January, 2010

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RMOUG Presentation, Part 1

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

For RMOUG (February 17 – 18, 2010) this year, I have a presentation called, “APEX – Moves from the Garage to the Basement”. I wasn’t sure if my presentation would be accepted based on the title. Who knew? The title is actually supposed to be a play on the real life story of HP starting their business in the Garage. For developer’s today, the same can be accomplished with a spare PC, Internet connection, and a few pieces of software including ApEx. To get this really going, I added information on setting up dyndns with a cable modem, which is the setup I personally have, and seems fairly common. This can be extended to most any broadband setup as well. The idea of the basement came from my own setup as well. I have a 24 port gigabit switch in my basement, so I setup a small table that has an old PC and a UPS next to the router.

I also have a domain name and use the custom dyndns service for less than 30 dollars (US) a year. An extra bonus, is Mail for Google Apps. I run the server from by basement, but have all of my mail routed through Google. That isn’t part of the presentation, but thought I would add that. Google, for me, just can’t be beat when used as a spam filter. I used to run my own mail server with postfix and spam-assassin. I just couldn’t keep up with the new ways I was getting spam, and really didn’t appreciate what was coming through and available to my kids. Using Google as a filter has solved this issue about 99.999 percent of the time.

I will add postings of how I set this up soon. Right now, the latest Ubuntu LTS server has been released, and I need to check this out with another virtual machine install. As for that, if anyone wants to know, I use both VMWare and VirtualBox. I had almost made the switch to VirtualBox completely, but am waiting to see what the fallout of this software will be with the Sun acquisition by Oracle. I have always though Oracle’s VM Software was lacking, so it will be interesting to see what develops! I wish I could be testing ApEx 4.0 as well with the new server VM. That will have to wait for another post when the software becomes available to the general public.

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First week of training on UCM Admin down, one week of Site Studio training to go!

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Had a great week of on-site training with Jason Stortz as our instructor. I have to give two big thumbs up, as the training Jason provided was both tailored to our needs, and the amount of knowledge that he brings is inspiring.

What was the biggest take away?
Creating components in Java was really simple and powerful. The examples found at HowToComponentsBundle are a must have. Setting up JDeveloper to build the class files was really easy. There is a tutorial on building components. Unfortunately, the only source was on metalink. If you have access, go to community/Middleware/Universal Content Management – Then look in the popular documents section.

Other important notes: Repeating the mantra, “You need a component to do that” was the phrase of the week. With training, you realize that UCM is like many other Oracle products. You purchase a very base model, but get tools that, once you learn them, have the capability to get the job done. You have to think in UCM. This means that you need to learn IDocScript, and follow the component model system to get the functionality you need. So, what does that mean? Simple, you need a component to do that!

To give you an example. We have lots of documents that we need to import, but a large percentage of these documents have spaces in them. By using a little IDocScript and the RemoveWs function in the batch uploader, we were able to upload the documents with name without spaces. Now when we link to this content from our web server, we don’t have to deal with spaces and encoding links.

In order to get check-in documents to be space free, we created a component that removed spaces from the Original Name during the check-in. We were able to create a component using two lines of Java code to get this done. Of course there is more to it than this. Setting up a component to call the java code was done with the component manager, and we used one of the components found in the howto bundle as a template. We also needed to know what event to hook into. As you can see, a lot of setup just to get two lines of code to get the job done.

I will try to add more code that is UCM based as that is the direction my employer is taking. There seems to be a dearth of documentation on “How To” with UCM. Even though Bex’s Book is very helpful, more is needed!

Posted in UCM | Comments Off on First week of training on UCM Admin down, one week of Site Studio training to go!
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