Arie's Blog

Update field automaticaly once another field get updated

2011-10-30T03:31:00.000-07:00

Now, I just want to share out a bit of how to update the field automatically in Maximo. A lot of time, we have requirement on how to update the field once another field get updated. Yes, this is really to ease user for not updating another field manually while the information exists in another table. Well, this kind of behaviour is quite common in the UI of maximo. Let's say in the Purchase Order application. Once you update the field of quantity, you should get the total cost of the purchase. that is, one of the default behavior of the Maximo UI.

In order to perform the above behavior, you can do it in 2 ways.

Coding in the level of Mbo
Coding in the level of Bean

Both must be done by coding. :P Well, it's indeed this blog is meant to be.

Anyway, doing coding in level Mbo, you can do it in Fld classes. Thus, you need to perform some changes on metada of Maximo's database. But, one thing that you need to ensure is that you update the same Mbo as what the bean is actually display. Because, a lot of time, the mbo object is not the same as what the mbo object used in Bean. Thus, updating the data will take no effect on the mbo which current bean displays.

doing coding in the level of Bean, will definitely give you the right Mbo. Thus, there is no need to worry about different Mbo object problem as I describe above.

Maximo does not publish the changes created by MIF

2011-10-22T02:19:00.000-07:00

During my project in AORA, I have been configuring a lot about integration/MIF as it deals a lot with external application so called Satellite Application. The idea is the satellite application does not deal directly to Maximo database, but they are accessing Maximo database through iface table. Well, that is general idea of why Integration exists.

In the business process of our client, there is a process to transfer their assets from one storeroom to another storeroom. Well, the satellite application will expect to have a record of Transfer Order to perform Transfer Out-In process. The record is created in the iface table (this is the term representing a table used to exchange data between external application and maximo). Transfer out will be performed first, from Maximo. Once, the process of transfer out is finished. Transfer in will be processed. Transfer in will not be executed if the transfer out has not been done. The transfer asset process involves a hundred of assets to be transferred even thousand, thus, we cannot use a standard Maximo to do this.

To fulfill the above scenario, I make some customization to process the assets. I am using excel reader to read excel and then process it to MIF. Using MIF, I am able to create record. Well, upon creating the record I am expecting to get a record for transfer in. But in fact, it does not get created which is weird. I have created a publish channel to monitor the objects but still the transfer in object does not get created. Well, my hypothesis is that it has different behavior between integration and created directly from UI, which I think, it is not supposed to be so. Thus, the solution to deal with with the problem is to perform some changes on the object either using mbo changes or using escalation to monitor the existence of object and do some changes (adding description to object or any kind of changes to trigger MIF to publish the changes) on that.

Maximo Authentication

2011-04-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

When user login to maximo, Maximo has its own way on doing authentication process. Well, i think its bad. Why do i say so? maximo does have flag for toggling purpose between lookup to db or LDAP and akin. but, it seems that its no use.

Here is the way maximo doing some authentication.

Maximo doing lookup against the db first, if there is no result of looking up the db, then the process will lookup to the ldap. But, before doing lookup, it will see the flag of "useAppServerSecurity". If it is true, then its going to find the ldap for the entered user.

There is a few thing on my mind regarding this process.

1. the process is not efficient. Why? because maximo will lookup the db before lookup to the others. If it has a flag, then why dont use the flag for toggling purpose.
2. if user wants to migrate, then user should migrate all the user in maxuser to the repository of choice.

deploy weblogic using maven2

2011-01-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

I tried to deploy my app into weblogic app server using maven2. Yes, there are a few ways. You can use cargo and weblogic maven plugin. I just tried to use the simple 1 which is the cargo plugin. It seems that this plugin has a problem on the repo. I got so many problem of redirection problem (as the maven2 has a problem on doing redirection once the repository is moved to another server). This gave me a problem of the metadata in my local repository. It seems to many things to do and I just gave up on dealing with this plugin.

Having such problem on the cargo plugin. I try to use weblogic plugin as in the following:
http://mojo.codehaus.org/weblogic-maven-plugin

The following are the steps that I go through to get my app deployed onto my weblogic.
1. Insert the following piece of xml code onto the settings.xml. Insert the following configuration:

weblogic
https://nexus.codehaus.org/content/repositories/releases

weblogic
https://nexus.codehaus.org/content/repositories/releases

2. Insert the following piece of xml code into

org.apache.maven.plugins
maven-war-plugin
2.0.2

org.codehaus.mojo
weblogic-maven-plugin
2.9.1

deploy

deploy
start

mpl-web
${wls.adminServerHostName}
${wls.adminServerPort}
t3
${wls.userId}
${wls.password}
true
true
false
false
${wls.targetname}
true

weblogic
wlfullclient
${weblogic.version}

weblogic
com.bea.core.descriptor.wl
1.1.0.0

3. As you might see on the above configuration that the plugin needs 2 weblogic's plugins. Those are wlfullclient and com.bea.core.descriptor.wl. I just need to install the manually. You can find artifact com.bea.core.descriptor.wl in the directory of /modules. While the other artifact is a merged of all the jar files which located in the /wlserver_10.3/server/lib. So that, you can get the files simply do the following steps:
a. go to the mentioned directory.
b. execute the following command to merge all jars:

java -jar ../../../modules/com.bea.core.jarbuilder_X.X.X.X.jar

java -jar wlfullclient.jar

4. Create the war package of your app by executing the following command: mvn package
I use maven-war-plugin version 2.0.2 to package my application as the default version seems to have a problem.

5. Deploy the app to a running weblogic (Ensure that the weblogic server is running). Take a note that I am using a remote deployment instead of local one even the app server is on my local.
Execute the following command the get it deployed.
mvn weblogic:deploy

An internal error occurred during: "Starting Oracle WebLogic Server 10gR3 at". java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.w3c.dom.Node.getTextContent()Ljava/la

2010-06-28T22:15:00.001-07:00

An internal error occurred during: "Starting Oracle WebLogic Server 10gR3 at".

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.w3c.dom.Node.getTextContent()Ljava/lang/String;

its been quite long, i have not been blogging as the work load in my new company is so freakin heavy. Well, just want to share up some small thing but its very annoying and noisy. Well, here is the story behind this error.

Previously, I had a problem on using BIRT on Maximo. and it seems that the problem is caused by some incompatible library. After googling around, I found out that a few people experiencing the same problem as me even not specifically for the use in BIRT and Maximo.

Then, I followed what the suggestion told me to. Yet, the result is not as what I had expected. It does not work at all. Seeing that this problem took too much of time and also the due date of the project is quite close, then I was moving forward to deal with another stuff. The day after, I got my PC restarted and then I got the problem as the above. After troubleshooting the problem, I found out that the problem relies on the endorsed method which I took to sort out the problem of maximo and BIRT.

Rolling back all the changes, will give back your eclipse to normal.

The path does not contain a valid WebLogic Server install

2010-02-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

Its been a while for not blogging. huehue... now im working in a different company and different business. Most of the time, I deal a lot with weblogic and etc. Alright, the first time dealing this application server with eclipse, I have a problem saying a non existence of home directory as in the title of this blog.

Upon googling around, I found out some discussion about this message. We need to point eclipse to some part of the directory of weblogic which is /weblogic81 or whatever version that maybe another user uses. Well, as most of the beginner, many people will not be aware of bea home and bea installation directory (I havent tried to differ between bea home and bea installation directory). Anyway, it is sorted out by pointing the explained-above directory.

Project properties of JIRA

2010-01-11T04:55:00.000-08:00

Currently, I am doing plugin development of JIRA. A request of my friend in hongkong. The functionality of this plugin is to clone the existing project with all the issues and the configuration of the project. Thus, this project will be akin of template to create 'real' project.

One interesting part of developing this plugin is cloning the issue type scheme. As we know that JIRA has issue type scheme to differentiate the type of the issue. JIRA divides the issue type scheme to be global and not global. By default, the global issue type scheme is Default Issue Type Scheme. But, strange thing is happening when I try to fetch the entity of Default Issue Type Scheme. When I use the following line to get the entity:

FieldConfigScheme fieldConfigScheme = issueTypeSchemeManager.getConfigScheme(existingProject);

and the above result is checked against the isGlobal() method of object fieldConfigScheme. The result is false which I think, it is supposed to be true. However, what i did to solve the problem is to check the object against the default fieldConfigScheme and it works.

Guice-ing your code

2009-11-28T19:19:00.000-08:00

During my learning on shindig, i found out that shindig using guice a lot on its code. Of course, I try to find out what is this tool about. After a little bit searching, I found out that the it is a bit similar with Spring. However, the authors say that it is different. They say that guice is not container and it is too light to be container. Anyway, just cut the bullshit and try to find out what is this tool about.

The first impression on my side after trying this tool is simple. Well, yes... it is indeed very simple as a dependency injection framework. What you need to do is the annotation. It makes all the things very simple.

The things that you need to remember (well, at least on my simple try) on regard of guice-ing your codes is the injector. The injector will try to lookup what are the fields, methods or constructor which need to be injected with object. Then, guice will inject it for you.

Below is a little bit example on it:

public static void main(String[] args) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
Injector injector = Guice.createInjector();
Customer customer = injector.getInstance(Customer.class);
customer.changeItem("barangnya");
}

The method injector.getInstance(Customer.class) will give you a complete object of customer with the injected notifier object. Below is the class of Customer:

public class Customer {
@Inject
public Notifier notifier;
public void changeItem(String message)
{
notifier.sendNotification(message);
}
}

Notifier is an interface. Guice will lookup on this interface to find out what class implement Notifier interface. In order to know what class which implemet Notifier interface, the interface should define annotation to tell the guice. Below is the interface of Notifier.

@ImplementedBy(SendSms.class)
public interface Notifier {
public void sendNotification(String message);
}

Its easy, isnt it (well, at least for this try :P)?

Building and Running shindig source on eclipse

2009-11-16T02:18:00.001-08:00

Well, running or debugging any java sources managed by maven inside eclipse is as easy as running any simple application in eclipse. The only thing that you need is maven integration plugin. This is a super power plugin when your application deal a lot with maven. I just started to fall in love with eclipse instead of his competitor, Intellije IDEA, which always falls on the error of classpath. I need to delete the current working space and then rebuild it again. Its very annoying.

Yeps, maybe better to tell you a bit story of using this IDEA, a very lame tool to develop your application. The slogan should not be "Develop with pleasure", but it should be "Develop with pressure" instead. Many people agree with this slogan. Perhaps, we really need to tell them this new slogan. I have been using this IDEA to develop and learn about Confluence and JIRA source. However, everyday, I restart my computer, it always fall on the classpath error. It says that it cannot find xxx class while yesterday i build it without any problem. Then, the only thing that I can do is to build it again. It takes a lot of time indeed. Thus, I recommend you for not using IDEA to develop your application. It will only give you pressure because you spend a lot of time to rebuild your source.

Anyway, back to eclipse. I am using this tool to build, running and debugging the source of shindig. Yeps, it is pretty much easy. You just need to install the plugin on this url:
http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

well, you should get the list of plugins need to be installed. Just pick the core and then installed and restart your eclipse after finishing the installation. After that, you can simply open debug configuration and then create a maven command to run your source. You can use any maven plugin, I have used jetty and tomcat for the tries.

Building and Running shindig source

2009-11-16T02:02:00.000-08:00

I ve just tried to build the source of Shindig and running it on eclipse. Yes, as what most people expected, there will be problem face during this process.

First time I was experiencing the problem of not able to build the source of shindig. I saw the log of the process, it fails on the test code. Thus, I just skipped it and running the maven command mvn is success.

The problem is not stopped on this, if you try to run it on jetty using the following command (as what the doco said)

mvn clean install jetty:run -DrunType=full -Djetty.port=80

It will complain as in the following:

[INFO] The plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-jetty-plugin' does not exist o r no valid version could be found
Thus, you need to run a complete maven command as in the following

mvn clean install org.mortbay.jetty:maven-jetty-plugin:6.0.1:run -DrunType=full -Djetty.port=8091

Even more, it will complain on the non-availability of the webapp directory as in the following:

[INFO] web.xml does not exist at location F:\software\shindig\src\main\webapp\WE B-INF\web.xml
Therefore, you need to run it on /java/server. Run the above complete maven command, you should get your jetty running the shindig. You can access the sample of shindig using the address:

http://localhost:8091/gadgets/ifr?url=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml

You should see the following image on your browser.

SSO (Single Sign On) for JIRA and Confluence

2009-11-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

I just developed an SSO application which is built on mule. This SSO can be plugged in the application which is using seraph as its security framework. The 2 greats Atlassian's product which are Confluence and JIRA uses seraph, as its security framework. Thus, this SSO can be applied to these products.

Basically, the idea of this SSO are:

to use a middleware to store a data on regard of user's authentication, The middleware that I use is mule as it is free and open source. So, people can use it.

to use the existing user framework which is used in seraph to perform authentication. Seraph, by default, uses osuser as its user management framework. However, as we can customize and plug any authenticator to seraph. This would make the authentication is more dynamic to perform. The authentication definitely needs user management framework to perform its task by comparing the credential in database against the input that use provides.

As of now, i still need to clean the code and doing some automation to ease the installation.

Unable to resolve JRE

2009-10-31T01:30:00.000-07:00

Have you experienced this message on your eclipse after building your application using maven 2? I experience this problem after building mule source and the following are the things that I did to fix the problem:
# Check your JAVA_HOME to point to jdk instead of jre
# Check your pom.xml to point to the right jre. The following is the figure of my pom.xml which procudes the message above on the pom.xml

This is after the change:

The change that I did is only changing the name of your jre as my jre directory is jre1.5.0_07 and it is located at C:\Java\jre1.5.0_07.

How to change maven repository

2009-10-29T04:30:00.000-07:00

Well, yes... I experience the problem of not enough space on my drive C.... I believe many people experience the same thing as me. One of the causes is my maven repository is getting bigger and bigger. Yes.. it is the problem when you need to build the source and downloading the dependencies.

To get it changed, what I was thinking is where the configuration of maven located. Then, I was thinking about the installation directory (my maven installation directory is in F:\software\apache-maven-2.0.9). I was suspecting there should be some sort of configuration about this. Just go to the installation directory of maven, and then I found settings.xml inside the conf directory on my maven directory. Open it up and then I found about local repository configuration. The following is a figure of it.

Soap document Validation on webmethods

2009-10-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

Today, I am experiencing the problem of dealing with webmethods on consuming service generated by processing wsdl of JIRA's application. Well, I definitely experience an error message on dealing with this. Here it is:

com.wm.app.b2b.server.ServiceException: [ISS.0088.9139] Output parameters do not conform to targetOutputSignature:
errorCode=VV-004

The above is caused by validation that is done by webmethods after receiving the object during the soap service calling. All the fields on the object will be validated and if the fields' value does not match (even, the value is empty or null). It will complain. It is very annoying if you receive an object which does not have any value or we can say it as null. it keeps poping up an error message as mentioned above.

However, I found weakness of this validation. It seems that webmethods is not trying to match between the object's fields and the document as reference for validation. Thus, if the fields in the object being retrieved does not exist in the document, then there will be no validation being done.

ConfluenceJira integration

2009-10-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

It has been so long for not blogging. Yeps, I come back to blog on my integration of Confluence and JIRA using webmethods as the tool. The initialization of the project has been uploaded to my github repository.
* http://github.com/ariemurdianto/ConfluenceJiraWM

In order to integrate between these products of Atlassian. I use webservice which is provided by both Confluence and JIRA. Also, I use email notification which is sent every time certain event is happening on both application. The email notification that I extract the information is email which is generated from add comment and add page. I extract the information from those type of event and integrate Confluence and JIRA.

Let's pick Confluence as an example to describe the way the system that I juscet developed works, You can configure Confluence so that it will notify you when there is someone adding some comment to certain page. When this event happen, then Confluence will send an email notification to the subscriber (Every user can subscribe on certain available space in Confluen). Every certain period of time, the flow service that I developed, will check on the mailbox and then grab the email with certain pattern. If the email notification is adding a page, then the subject of the email will show us that the email is an adding page email. We can see the pattern of the email subject to determine the event being generated in Confluence. After grabbing the email and extract the information, the service will call the webservice of JIRA to create an issue. This process also happens in JIRA wise. When certain event is fired then the email notification will be sent... so on and so forth....

In fetching email from my inbox, I need to create a custom java service as I can not find any service which deals with imap server in developer documentation (I may be missing out some documentation). This custom service does fetch data based on the predefined regular expression and then extract it to be title, space, bodyContent. For detail on the code, it has been uploaded to my guthub repository.

integrate Confluence and JIRA using webmethods

2009-10-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

I am planning to integrate Confluence and JIRA. The basic idea of this integration is every time one of those products get updated, then the update will be taking effect to the other product. The updating that I mean is creating an issue in JIRA, giving a comment in JIRA.

The current thought of this integration is:
1. if user creates an issue in JIRA then Confluence should be created a page with the page content is the same as the description of the issue.
2. if user creates a page in Confluence, JIRA should be created an issue as well.
3. if user add a comment to some page in Confluence, JIRA should be able to get the comment added to the relevant isssue.
4. if user add a comment to some issue in JIRA, Confluence should be able to the the comment added to the relevant page.

The integration tool that I use is webmethods and mule.
On regard of the progress. let's see later on the next post.

Migrate MySQL to postgres

2009-09-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

I just googled around on how to do migration from MySQL to postgresql. I ended up with unavailable script of phyton. However, I found Use mysql-postgresql-wizard of component EnterpriseDB which can be used to . You can download the source from here:

http://downloads.enterprisedb.com/src/mysql_pg_wizard_src.zip

You need to download Apache Ant to build the source. I use Apache Ant 1.7.0. Use the following command on how to build the jar file:

ant dist

Executing the above command will produce a jar file which is MigrationWizard.jar. To get the wizard of migrating the mysql to postgres, you need to execute the jar file using the following command in the /dist directory:

java -jar MigrationWizard.jar

The following wizard should be poped up once you execute the above command.

Event Handler on jQuery

2009-08-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

Just tried to implement event handler in jQuery. The first impression that I have is simple, easy and straight forward. Yeps, what do you need to do is just binding event name with certain function and then of course, you need to trigger the event.

Below is an example on how to bind the certain object in javascript using jQuery:

$(document).bind('kampred.facebox', function(){
alert("si kampred");
});

The above will bind event named kampred.facebox to object document. In order to call this event and let the handler execute the function. What you need to do is to trigger it. Below is the example on how to do it.

$(document).trigger('kampred.facebox');

Calling the above line, will trigger the event kampred.facebox. Of course, it will prompt you an alert box. Its simple, isnt it.

facebook's box alike

2009-07-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

After quite long doing research on how to display a popup like what is in facebook, I found a way to do so. It is a jquery plugin which name is facebox (you can google this). Basically, the basic functionalities of this plugin is poping up a window which contains an information from certain dom. Start from this understanding, it can be improved to insert an information from another page (using xhr). Of course, when i say using xhr, it can only fetching data from the same domain as xhr cannot be used to fetch data from different domain.

Well, in this blog, i would like to share the way it works in a bit high level for the operation of fetching data from another page. Basically, this plugin only fetch the data from another page and insert it in a dom. Of course, it will be hidden. After fetching the data, there will be a decorator manipulation which is the popup window itself and grab the information from the dom and put it in the popup window. Well, that's all. Its simple, isnt it? Of course, for my need, I tweak it a bit.

Below is the picture of my try where the information is grabbed from Twitter.

Transaction, maintainability and performance

2009-07-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

Transaction management strategies on high performance application. This is an interesting topic, I guess, since many of enterprise applications have such problem.

Most of the enterprise applications are having a problem of performance because they maintain ACID in every of their transaction. Thus, the transaction will be atomic. Imagine that we have a few transactions, 100 transactions maybe, that we need to maintain the atomic-ity of these transactions for only one action of user (clicking certain button). And definitely, the user of some applications are not only 1, so it will cost more slowness. The more users who access your application at the same time, the more slow of your application will be.

Sometime, we sacrifice performance for application's design. we usually choose to have a good design of the application rather than a high performance of application. For example, the use of ORM, let's say hibernate. Using this kind of ORM, definitely, will slow down your application. But, it will make your application more portable if you want to use another database and also, it will make the code of your application much more maintainable.

This kind of trade off cannot be avoided. It will always exist in every of software development. However, it needs to be assessed and evaluated so that those factors can benefit end user.

One thing that may come on your mind is the use of stored procedure to leverage the performance. Why does stored procedure can be used to leverage the performance instead of having plain sql? Because stored procedure is a precompiled sql statement and also less data being transferred between application and database server. Unfortunately, not many ORM fully support store procedure. The only ORM that I know which supports store procedure is Hibernate. For detail about store procedure can be seen on the link below:
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/querysql.html#sp_query

YQL open data table

2009-07-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

So that, you can use a service of YQL, you need to configure open data table. This table is in xml format which tells YQL what service that you want to expose and also it tells you also on how to use the service. Thus, this open data table will determine how is your query looks like.

YQL provides you 4 operations to deal with any public webservices, such as Twitter and Facebook. They are select, insert, update and delete. Yeps, pretty much similar with sql query. They are very powerful to deal with those public webservices.

I am gonna explain a little bit about those operations

select, this operation is to fetch data from webservices that you point in YQL. The things that you need to be aware is the format that you expect YQL to send to you. The available format are JSON, XML and the combination of both.
insert, this operation is to add/insert a new data through YQL.
update, this operation is to update certain data through YQL
delete, is to delete data in public webservice through YQL.

In SQL query, as we know, there are parameters, we need to supply so that they behave like what we expect. Below is the piece of code as an example:

The parameter of YQL is specified inside tag inputs. The thing that you really need to be aware is about the paramType. It determines how is the behaviour of the variable. paramType variable means that the input is accessible in javascript as the above. Yeah!!! it is one of the interesting thing of YQL, it allows you to do javascript to tackle the problem of basic authentication. It's nice, isnt it?

For a complete referece, you can see on YQL documentation. Overall, Its a gift to know that YQL comes. It is really helpful service.

YQL rocks

2009-07-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I was doing research on how to perform cross domain ajax. I was hitting a lot of problem as this method (as in cross domain) was not supported by xhr. This object will definitely hit into a problem of security as you are trying to do a cross domain ajax. However, after google around, I found that jquery has a plugin named flxhr. This plugin claims that it can do a cross domain. I read the documentation, it says that it uses flash as a proxy to do request. But, it needs a configuration file in the machine to be planted. I dont think, it is a good way to implement my plugin. Hence, I leave away this plugin.

That time, I really gave up to find a way on using xhr. It is definitely not the right way to get data from another domain. However, I found a way to fetch data from different domain. We can fetch data from domain using technique called JSONP. This technique is actually a script to create or inject another script dynamically. The destination website needs to provide a service in JSON format and wrap it in a function. By then, we can do JSONP. As I need to deal with twitter and I see twitter provides service in JSON format. Then, I can definitely use this way.

Again, all the things do not go as smooth as what I expected. Some of the provided services need basic authentication. Arrgghh, again, I cant use JSONP for this. Feel so damn curious on how to resolve this problem. Upon googling around (again, I dont want to use this word, actually :P). I found out about a new service provided by yahoo. This service is called as YQL. It stands for yahoo query language. It acts like a proxy for any open webservice provided by well known website such as facebook and twitter. Also, this service provides you a way on how to modify header of the request using javascrip. Finally, I can fetch data from twitter using the great YQL.

Here is the snippet of my javascript to use YQL webservice.

social repository Github

2009-07-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

Today, I just got a way on how to checkout a code in github. well, let me introduce what is github actually. it is a repository for community. Yeah, you can sign up yourself in the following address:
http://github.com

I have registered myself in the following:
http://github.com/ariemurdianto

Well, you will see a few test project there. Well, as I am noob, it should be not a matter. :D

However, this repository is quite unique compare to the others. it provides you almost the same featurea as subversion, the only thing which makes this different is about the command. The command's name is different. Just a few things are the same.

The thing that I did is to clone a project of yql-tables from spullara and then try to perfom add and edit on this clone project. Well, it is successfully being updated there. What does this mean? it means I can start to develop my plugin as yahoo service can reach open table in github.

Yatta!!! the next plugin will be coming shortly.

Ajax Cross Site

2009-07-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

Now, I am trying to develop a Confluence plugin which needs an Ajax cross site. This plugin is actually need a data from outside. It means that I need to open and maybe hold the connection during the data fetching process. If I do this in server side code, it will burden the server a lot. Thus, I need to distribute the burden among the client. Thus, Confluence will not be complained to be slow anymore.

Upon googling around, it seems that it is impossible. A lot of people hit into a security problem. As xhr (XmlHTTPRequest) does not allow any script crossing site. However, I was finding clue which reveal the script of doing cross site. JSONP!! Yeay... By using JSONP technique, it is possible to fetch data from outside using javascript. The idea of JSONP is actually to have a dynamic insertion on function. As you may know that we are allowed to import a script from outside. For example:
< type="text/javascript" src="http://vs1.pbworks.com/shared/statics/packed-v70340828.js">

But, the application which you want to fetch data from, should provide a way so that the json which is a return value of rpc, wrap the return value in certain function. The following is a piece of code which does JSONP:

var surl = baseurl + "&callback=?"
$.getJSON(surl, function(data) {
var res = '<>The data: '+data.screen_name+''
$("#result").html(res)
})

Releasing plugin using maven

2009-07-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

I was having difficulties on how to release plugin in maven since this is the first time I develop plugin for open source. A new knowledge for me indeed. My plugin which is about RPC using JSON in Confluence, now has been released. You can have a look at the following page:
* http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Confluence+JSON+webservice
* http://www.customware.net/repository/display/AtlassianPlugins/Confluence+JSON+webservice

I hope that many feedback from Confluence users to this plugin.

Anyway, back to the topic. Releasing the plugin is a bit complicated work for beginner. First thing that you need to do is to configure your pom.xml so that it points to the right repos. The configuration that you need to aware of is distributionManagement. DistributionManagement will have a link to servers' configuration in settings.xml. The following pages may be better to explain more on distribution tag:
* http://maven.apache.org/pom.html#Distribution_Management
* http://maven.apache.org/settings.html#Servers

Just to sum up the 2 links above. The distributionManagement tag defines what server to be used as a remote repository (this configuration is defined in pom.xml) and servers tag specifies the credentials or anything so that maven can write and install plugin in the remote repository.

Merge dependencies in maven

2009-06-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

I have a need to merge dependencies of my Confluence JSON webservice plugin because the plugin needs 2 libraries which are json-lib and ezmorph. There are a few ways on how to do this:

A very naive way, by unjaring all the dependencies and my plugin together and then rejar it back. This is definitely not a good way since I want to make my plugin is installable via repository client.
Maven, maven provides you a way on how to merge file. The idea is to unjar the dependencies before maven package the classes to be jar file. So, what I did was to unpack the dependencies to classes directory where maven allocate the classes of my plugin after compile them.

The following is the additional pom.xml configuration for my plugin:

installation of sharepoint

2009-06-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling a lot with this freaking tool. Why do I say so, because its really really freaking me out. My purpose is to set up SSO using sso service bundled with MOSS. Its

The first time I experienced the problem of the domain name. Then, I googled a lot, I found a page saying that we cant have domain name more than 15 characters??!!! What the ???!!! And then i changed the domain of my AD successfully. This way, I faced another problem which I dont understand what is the problem actually :D. Its about network administration thing. If I had to learn about the administration thing, it would take quite some time to learn. I need to consider about the time that i have. So, I left this way.

After thinking that this way seems to be impossible, then I moved to another way which is to remove the domain of domain controller. Because this machine is only 1 machine as a domain controller. After removing the domain controller of course, many applications which deal with domain will have a problem, not excluded sharepoint. So, after removing domain, I definitely need to create a new domain.

Oww yeah, I forgot to say about the tool used to remove and create domain in my windows server 2003. The tool is dcpromo. This tool is bundled with your Windows server 2003, if you cant find it. You can google and download it. :P

After creating the domain (a shorter name, of course), what I did is to remove and reinstall my sharepoint as I am afraid that there is something may crash or something. So, I reinstalled sharepoint. I faced a problem here as well :P *problems never stop coming*. So, what was I facing is about installing this darn application from my vm of windows server 2003. You need to install manually another sql server instance which name is officeservers. Because, sharepoint needs this database with this fix name *it seems they use a constant on this db, im not sure anyway :P*. After installing this database, the installation went smooth and it says that it is completely installed. But...... *there is a "but" coming* I got another problem still. So, it was a "not enough permission" problem. I had been googling a lot to find solution for this problem. Some people suggest editing regedit and creating a new user (all of this suggestions can be found by googling). This way didnt work. So, the last thing that I did are:

- I switched to use administrator account.

- I changed service account in sharepoint. You can have a look on the following figure.

- Put the name of administator account on the SSO service as I have configured in the above step.

taraaaaa................ All things work fine.... after all.....

NotificationMessage

2009-06-21T21:02:00.002-07:00

Today, I asses the feasibility of NotificationMessage plugin that I want to develop. What does this plugin do is simple, just message ur team mates. The message itself can be email or message which is stored in local data.

One thing that I asses is about how to store the data in Confluence if it is in the form of message. If it is possible I dont really like to put it as property or more complex data. Usually, plugin developer will store the data in OS_PROPERTYENTRY (if the data is about property) or BANDANA (if the data is a more complex data, usually it is an object representative). I just want to put it as a normal page or news. Lucky me, that Confluence designs its object in a elegant way. News and Page are inherited from AbstractPage. I can foretell that Message class of mine can be inherited from the same AbstractPage. I just need to specify the content type. The same thing happens to user updates feature which people say as "Twitter a like".

I could not find any class to represent user update in Confluence core code, but I could find the entry of this class in the database. It must be somewhere in the plugin which represent this entry. I will do the same thing anyway.

Sharepoint cannot display anything, just an error message

2009-06-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

I just got an error message on my sharepoint. it does not give any clue, the message in the display is so useless. Then, i am trying to find the log which is usually located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS. And again, such a useless log, not telling me anything about the cause.

However, I can delete the problematic webpart by specifying this parameter ?Contents=1 For microsoft, this may be called a hidden secret. They dont want to spread the knowledge on their product. Such a stupid.

Also, Sharepoint has an administration page, it is a different process which runs in the different port... haiiihhh.... it is running on port 42094

2009-06-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Last night, I just finished up my testing and a few additional bugs on JIRA2JIRA plugin which will be used by Atlassian to transfer issues from https://support.atlassian.com to http:// jira.atlassian.com. which I just found that time. Ugghh..... A few things that I realize abouut JIRA implementation on issue is:

Issue's comment does not belong to issue.

Everytime I need to create issue using webservice provided by JIRA, I need to use another method to add the comment to the issue. There should be an object to encapsulate this operation. Thus, it will roll back all the the transaction in case, the transaction failed. What I think about this design is a very risky to do it. The reasons are:

During the execution of the method, if in case there is a problem of connection for a few seconds. Maybe, during adding a comment #2, for certain issue, it fails. This will make your issue incomplete and be added in half way. Of course, it will be a trash if it does happen.
Its more effort to maintain both method in the implementation wise.

Maven integration test

2009-05-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

I m currently doing some functional tests using a great build tool Maven (this also has been used much by Atlassian developer) on my Confluence plugin. Yep, as usualy, i got a problem on my test :P. I found there is a "Class not found exception" on the log file. The class that could not be found is JSONObject which is from json-lib. I was wondering how could this be happening. Then, I checked the classpath of my integrationt test. Forgot to mention that I use cargo to startup Tomcat for my functional test.

Checking on the classpath, i could not find any json-lib library. I thought that it is added automatically as I have specified the dependency of my plugin, but in fact it is not. Thus, what I did is to copy the dependency so that the error does not reoccur anymore. Maven defines 3 phases on integration test, they are pre integration test, integration test and post integration test. I didnt choose one of them but I choose phase package.

This phase will be executed before pre integration test. The first time I was trying pre-integration phase, it does not work. Thus, I pick the phase before executing integration phase and the result it works like a charm.

The following is the code that I have:

There is a few ways to copy any data to any directory using maven. A few plugins available to do that. You can use maven-antrun-plugin, you can reference to maven documentation about plugins availabe.

TargetClassLoaderTransactionProxyFactoryBean vs TransactionProxyFactoryBean

2009-05-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

I had an experience on some error which tells me that the Confluence cannot find the interface that I use for TransactionProxyFactoryBean, interface is needed by this class to perform transaction. I checked on my code and directory where my code is compiled, to see whether the interface that Confluence complains to, does actually exist or not.

Checking those things, I was sure that all the things are there, but Confluence keeps complaining about the error. Then, I asked uncle google and found a jira issue saying about Confluence's bug regarding this matter. It also says about the replacement class of TransactionProxyFactoryBean which is TargetClassLoaderTransactionProxyFactoryBean. After changing this class, all the things are working fine. It seems that there is a classloader problem (it is definitely as Confluence cannot find the class file :P )

JQuery on JIRA

2009-02-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, i did some learning about jquery in jira. Impressive, Jquery is an easy tool to get your site ajax enabled. The way they develop jquery makes the development of my site is independent each other (between client side script and server side script). As long as you can create a servlet which returns an xml to client, all of the thing neeeded to build an ajax enabled are done. Luckily, jira provides a way to build a servlet plugin. Thus, updating the process which happens in jira is done via servlet.

In the plugin that I created, actually, I'd like to create an ajax enabled using DWR. As JIRA using a very old library (maybe it is the first release of DWR), I tried to use it. The result is im stuck on the way to access a javascript which is supposed to be created by DWR on the fly. I tried to change several configurations in regards of jira servlet plugin and configuration of general servlet. Some more, I did overwrite the code of DWR servlet (so that I can access dwr.xml which is needed by the servlet to create javascript files). All of the things ended with unluckyness. Even, accessing the configuration file is successfull but the javascript file cannot be produced by the servlet (strange enough). There must be something that I missed, definitely, in regards of the creation of the files.

After that, I managed to move to JQuery. Yeah, this stuff is so impressive. I can implement the things that I need using this stuff (However, I had managed to change from javascript enabled to wizard). Because I had changed the way the plugin works, thus I dont want to change anything in the plugin, just be my knowledge, huehuehue.

Basically, what I did to implement JQuery on JIRA (This must be applicable on Confluence as well) are:

Create servlet to give information needed by client side script.
Create javascript to access the servlet. In this test, I created a progress bar to update the information of transferring process from 1 jira instance to another instance. There is actually a plugin but strange, I cannot make it work. Thus, I tried to develop my own progress bar (using their progress bar image :P) and it does work well. A very simple progress bar, but at least it does fulfill what I want.

That's all my experience on researching ajax enabled for jira.

Cheers,

setup a trading network

2009-01-14T19:20:00.000-08:00

Has been long time for not blogging here as I need to blog a lot on company's wiki. Anyway, Yesterday, I was trying to setup trading network using sql server 2005 express. This is an experience that I want to share here. The first time, I tried to setup this, I always have an error about unable to retrieve data from PartnerUser. While, indeed this table does not exist in the WM database. I was googling and find that I need to setup a table for DB and of course I did that as someone's advise in some forum (definitely, WM forum).

Setting up tables do not work using a tool DB config. I am not really sure why was it happening and of course, the tables needed are not created. After struggling enough using this tool, I initiated myself to create the tables manually using the scripts which are provided with the distribution of this tool. Yeah, I could make. But.... hold on. There were a new error coming up. What the....... The error saying that it could not find an object named component_event.

I was checking on the WM database, and it was there. I was questioning myself "what's wrong with this expensive and enterprise tool? Is this really an enterprise tool?". I almost gave up. I tried to reinstall all of the stuffs in WM and try to recreate DB. All the things were nothing, just the same error. After long time thinking. I suspected collation problem in the DB. Yeah, indeed this was the culprit. I need to create a new database which collation is case insensitive. After doing this changes, creating script using db config was going so smooth like a charm. Trying to login to trading network is working so smooth as well without any error message.

friend's conversation

2008-12-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my friend asked me to attend conversation with customer. This session was meant to improve my skill on providing consulting. There are several things that I caught of being consultant.

Understand Customer's problem.
This is very important and also the thing that most of the people and me, are missed. Understanding what problem they have and based on the well defined problem that they have. Consultant will try to think about what actually the solution is.

Most of the time Customer tries to explain what are their problem, but they usually are not well organized on telling all of your problem. Thus, it is job of consultant to manage them. For example: they tell that they have a problem of documenting certain project, they want to have a tool to document a project is available and published in internet and bla...bla..bla and maybe they want everything in the tool. As a consultant, Consultant needs to drive him to the correct path. What actually their problem is, dont let them navigate you. Filtering the problem and prioritizing their problem based on their business is very important so that we can solve their problem and of course it will make their business successful.
Manage customer to the correct path.
As I explain, most of the time customer tells you all of the thing they need, all of the problem that they have, but they tells you in unwell organized. This is job for consultant to manage their problem and solve their problem.

Navigate them is very important for consultant so that we can limit and focus on their problem which relates to their business. If consultant is driven by customer, the solution of the problem will take a long time to implement and of course the impact is customer's business will slow down as probably their problems are too much to solve. Thus, filtering and managing the problem are very important to do in the world of consultancy.

Use a communicative way to communicate with customer.
Yeah, maybe for some people, this is quite difficult to do. You get to communicate what is in your mind to customer, communicate what is the solution to customer. Communication is playing the important role of providing consultancy. The above activities which I have explained, would be useless if the way we communicate to customer is not understandable. Structuring the problem, structuring the solution are also part of well communication. You could use any media to communicate your solution. This is a tentative way to do and seems to depend on the situation. There may be a customer wants to have a slide to elaborate the problem and explain the solution or maybe there is another better media to communicate them.

If there is something that I miss or wrong, It would be great for those who read this blog to give me a feedback, I appreciate it much.

maven

2008-10-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

i am back to blog now after resting. This week, i am learning maven. A simply build tool to make easy developing your project. All of the capability that Ant has, is provided by maven with a simply way. In this blog, I will state steps that I have gone through (even not detail :P) to build a project using maven and building maven's plugin.

There are several terms that we need to understand about maven:

repository, maven installed in your machine has 2 repositories (by default). First is in your local, the second is in remote server (ibiblio). repository is used for storing third party plugins needed by your project.
lifecycle. Lifecycle in maven comprises several phases (by default). Take a look at this url. You can bound one or more task to certain phase as you like. You can also bound plugin task to any phases in maven's life cycle.

The first thing that you need to do is creating a maven's project. Execute the following command:

mvn -DgroupId=group -DartifactId= artifact

The above command will execute plugin which belongs to group and in artifact . You will see the plugin in your repository, take a look on your repository. If this is the first time you do a maven, maven should download the necessary file to your local repository.

The other interest thing about maven is the existent of plugin. Using plugin, you can customize maven's behavior. The purpose of having plugin is to have additional goal. The goal will be attached in certain lifecycle that has been defined in maven.

data source class used by IS to connect to database

2008-08-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

Today, I am exploring webmethods regarding JDBC adapter. In my local machine, I have only 2 DBMS, which are MySQL and sql server 2005 express edition. Huehuehue.... as you know they are free and I can learn a lot from a free thing :P. Anyway, I had a problem today regarding connection to those DBMS.

This blog tells you about data source class that I use to create connection to MySQL and SQL server 2005 express edition.

However, I was trying to find out what is the class to connect to MySQL and sql server. I found a site talking about it. It says that I need to put datasource class like the following and it works fine:

com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource

However, I still could not find any site saying about SQL server 2005. Then, I look around to jar file and I found the following class:

net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbcx.JtdsDataSource

Exploring webmethods 2 (Sending xml file via http)

2008-08-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

Today's exploration is about webmethods. To be more specific is sending a file to IS through http channel. I had done the following ways and only one success. I am not really sure what is the cause of it.

html post, This way I just create an html page and publish it using apache webserver. As usual, I create html element file. Using this element, I can choose whatever file that I want to send over. The form itself, I point to the flow service that I had just created. But unlucky me, this way fails and I dont know what is the cause.

Apache httpcommon , I was playing around with this useful stuff. The first try I failed. In the first try I was using a class that I am not familiar with. The following is a piece of code that I use:

Part[] parts = { part , new FilePart(f.getName(), f) };
filePost.setRequestEntity( new MultipartRequestEntity(parts, filePost.getParams()) );

The above method is actually encapsulate a file in the variable named parts. This way fails with the same output as the first way and again I dont know what is the cause of this problem. However, the second try is success. In this way, I was using the following code to send a file.

File f = new File("F:/SINAU/WM/xml/test.xml");
FileRequestEntity fileReq = new FileRequestEntity(f, "text/xml"); filePost.setRequestEntity(fileReq);

In the flow service side, I perform the following flow steps, to extract or parse the result that I want to:

What the above flow steps do are:

Fetch a content of file and put it in the variable test.
Convert the content of file to document type.
Perform query on the node.

The above sample may be not really efficient as it seems that I can directly query from node using flow step queryXMLNode.

The next exploration is... errmm... not sure !!!! :D

exploring webmethods 1

2008-08-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time for not blogging. Today, I am exploring webmethods stuff. it is about reading a file to xml. I want to give a bit comment on webmethods documentation. You guys, are suck. The documentation is definitely suck. Even more, the way they named the flow service. The reason why do i tell you, it is suck:

You just give the explanation with less example. Of course for me as beginner, will be having a lot of damn trouble.
The flow service's name is sometime a bit difficult to interpret. if you want to have people understand on some methods, you need to have a very representative method's name of its function.
There are no official, detail and complete documentation so that people can learn your product easily.

Huh, after sometimes struggling to find out on how to read a file from file system (previously, I have sent a file through ftp and get the file from ftp using webmethods), now I will blog my experience. In order to read a file, webmethods has it's own way to treat each format file. it has a way to process an xml file but I am not sure on how to read another file type. To read an xml file, is pretty much simple. First, you need a flow service named getFile. Set the load type as Bytes. The output of this flow service can be an input for another xml flow service which is xmlStringToXMLNode.

That's it, until this state, you get the xml to be loaded as a note but you cannot read it as it is an object. In order to read a node, either you read it as String or you read it as document. In my experiment, I was using xmlNodeToDocument. Yeah!!!1, that's all. You can load, read and process after the output of this flow service comes out.

output template

2008-07-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

Today, i am exploring webmethods about assigning template to output. WM provides you several template's type as an output. They are:

xml
html
wml
hdml

The third and fourth are types that can be used in mobile. Thus, you may want to create a service which return an output to your mobile, wm has provided you an easy way.

You can fill in the value using DSP (Dynamic Server Page) syntax. DSP is pretty much like a server side scripting (PHP or JSP) provided by wm. By assigning some variable in certain place, you fill in the output and send the output to client such as computer's browser and mobile's browser.

Ways to send an input to webmethods

2008-07-29T23:35:00.000-07:00

There are several ways to send an input to webmethods:

Using Get method. Giving the input service's name like the variable name. To note that the character is in case sensitive.
Using Post method. This is pretty much same like the above. The different must be the hidden data posted in this method.

For more information is in the webmethod's documentation page 356.

The URL address to invoke webmethod's service is in the following formats:

http://:5555/invoke/folder/serviceName?variableA=valueA&variableB=valueB

I created a code to post a variable using HttpClient (developed by Apache). The following is a piece of code that I created:

client.getState().setCredentials(new AuthScope("localhost", 5555), new
UsernamePasswordCredentials("Administrator","manage"));
PostMethod postMethod = new PostMethod(url);
postMethod.addParameter("name", "nama saya arie murdianto ganteng banged");
postMethod.addParameter("USERNAME", "Administrator");
postMethod.addParameter("PASSWORD", "manage");
postMethod.setDoAuthentication(true);
.....
byte[] responseBody = postMethod.getResponseBody();

My flow step is only performing the length of the input String. For your information that the latest HttpClient is having 2 dependencies. They are commons codec and commons logging

Pipeline processing

2008-07-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

When a message comes to several processing steps. Let's say there is an event triggering the process which is sending a message to several process. The processes are: authentication, decryption and updating db.

In order to maintain a loosely integration, it will be difficult. The best way is to make each process independent. There is a method called pipelines processing. Yeah, you can imagine the method is having pipe connected each other. When there is a message comes to the pipe. The process will taking the message from it and process it. Once the first process finishes it process, then it just straightly put the message to another pipe to be processed. While the first process finishes its job, it can take another message without waiting for the message to be finished until the last process. Using this method, the throughput will be increased.

Note that each process are running independently. It may be better to have a look at the following image.

The above picture is taken from the book Addison wesley- Martin Fowler - Enterprise Integration pattern.

Looking on the above image, we can see a comparison between pipeline processing and sequential processing. The throughput of pipeline is more effective compare to sequential. The time needed to process 3 messages in pipeline is almost a half of sequential.

Integration (Message and Message channel)

2008-07-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

Message channel can be imagined as a conduit of data between one application to another. The data which will be transmitted via message channel, should be wrapped by some object that can be understand by message channel. Or we usually call this as a marshalling. Thus, before going to the message broker. The data should be marshalled. The data will be queued in the message broker.

If there is a client interested on the data, it will go to the message channel to get the data from the message broker. Before consuming the data, the data should be unmarshalled.

The data that is being transmitted via message channel contains 2 parts. They are:

Header, header contains the data regarding destination and application.
Body, this part contains information as-is. there should not be any modification on this part.

Several technologies divide the body content which depends on the type of the body content. For JMS itself, it defines several body content type, for example:

TextMessage
ByteMessage, and
Object message.

Integration

2008-07-21T18:49:00.000-07:00

In order to perform integration, there are several points we need to aware of. They are:

Loosely couple
Simplify integration
Unified data format
Data staleness
Awareness of Asynchronicity

Thus, when we perform integration, those points are the thing we need to remember so that it produces a good result. However, There are several ways to perform integration among several applications. They are:

File transfer
Shared database
RPC
Messaging

The above ways have advantages and disadvantages, it depends on the way people performing integration but the most recommended way is messaging. Messaging solves several limitation on File transfer, Shared database and RPC. Using messaging, you can store data and functions. With messaging, the system will be very loosely. So, the integrated applications will not depend each other.

Get back to my hometown

2008-07-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day in this week in my company. Hehehe, a bit confusing right? I feel that I cannot wait any longer to go back to my hometown. Meet my family, my cousin and my friends. I cannot imagine what it would like. I m hoping that I could be refreshed after going back to my hometown. Really, this is what I want to, this is what I meant to. My working here is not meant only for working and get a money. There is other purpose what I am here.

Beside attending my cousin's marriage, I need to finish my left task in my home town. Hehehe, as usual of me, always leaving something behind. One of the thing left behind, is giving back the stuffs that I have borrowed :P. What the hell!!!!..... My bad.

If you are an expatriate and moreover this is your first overseas traveling. You will feel what I feel. A very hard homesickness is one of the purpose why do I want to go back. Hehehe...... May be what I feel cannot be imagine by anyone who has never felt like what I feel. That's all what I want to write now. I m hoping that getting back to my hometown will recharge my spirit, will refresh my mind. Thus, I will be getting back to be myself. As an ambitious man, as a very hardworker man.

Amien!!!! Amiennnn!!!!

Different between servlet and JSP

2008-07-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

I have done a little experiment about jsp and servlet. In the first time, I thought both files will be compiled and run in the same way. But in fact, both files are treated different by Tomcat. I have never come across on this little experiment before.

I did 3 experiments. In the first experiment, I went through the following steps:

Create jsp a very simple jsp file. It only contains the html tag.
Startup tomcat.

The above experiment come with the result that there is a file created by Tomcat. The filename is tldCache.ser. I am not really sure on this file, but I found some source saying that this file is used by Tomcat as a cache for tld tag defined in jsp. Thus, Tomcat doesnt read or scan the tag every time the request is meant to the jsp file.

The second experiment, I went through the following steps:

Create a simple jsp file which contains html tag and several java operation (which is looping something). The filename is test.jsp
startup Tomcat.

The result of this experiment is Tomcat produces java file and class file. The files are located in /work/. The files which are produced by Tomcat, are test_jsp.java and test_jsp.class. The thing that I can get from the second experiment is, Tomcat produces java file which extends org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase. It is completely different from what I had thought before.

In the third experiment, I went through the following steps:

Create a very simple java class extends HttpServlet.
Compile it to be ja va class.
Create directory /work//WEB-INF/classes.
Create mapping file.
Startup Tomcat.

In the last experiment, I didnt see any files created by Tomcat. Which means that Tomcat will use it in memory directly without creating any files.

My bad that I didnt come across this experiment before. I have gone through the things that is too far such as playing around with spring and webwork but never think on this basic thing. I hope my experiments will be useful for all of the visitor.

SQL server backup restoration

2008-07-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Several days ago, I tried to restore a SQL server backup file to a just-created DB in my local. Actually, I am not really good on SQL server. Even performing restoration or backup, I had never tried them before. Moreover, I really hate about this product because it takes a lot of resource (memory, hardisk space, cpu) in my computer thus, I dont have any chance to learn it.

However, in order to perform SQL backup, you can do it easily in SQL server Management studio. But for restoration, somehow it fails performing it in management studio. I got a very annoying error message. Thus, another way that i can think of is, through console. I perform backup through the following command.

restore database DatabaseName
from file ""
with replace

For more detail about the query, please refer to the microsoft's site. If you want to have the real script, I would be happy to provide it.

My Birthday

2008-07-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. A lot of my friends give birthday greeting through friendster. Thanks for it. One special greeting was coming from my family. my sister sent me a birthday greeting last night. The thing that I really like from her wish is a wish to be a better man as a son, as a big brother and as a young brother and of course as a man who live in society.

I wish to be a better man as well for my family and for the people around me. I hope so. Amiieenn.....

crowd

2008-07-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

Do you know guys an application named Crowd. Yesterday, I tried this stuff and I think the idea behind this application, is pretty much cool. With only 1 application, you can delegate your user management to this god damned application. Besides, this application can be used as an SSO (Single Sign On) application to all applications which have been integrated with Crowd.

You can centralize your user management to only 1 application. The user can be created, edited from Crowd. I have tried this on Confluence. Confluence is knowledge management system developed by Atlassian. When I was integrating Crowd and Confluence, I found that it is very easy to perform this integration.

But i am not sure to use a custom application to use it. not sure whether it works or not. Can this application manage any users from a custom application. If so, there should be a convention on developing a custom application.

Pretty girl

2008-07-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

Umm ... It is a bit funny, isnt it? From the title, you can see what will I write into this god damned blog. Huehue..... yeah man..... this afternoon I went to Mid Valley. Screwing around just for finding what my cousin "sepatu lucu". fuuh.... it is a bit hard for me as I have never bought such thing especially for a girl. But somehow I dont want to make her great day is screwed. I want to make that moment is as special as possible. Do you guys know what sort of moment is that? Marriage. Yeah this is once in a life moment. So, I would like to have such shoe. After calling her regarding the shoe that she order, I explained to her about a fashion shoe here. Listening to my explanation, he didnt want me to get it as it is not suitable for her. Do you know what is that? That is a high heel shoe.

I am screwing around all of the shops over there and got nothing. However, when I was in Jusco, I saw a pretty god damn girl. Waaww...... damn it. She is so much pretty. Her face is much more like arabian-malay. I like such face much. I have met such face two times. I hope very on getting such girl. But of course, her heart is much more important instead of her face. If I get a pretty god damn girl but her heart is pretty much bad. I would like her to die instead of being my ???? :P. Errmm..... what I did is only watching that girl, I cannot do much more than that. What a coward.

Today is a very tiring today and tomorrow as well. I have a lot of things on hand.....

Ganbatte...

See you all guys...

LDAP Sharing knowledge :)

2008-06-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

Several days ago, I read a book about LDAP. Understanding the schema and understanding components inside it, is part of my purpos e on reading it. The following are the points that I got from the book. I hope this blog help any visitors of this blog to understand LDAP.

I would like to start with the schema. What actually schema is used for? The schema is used for defining the structure of your organization in LDAP. The schema is defining 2 components to build the structure of your organization. They are:
1. Object class
Object classes define what entries are possible in an LDAP directory. Please have a look at the following example:

objectclass ( 2.5.6.4 NAME 'organization' DESC 'RFC2256: an organization' SUP top STRUCTURAL MUST o MAY ( userPassword $ searchGuide $ seeAlso $ businessCategory $ x121Address $ registeredAddress $ destinationIndicator $ preferredDeliveryMethod $ telexNumber $ teletexTerminalIdentifier $ telephoneNumber $ internationaliSDNNumber $ facsimileTelephoneNumber $ street $ postOfficeBox $ postalCode $ postalAddress $ physicalDeliveryOfficeName $ st $ l $ description ) )

You may be often to see the above object class defined in your ldif file when you are trying to update or add an entry to your LDAP. The above piece of code, is defining objectClass named organization. The thing that you need to put your attention on is keyword NAME, SUP, MAY and MUST.

What are those things mean?
NAME means the name of your object, it should be unique among all of the object defined.
SUP means that from which class it is derived.
MUST means the compulsory attribute that should exist when you add an entry to which class it belongs to.
May means a not compulsory attribute.

For your information, actually, there are 3 classes that is provided by LDAP (read: OpenLDAP) they are: abstract classes, auxiliary classes, and structural classes. As a lot of cases, people more often to use structural class, in the above example, I am using structural class as you can see from the above example.

2. Attribute
Attribute is defining attribute that objectClass has. For better understanding, I would like to give an example. Below is the example declaration of attribute o and the above example in objectClass organization is the example usage (Please have a look):

dn: dc=atlassian,dc=com objectClass: dcObject objectClass: organization dc: atlassian o: Kia Huat

Please have a look at the following messy picture:

From the above picture, we can see that objectClasses defined are department, sales and IT. ObjectClass sales has several attribute which are name, age and hobby. so does IT.

In attribute, you can define it as a text, image or any sort of data. Howeve, I wont cover up all of those things. It would be better to see it by yourself as it should not be a big problem to understand it.

If you have any comments or advise, I would appreciate it. Please do not hesitate to give it to this blog.

Have a nice day !!!

Learning SAP R/3

2008-06-09T20:25:00.001-07:00

This morning, just after wake up from a nice sleep, I read the book that I had downloaded yesterday. This book is about SAP. One thing that was coming from my mind just before I read the book is what actually R/3 stands for. After reading this book (only chapter), R originally stands for Real time which means that every changes on one module will update all of the affected modules in SAP.

Regarding SAP's module, SAP contains a lot of modules (I dont want to mention it as it is too many) such as FI (this stands for Financial Accounting, and it contains several modules... ) and HR. errmm quite a lot but unlucky me i can not see it directly the SAP modules. It makes me a bit difficult to learn by myself.

Regarding SAP R/3, This application consists of 3 layer, which is Presentation layer, middle layer and basis layer. Middle layer actually, is the core of SAP. why? because kernel is located at that layer. Besides, additional functionalities which we can create it using ABAP, is located in the same layer as kernel. The book says that all of the thing we can do in this layer. we can provide many functionalities created using ABAP. Errrmm, I think this is the most interesting point on SAP currently (at least for me).

Another interesting point on SAP is its capability to integrate with other external applications. This application provides a way to integrate with many application developed using many languages, such as Java (this is a must), C, VB etc. From now, I seem to focus on learning this application. I hope there will be a lot of people or resource that I can get to learn this tool.

JFreechart and JIRA

2008-06-08T04:26:00.000-07:00

One of the features on my plugin is creating a chart based on the specified parameter. Actually, this plugin is completely the same as report but the different is the representation. If report plugin is using text but this portlet plugin (I put my chart onto portlet) is using chart to represent the data.

The tricky thing on this plugin is on how to generate chart on the fly. As you know, JIRA is built on several frameworks. Even in plugin creation, you can not be as free as you create common servlet. Thus, creating plugin in JIRA is similar with creating a feature or functionality in the box. There are a lot of limitations.

Lucky me, since version 3.xx (I forget since what version), JIRA (and Confluence) provides you a way to create servlet. Isnt it very cool? It seems that JIRA provides you a way to get a freedom to add an additional functionalities as free as you create common servlet. Moreover, JIRA provides you an injection mechanism so that whenever you need JIRA's object, you can grab it using ComponentManager object. The following is as example of it.

public ServletImage() {
this.searchProvider = ComponentManager.getInstance().getSearchProvider();
this.authenticationContext = ComponentManager.getInstance().getJiraAuthenticationContext();
}

By using servlet, you can create any file on the fly and you do not need to worry about temporary directory to put your file.

Webmethod and database (Experience part 2)

2008-05-25T00:18:00.000-07:00

I think this is quite interesting regarding webmethod usage. As you know, webmethod provides you a custom flow steps through Java source code. Currently, I am doing research on how to webmethod connects to database. I am not sure if webmethod has provided you flow steps to do this. but currently I am using Java source to connect to database.

There are several way to get connection to db:
1. Using JDBC code. May be this way is a standard way for all of Java programmer. You can find this way in many resources in internet.
2. A class provided by webmethod. This class acts as an intermediary to connect to DB. Even this class uses JDBC to connect. I assume this class uses JDBC driver and bundle several steps in one method called getConnection(url, username, password, drivername). This method is located at DBConnection class.

For example:
If I use JDBC driver, I need to write the following steps:
Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/confluence28?user=root&password=arie");

But if we use the webmethod class, we only need to specify one line:
DBConnection dbConnect = db.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/confluence28", "root", "arie", "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");

Experience on WebMethod (Part 1)

2008-05-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

Several days ago, my boss (read: my company) gave me a short course on webmethod. This tool is used for integration. Very nice word, it sounds so elegant. However, in the first time I learn this tool, I felt so difficult to learn. Why? because I was not really familiar with the documentation. Besides, there are not a lot of people using this tool. After several days struggling on getting familiar with the flow steps, I can finish all of the exercises that I got from my company.

Last night, I was doing research on how to integrate with flow steps written in Java. Damn, I get an error message saying that no compiler found (this is not the real message). After reading, I found that I need to put a path to the compiler in system path. After making changes on it, I get another error message saying that I need to compile the resource (What the heck !!!!). I was desperate. I thought I had put the correct path and the previous error had been solved. After several hours playing around with the compiler path, I found that I have to use WM compiler instead of my own compiler which is a java compiler that I installed on my PC. Huuuuhh.... succkksss....

In order to make your Java code compiled and run correctly, you need to put compiler bundled by WM. It is located at /jvm/win142/bin. Just put the path into your System path. Then everything works fine.

Getting the result of all filter in JIRA

2008-05-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

Today, I get another new knowledge regarding JIRA stuff. Currently, I am developing a report plugin in JIRA. This afternoon, I got a problem on populating a value of all saved filters in JIRA. These values are used for specifying parameter in the report plugin. However, after doing some research on JIRA source code. I found the following source code which is used for populating parameters in report plugin.

List savedFiltersList = ManagerFactory.getSearchRequestManager().getVisibleRequests(user);
savedFilters = new HashMap();

for (Iterator iterator = savedFiltersList.iterator(); iterator.hasNext();)
{
GenericValue request = (GenericValue) iterator.next();
savedFilters.put(request.getLong("id").toString(), request.getString("name"));
}

By returning variable savedFilters, then JIRA will populate the value of select component automatically.

SQL Updating certain pattern of text in MySQL

2008-05-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

There are a way to update a text in some database with certain pattern. Today I get a case regarding this problem. In order to update a content in a column of a table, you can use the following command:

mysql> update bodycontent SET body = REPLACE ( `body` ,'google.com','arie.ganten
g.com');

The above query will update table bodycontent, body column which content is google.com, to arie.ganteng.com.

Experience on Apache POI

2008-05-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Today, I am doing experiment on Apache POI. Company asked me to create plugin for JIRA which is not within my scope as Confluence support engineer. However, I really enjoy it. One feature that I create in the plugin is an ability to convert data within JIRA to excel file. Actually, there are several options that I can use to export to excel file. I have searched through several websites where another peoples have done some research on it and they come with the conclusion that Apache POI is better than the other.

The most important thing on Apache POI is HSSFWorkbook object. This object represents one excel file. One workbook consists of one or several sheets. And one sheet contains several rows and columns.

Below is an example on how to create workbook:

HSSFWorkbook workBook = new HSSFWorkbook();
sheet = workBook.createSheet("Product");
HSSFRow row = sheet.createRow(1);
HSSFCell cell = row.createCell((short) (1));

What a simple code...... hehehe.... Note that the second line is used for creating a sheet named Product and POI will start the index of row and column with 0 instead of 1. Thus the above code will create object row in line 2 (in the excel file, row is started from 1 instead of 0) and will create a cell in column B(in the excel file, column is started from A instead of 0).

In order to fill in the value in the cell, POI has provided you a method setCellValue(). Please take a look at the API documentation for detail information regarding this method.

Another thing that I really like with POI is the ability to manipulate style in every cell. The style is including a way to format the data inside cell. In the plugin that I create, I use an ability of POI to manipulate border of each cell in the sheet. Below is an example to use HSSFCellStyle:
HSSFCellStyle style = workBook.createCellStyle();
style.setBorderTop(style.BORDER_THIN);
style.setBorderBottom(style.BORDER_THIN);
style.setBorderLeft(style.BORDER_THIN);
style.setBorderRight(style.BORDER_THIN);
style.setAlignment(style.ALIGN_CENTER);
style.setFillForegroundColor(HSSFColor.GREY_40_PERCENT.index);
style.setFillPattern(HSSFCellStyle.SOLID_FOREGROUND);

In order to apply the style on each cell, POI has provided us a method named cell.setCellStyle(style). This method has a parameter HSSFCellStyle which you has manipulated in the previous example.

A new friend is leaving....:((

2008-04-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

As the title mentions about my new friend. You know i have just known a girl who is very much nice... not really pretty but i am sure she is very nice (even i just knew her yesterday)... huuhh pity of me you know... she left me .... without telling me that she want to go back today...

If the time can be turned back, i would like to not went to work early. Shit.... this is because none take my cases. There is a lot of cases that I havent touched yet since i was sick.. ooo man... i hope i can meet such kind of girl.

Hardware Information for audit usage

2008-04-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

yuhuu.... In the end I can find a way to retrieve hardware information... I am going to write a Confluence plugin using JMX which shows hardware information. I think it is very useful for a big company which want to have a good documentation regarding to their inventories. By using this plugin company can see their inventories which are distributed in remote area (as long as they are connected with internet :P).

However, yesterday I have done research about how to retrieve hardware information, but I found that Java does not provide you with such feature and the only way is go through platform specific API but it will make me difficult in writing this plugin... and finally I found some API that is used for retrieving hardware information even I thought it is using the same idea as I mentioned but at least this API provides an interface to get what I want regardless what platform I am using.

Now, I am going to give a try on the API. Hopefully, it can meet what I want.

Retrieve Hardware Information

2008-04-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

Is there a way to retrieve information regarding to hardware information using java? errmm I have looking through google about this question... wakakakak pity me... i couldnt found any result. I hope I can find library can be used to retrieve hardware information.....

However, the only way to retrieve such information is only through platform command. It means that every platform that your application will run on, you need to issue one specific command.... wakakakak what an ugly arch. there is no way again....

Actually this information is used for my plugin development. I want to take a part on codegeist competition (!!! Guys please pray for me on it .... :P) I want to make a plugin to monitor all of the machine or resources that is connected to Confluence server thus we can see what kind of resource that you have. Moreover, you can control the resource as you want. But again since this kind of instruction is not really platform independent (since java need a command from the OS where it is running on). So I guess I have no choice anymore... I need to use it.

Another suck day

2008-04-06T00:18:00.001-07:00

Fuhh... I feel so regret on my life today.... today is not a productive day for me... i cannot touch code just because of my breakfast... to have a breakfast which is Lontong Jawa, i need to go to Damai... arrghhh so far and of course hot.... today is very hot.... unlucky me.... after having a lunch... i was feel so tired... damn... i cannot do coding today.... my leg is hurt...

Btw, I have another house mate who has just moved in yesterday... yea... i think she is very nice... Last night I had a chat with her... crapping and bla...bla...bla... In term of her face... I think I should give her 4(in range 1-10) kukukuku.... but she is very nice... i think the most important thing that you need to consider about a friend is how friendly your friend is.

Back to plugin competition, heh.... I need to catch up many thing today .... haaaa,,,,,,, a lot of thing i have not finished yet...... Hope I can finish it on time... Amieennn.....

Plugin Competition

2008-04-05T01:26:00.001-07:00

I am planning for Confluence (one of Atlassian's product) plugin competition... Actually i really need a help for this since i dont have much time on doing it. However, this is a thing that i need to put effort a lot on. Pity of me,

The progress is not really good... since i am stuck on something that should be my advantages on this plugin.. you what is that.... i am stuck on a way to increase a heap space for JVM... if there is a way to do that.... please kindly to ping me...by put a comment on this blog....

huuhh very hard to say... it is about life ... this is about me ..... about my character... it is very hard to deal with myself... in the first time i was seeing the advertisement on this plugin competition.... i am very interested on it.... as the time goes on,,,,, you know i am getting lazy on putting the effort to do plugin development....

However, I dont to be a loser, I hope my god gives me a light... gives me a new spirit.... to be a new Arie.... pumping up my spirit.... I hope so... come on ... come on Arie.... you can do that... you can win.... come on.... I believe you can do that....

Remember hardwork.... working smart.... navigate your life.... navigate your future....

Come on... come on.... wake up... wake up....
Ok that's all for now

My first blog

2008-04-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

Huuuhh.......

Hi all,,,,

This is my first blog..... I dont know why do i want to create blogger account. it seems that it is because of my loneliness here. For your information, I am staying at Malaysia and my hometown is in Indonesia. Yeah..... lovely Indonesia...

Even my country is a bit retarded,,,, hahaha,,, not retarded.... too rude..... may be a more polite way to say about my country is a bit poor. I am not saying that in term of annual revenue for all Indonesians but there are only some people that is really ... really rich and the rest, which is almost all, is pretty bad..... this is not fair..... errmmm enough saying about my country... however, i keep loving my country Indonesia.

Regarding the reason of why i want to create this blog account? it is because of I want to express my mind .... since i am here alone... may be this is the only way that i can do to express my feeling.... very... very hard to live in the foreign country..... hahaha especially for a guy like me...hahaha....

That's all for now.....

happy blogging...