Some useful hacks

Well.. it has been a while since I blogged. The primary reason being, I'm very busy with the work and trying to get adjusted to the new project env. The project uses lot of latest technologies, Oracle AQ/Streams, Web Services etc. Some useful hacks I have found last month -

Web Services - This is applicable only for the Axis platform. Axis persists the info of deployed web services to a file by name server-config.wsdd that is created under the WEB-INF. This file, incidentally, has a structure similar to that of the deploy.wsdd file. Instead of creating a deploy file and calling AdminClient from the command prompt, the same entries can be given in the server-config.wsdd and bouncing the server. When the server is started the web services get deployed. This is useful if the deployer of the project is not much aware of the Web services and their deployment processes.
*** Update ***
This is an info I often forget,well, in rush to publish the WS and consume it ;-). If proper description is not given about the methods exposed by the WS, the input arguments are exposed as in0, in1, in2, etc. A few additional lines in the WSDD expose the appropriate and intuitive info about the input parameters:

<operation name="theMethodName" qname="ns:qnameFortheMethod" returnQName="ns:theReturnTypeQNameofTheMethod" returnType="ns:theReturnType">
<parameter name="nameOfTheParameter" type="example-xsd:string"/>
</operation>


I had to recollect this when one of our testing team members said that the WSDL aren't descriptive about the input parameters.

NVarchar2 issue - I observed a strange "No more data to read from socket error" if the return type of the strings is NVarchar2. This was noticed with the Oracle 10g and the latest jdbc driver. Two hacks to overcome this are: a) Change the data type to Varchar2, if you have DB control b) add a java VM argument "-Doracle.jdbc.defaultNChar=true".

Other than work, there seems to be little time for life. Trying best to establish the work-life balance, ;-)