Year.introspect(2010)

Time has come again to look back and introspect on happenings of this year to learn and equip myself better for the next year. This year had been very interesting both on the personal and work fronts. On the personal side, we had a baby boy on Oct 11 and am starting to get used to the nappy changing duty ;). It is so much fun playing with my son and watching him grow. Babies are the cutest things in this world.

On the work side, we did a successful BPEL deployment. It was indeed a good learning experience, especially, with 3DNS/Big IP acting up in production preventing the partner links from being invoked (more on this topic later). Enabling service Orientedness for the application was another fun filled exercise - coaching the team on BPMN, service identification, training the team on BPEL, whipping up schemas and more importantly getting the buy in from stakeholders and peers. Did a bit of hacking to remote deploy all the bpel suitcases to the BPEL console using commons-http-connection. We are still on BPEL PM 10.1.3.4 and have a plan to migrate to SOA Suite 11g sometime mid next year. I have also created an installer for my application based on ant installer, this is a cool stuff that helps in deploying the applications (silently) to the target envs and the dev team can stay away while the ops team does the installation :).

I read Robin Sharma's two very good books - Leader who had no title and the monk who sold his Ferrari, both are very good books and I highly recommend reading them. I have also read few technical books - BPMN method and style by Bruce Silver, Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide, Getting Started with SOA Suite 11g, Enterprise Architecture A - Z.

Instance created!!!

At 2010-10-11T17:26:00+05:30Z, an instance of an anonymous inner class has been created. The toXML() of the instance is below:

<Event name="child birth">
<Name> TBD </Name>
<DateofBirth>Oct 11, 2010</DateofBirth>
<TimeofBirth>17:26</TimeofBirth>
<PlaceofBirth>Basant Sahney Hospital, W Marredpally, Hyderabad</PlaceofBirth>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
<Weight>2.72 KG</Weight>
</Event>

The instance is yet to be named per com.astrology.zodiac.* standards and bind to the Srirangam namespace.

And thats the reason I'm not active on the blog ;) and another reason is we have an internal blog in our company that runs on moss and most of my blogging activity is happening on the internal blog.

****** UPDATE ******
The instance is named Nischay!

Three Dimensions of S/W Programmer

Old article but very interesting - Three Dimensions of S/W Programmer

BPEL Deployment plan to replace queue names

We are using Oracle BPEL PM 10.1.3.4 and we are using the deployment plan feature to take care of the replacement of the wsdl end points and schema content. We realized that the queue names were not being replaced with simple search and replace. As guessed, the search replace functionality worked only for the wsdls where the host and port names were getting replaced correctly. Following needs to be done to have it working for the queue names:
1. Include the jca namespace in the deployment plan file [xmlns:jca="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/wsdl/jca/"]
2. Use the following to replace the queue name
<jca:property name="QueueName">
<searchReplace>
<search>oldqueuename</search>
<replace>newqueuename</replace>
</jca:property>

3. Most important of all, ensure that the above entry is the first inside the <wsdlAndSchema> element, otherwise, there'd be errors during deployment and the queue names shall not be replaced.

Long Pause

I had been silent on the blog for quite a while, the reason being, apparently, too much of activity at work and domestic fronts. Life is back to normal and things are under control now. I'd be writing few entries on the BPEL this time, so watch the space ;)

Programmer Types

We have heard of types of architects, this blog entry talks about types of programmers based on two attributes - planning and sophistication. Another dimension of looking at things!

Apache Thrift

Apache Thrift - "Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml.". Sounds pretty interesting.