Posts Tagged ‘Cool Tools’
Monday, August 16th, 2010
I started the Cool Tools feature 3 years ago at Function1, and I’m sorry to say, I’ve listed everything you could possibly ever need now or in the future of WebCenter consulting, portal development, or portlet hacking.
HA! Truth is, while I’ve already done one lap around the “software utility” track, there are LOTs of Cool Tools out there – some directly related to portal development, debugging, or maintenance, and some more broadly defined.
In fact, I wouldn’t really consider today’s “Cool Tool” a “tool” at all – it’s a full-fledged application, and it’s likely to give the WebCenter stack a run for its money in the long term.
Allow me to introduce Atlassian’s Confluence – one of the web’s best Wiki platforms out there. We’ve been working with this application a lot lately, and have been very impressed with it. It’s a powerful wiki platform, has a robust third-party support and development network, is dramatically less expensive than Oracle products, and provides many of the features some clients bought the Plumtree portal for. (Does it surprise you to know that a bunch of the old Plumtree team ended up there?)
When ALUI Publisher was released, BEA occasionally said it would be the blog and wiki platform that customers had been waiting for (it wasn’t). Then, we started hearing that the ill-fated product called Pages was the REAL blog and wiki platform (it wasn’t). 2009 brought us some more “WCI Sample Portlets available for the Wiki/Blog/Discussions functionality” (meh, didn’t really work). This year the message clients have been hearing “it’s all about WebCenter Spaces”. Honestly, while we may or may not see the fabled 11g version of WebCenter Interaction, Spaces does look very intriguing. In my opinion, though, it’s still not as rich as the much more mature – some would say over-the-hill – WCI portal is now. And it certainly is not the right application for all WCI customers.
So, friends, until I see Oracle deliver the great, mythical, elusive Enterprise Wiki we’ve been hearing about for years, consider me firmly in the Atlassian camp on this one – the stability, ease of use, price-point, and sizable third-party ecosystem are first-rate! Don’t take my word for it – try it out yourself for ten bucks.
Stay tuned for many more tips and follow-up posts on Confluence and other third-party products that can work alongside your existing portal implementations – and some posts on where Confluence falls short of a “full Portal Replacement”. Until then, feast your eyes on… THIS:
OK I’m not going to lie to you, unlike most Cool Tools, it’s not easy to find a screen shot that embodies all of what a great wiki product Confluence is. At least it’s not as hard as taking a picture of the wind…
Tags: Atlassian, Confluence, Cool Tools, Wiki
Posted in Confluence, Cool Tools | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
For those of you that use the Oracle DB in your portal stack (or for pretty much anything), you know what an atrocity Oracle’s SQL*Plus is (it’s more dated than Plumtree / ALUI!). I’ve looked on and off over the years for a simple Oracle client that works as well as Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio, and I want to thank Hani Atalla for turning me on to this one: Benthic Software’s Golden. It’s hyper-simple to use, and even has all the “creature comforts” like being able to copy a result set into an Excel Spreadsheet (try doing THAT with SQL*Plus!). It does require Oracle’s Instant Client to work, but even I (as a non-Oracle DBA) was able to install both in a matter of minutes.
If you’ve sweated through SQL*Plus sessions for way too long, definitely check this tool out – it’s cheap, at only $40. If you’ve got a better tool for quick and easy Oracle DB queries, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
Tags: Cool Tools, database, Oracle
Posted in Cool Tools, Oracle | 5 Comments »
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
After upgrading from ALUI 6.1 to WCI 10gR3, all of our portlets looked … wrong. The background color had reverted the blue, and they were cutting off on the right side so you couldn’t see the toolbar buttons. Strangely, this was only happening in IE, so we weren’t able to use Firefox’s FireBug. Fortunately, there’s a similar type of tool offered by IEInspector Software called IE Web Developer 2.
Similar to FireBug, it offers basic HTTP tracing, JavaScript debugging, and, in this case, DOM/CSS analysis. This allows you to higlight an item on the page – in this case, a portlet – and view all the styles applied to that item. it also shows you where the style definitions are coming from:
Using it, we were able to determine that the CSS files had changed, and there was an addition of “table-layout:fixed’ and a ’background-color’ definition in the CSS definitions for the column layouts. Removing these definitions from the CSS restored the look and feel back to the way we had prior to the upgrade.
How did we update the hundreds of CSS files we had? Well, that’s a post for another day… (more…)
Tags: 10gR3, Cool Tools, CSS, IE
Posted in Cool Tools | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Any self-respecting programmer has a suite of decompilers in their arsenal. Hey, the WebCenter Interaction portal is great, but it’s not without its fair share of bugs, and often Oracle Support isn’t going to give you a lot of, well, support – so sometimes you need to take matters into your own hands. Today’s Cool Tools are two of the best .NET decompilers I’ve used; I’ll have a post for Java decompilers soon.
I’m kind of split on this one and go back and forth between Dis# Decompiler and Red Gate’s .NET Reflector. I do a lot of decompiling, and both have proven relatively useful. As professional tools, they’re not cheap ($399 and $195 for the professional versions, respectively), but can save hours of time, and both have free trial versions. Red Gate’s Reflector even has free version available.
Personally, I sway a little more to Dis# Decompiler for one reason: You can have it decompile ALL class files in a .DLL at once. This is highly useful if you’re looking at bad portal code and are trying to search for a particular string somewhere in the portal libraries, but don’t know which class it might be in; you can decompile everything to disk and search with a text tool. Red Gate, on the other hand, offers Visual Studio integration – which I haven’t tried yet – that promises to allow you to step through compiled code like you would with your own source.
So there you have it – two decent tools to check out when it comes time to figuring out why something’s broken. Let me know if you’ve got a preference, or feel free to recommend something else!
Dis# Decompiler
Red Gate’s .NET Reflector
Tags: Cool Tools, decompilers
Posted in Cool Tools, Integryst | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Yes, I’m a VMWare fanboy. I own stock. I truly believe in this “cloud computing” thing, but it’s going to be a while – if ever – for large corporations and government to trust someone like Google or Amazon to store their data in the cloud. In the meantime, the next big trend is for these organizations to host data in their own “cloud” – i.e., virtual servers. Lately, I’ve been migrating some ALUI clients to WCI via VMWare Server. That is, rather than upgrading servers in-place, we’re using the opportunity to “go virtual” and install the WebCenter 10gR3 portal stack in the VMWare environment, then migrating data and content from the physical servers to virtual. This eliminates down-time – you can just cut over the DNS or load balancer whenever the virtual environment is ready to go after the data synch. I’m sure I’ll have another post on this strategy someday, but today’s post is about the Cool Tool called VMWare Server.
For those not in the know, VMWare Server allows you to create many “Virtual Machines” on 1 or more physical machines, each running Windows (or Linux or whatever operating system you choose). There are many huge advantages of this, including:
- Being able to physically reboot the virtual server without “standing in front of it” (this is huge if you’re a WebCeneter portal administrator who’s never actually seen the servers running the WebCenter Interaction portal, and are tired of asking IT to push the power button if something goes horribly wrong).
- Being able to duplicate virtual machines to a dev environment or Disaster Recover (DR) site
- Being able to use generic drivers while still having full redundancy (say I have a huge physical machine with 4 HP network cards; I don’t need to install HP drivers and configure Windows to handle all those NICS; the VSphere handles that for me; to the virtual environment I have a single, generic NIC that basically never goes down because there are four physical NICs behind it)
- Being able to add and remove resources like CPU and RAM from the virtual systems without touching hardware, and view resource consumption in real-time
It’s this last point that warrants a little attention. Let’s say we have a massive machine or cluster of machines with 4 quad-core 3GHz CPUs and 80GB of RAM, running 20 Virtual Servers. Each of those servers would have 4GB of RAM – Windows can’t dynamically allocate memory to grow and shrink the memory in real-time, but if we found one server that’s at 90% RAM and another at 10%, we could shift some RAM from one VM to another after a reboot.
Here’s what’s REALLY cool though: a 3GHz processor handles 3 billion instructions per second; a quad-core (bear with me on this, it’s not technically accurate) can handle 12 billion. If this were a physical machine, we could mostly get 3GHz out of it, but because we’re virtual, all virtual machines share the same computing power. So if your WCI Collaboration server is basically idle while the WCI Publisher server is furiously copying files, you might see performance metrics like this:
That’s right – the publisher server is running at SIX (6) GHz, because multiple physical CPUs/cores are crunching data for the one virtual CPU. Meanwhile, the “idle” server is still doing its job, but handling its load at only 500 MHz:
Ah, techmology…
Tags: Cool Tools, VMWare
Posted in Cool Tools, VMWare | Comments Off
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Get ready for a handful of VMWare fanboy posts. I’ve been using VMWare Workstation for years so that I can run different versions of the WCI portal for different clients, and am starting to get involved with VMWare Server (vSphere) for virtual WCI portal installations, so look for a couple of posts on that in the future.
I’ve got about a dozen clients with different portal versions, databases, development environments, VPNs, etc. And it simply isn’t all that practical to install off these pieces of software (especially VPN software from different vendors, which often don’t play nice with each other) on the same machine. So for each client and development environment I have, I maintain a separate Virtual Machine. This way, I can have an installed version of the portal, database, and dev environment that matches the client, as well as the client-specific VPN and any other support files I need. These Virtual Machines are then portable between my desktop and laptop, and can even be shared with the clients themselves if they need a ready-made development environment: the .vmdk files (which are physical files on your drive that represent the virtual drive in the client Operating System) can simply be copied and shared.
What happens if you run out of disk space on your Virtual Drive, though? It’s actually not a completely simple process, but can be done in 3 pretty quick steps:
1) Resize the “physical” disk itself.
You do this by editing the Virtual Machine settings, clicking the hard drive, then clicking “Utilities”, and “Expand” to increase the size.
(more…)
Tags: Cool Tools, resize disk, VMWare, workstation
Posted in Cool Tools, VMWare | Comments Off
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Here’s a tool I can no longer go without. The premise is simple: it’s MUCH easier to visualize what’s using up your disk space, rather than look for it. Enter WinDirStat. Run this thing as a portalable app or install it, and you get beautiful looking graphic representations of your drive – complete with the ability to hover over blocks and identify what’s taking up so much space on your disk.
Here’s a drive with a ridiculous amount of Analytics Logs on it (remember to prevent Analytics from logging like crazy with log4j configurations!):
(more…)
Tags: Cool Tools, WinDirStat
Posted in Cool Tools | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Let’s start out this blog with a continuation of a series we started at Function1, Cool Tools. For this feature, I’ll occasionally add tools I use on a regular basis that have some sort of relevance to WebCenter Interaction (aka Plumtree Portal, aka AquaLogic User Interaction, aka ALUI - yeah, we’re all in a perpetual state of adopting the new names since BEA aquired Plumtree and Oracle acquired BEA).
Today’s featured app is a simple one but I’m still always surprised at the number of screen shots I get where people hit “print screen”, then paste that screen capture into Word, then attach that Word document to an email.
There’s a better way! In Vista and Windows 7, you can use Microsoft’s “Snipping Tool” to quickly capture selected areas of your screen to the clipboard. Just run C:\windows\system32\SnippingTool.exe (I add a shortcut to the app in my Quick Launch bar for easy access), and you’ll never be far from a quick and easy way to take screen captures.
Once you launch the tool, you’ll get a simple interface:
… and the screen will “grey out”. Then, you just highlight what part of the screen you want to copy and the Snipping Tool will automatically copy the image to your clipboard. Go to an email in Outlook and click paste (or hit CTRL-V), and viola! – you’ve got a screen image of only the relevant part of the screen you’d like to share.
The really cool thing is you can highlight text and draw arrows on the screen cap to point out areas of the snapshot you’re referring to, and Snipping Tool will automatically update the image on the clipboard.
Tags: Cool Tools
Posted in Cool Tools | Comments Off
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