Thursday, November 29, 2007

Oracle Fast Connection Failover for a RAC cluster

Problem:Whenever one node of a Oracle RAC cluster goes down, some of the connections allocated to that node go stale in the connection pool. This causes errors such as 'Broken pipe' to be raised whenever the stale connections are used.

Solution:Configure a ONS (Oracle Notification Service) remote subscription client on the App Servers. Whenever any RAC node goes down, a 'DOWN' event would be raised and sent to all subscribers. The ONS client on the Appservers would receive this event and refresh all stale connections in the pool. When the node comes up, a 'UP' event is sent to the AppServer ONS client and again the connections in the pool are balanced against both the nodes.

In Oracle 10.2g, to configure ONS, U just have to add ons.jar file to WEB-INF/lib and 2 lines of code to configure the Connection Cache.

3 easy steps to self-sign a Applet Jar file

Found this link that explains how to self-sign an applet in 3 easy steps:

1. keytool -genkey -keystore myKeyStore -alias me

2. keytool -selfcert -keystore myKeyStore -alias me

3. jarsigner -keystore myKeyStore jarfile.jar me

Thats it..simple and sweet :)

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

FCKeditor

Came across this beautiful AJAX control that can be used to emulate a HTML editor text box.

http://www.fckeditor.net/ - worth a look.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Setting focus on the first field

Whenever a HTML page is loaded, we often want to set the focus on the first input field of that page. Came across this Javascript code that can be put in a JS file and reused everywhere.
http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/FocusFirstInput.asp Simple and Sweet solution :)

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Reflection in Java-XML binding frameworks

Almost all Java-XML binding frameworks use Java reflection to map Java objects to XML documents. I had used Castor and XMLBeans in our projects and were satisfied with the performance of both of them.

Recently a friend of mine told me that he had reservations on using Castor as it uses Reflection and hence cannot be used in high-performance applications. I contemplated on this and felt that some basic amount of reflection code would be present in any XML-binding framework; or how would the API call 'set' methods on Java objects during unmarshalling?

I found this discussion on the net that explains this same fact.

Snippet:
Castor will still use some amount of reflection (mainly to set values onto your domain objects) even if you are using a mapping file (a binding file is used during code generation only).

Having said that, let me add one thought. At the time most of these articles have been written (2001 to 2002), the use of reflection introduced some performance penalties, noticeable to some degree.

Since then, a lot of time and effort has gone into improving the JVMs/JDK/compilers to lessen this impact further and further. In my personal view, with the event of JDK 1.4 (and even more so with Java 5)
this problems have been addressed sufficiently in that I would not call the use of (moderate) reflection an issue any more. If use of reflection would still be an issue, frameworks like Spring and some of their most
powerful features (run-time AOP through Spring interceptors) would not have been adopted by the market as it happened in the last one or two years.

Btw, in case this is not clear enough, using a mapping file instead of Castor's 'introspector' to establish mappings between the Java domain classes and the XML artefacts does not really improve Castor's
performance, as both modes will cause Castor to use reflection to establish what methods to use on your Java objects to set a value, to get a value (from an instance variable) or to add a value to a collection member. Bear in mind that these activities happen at start-up time only, and thus once and once only.

At run-time, when e.g. unmarshalling an XML document to a predefined object hierarchy, Cstor will (and has to) use reflection to ...
a) create object instances (using Class.newInstance())
b) set and get values into/from your instance variables (Method.invoke())

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

SQL to find out indexes on a table

Quick reference to find out indexes on a table from the command prompt.
select * from user_indexes where table_name = 'MY_TABLE'
select * from user_ind_columns where index_name = 'PK_MY_INDEX'
To find out the triggers on a table:
select * from user_triggers where table_name = 'MY_TABLE'

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Disk usage commands on Solaris

du and df are the most powerful commands on Solaris to find out the disk usage.
Here is a list of the most useful commands at a glance.
- df -h (shows the file system partitions)
- du -ks /opt/* | sort -nr | head -5 (shows the top 5 dirs in /opt. Subdirs are summarized.)
- du -ak /opt/* | sort -nr | head -5 (shows the top 5 dirs/files in /opt including subdirs)

Monday, November 05, 2007

Modal Dialog session expiry issue in IE 6

In our application we were facing a very queer problem. One of our page flows was opening a modal dialog from another modal dialog. While doing this we were facing an intermittant problem of 'session-expiry'. I put a sniffer on the client machine and saw that a new sessionID was generated. This meant that the JSESSIONID cookie was not being propogated to the child windows.
I also realised that this problem was only with 'Modal Dialogs' and hence IE specific.

I tried in vain to understand where we were doing things wrong. Lady luck was shining on me, when I found this link that explains the problem.
Snippet from the microsoft site:

When Internet Explorer opens a window from a modal or modeless HTML dialog box by using the showModalDialog method or by using the showModelessDialog method, Internet Explorer uses Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) to create a new instance of the window. Typically, the window is opened by using the first instance of an existing Internet Explorer process. This process is different from the process that Internet Explorer uses to open a new window by using the window.open method.
When Internet Explorer opens the window in a new process, all the memory cookies are no longer available, including the session ID.

The workaround was to pass the window object of the parent of the dialog box into the dialog box, and then use that object to open the new window.

For e.g. In the parent window:
var args = new Object;
args.window = window;
showModalDialog("modal.asp", args)

And in the child window:
dialogArguments.window.open('page1.asp')