to Microsoft’s MSDN program – which can cost in the thousands – for fully licensed versions of Microsoft’s products for some production applications I use (like Office 2010), and mostly test applications (like Excel 2003 to test the Plumtree Excel Portlets).

I realize most of my readers don’t meet the criteria for this program, but there are a couple of my consulting peers – and clients with “side businesses” – who could greatly benefit from this incredibly valuable program.  Just go to microsoft.com/bizspark if you meet the following criteria and sign up!

• Developing Software
• Privately held
• Less than three years old
• Making less than $1M annually

As a final note, the BizSpark Team is wildly helpful and personal; when I was having problems logging into the site and submitted a request via email, I wasn’t hopeful for a response from the “giant conglomerate” of Microsoft.  Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to end up on a phone call with a real person on a LiveMeeting call showing her exactly what my problem was, and she fixed it within 10 minutes!