Some Java, JEE and WebSphere stuffs | Something about JEE and WebSphere. Java, JEE and WebSphere tips and tutorials

I just experienced a strange problem with WebSphere Process Server. When I started WPS server from WebSphere Integration Developer, its status was starting… starting… and starting… only. The server’s status remains unchanged for ever. I tried all the ways I could think to make the status as started. I stopped the server, restarted the server, killed the server, restarted WID, killed WID, and even restarted my machine (Unfortunately I did not know how to kill my machine. Moreover my laptop was given by my company and any developments on my laptop’s physical and mental state has a direct impact on my pas slip. So I did not invest too much time for reading articles on how to kill my machine ).

The strange part was, according to the log files the server was open for e-business and when I tried I was able to access the BPC Explorer and admin console. But some how WID didn’t know about the server’s status change.

Finally I got a solution to fix the problem. Just double click on the server and open the server properties window. Change the ‘Server connection type’ to SOAP. I don’t know how it solved the problem, but it worked and it is working.

Configuration management is an important part of any project and integration of the CM tool with the IDE makes developers life cool. In this post I am going to explain how to integrate Visual Source Safe with WebSphere Integration Developer.

There is one plugin available for integrating VSS with WID. First you need to download version 1.6.0 of VSS plugin from http://sourceforge.net/projects/vssplugin/. Extract the plugin to some directory and copy the ‘org.vssplugin_1.6.0′ to WID_installation directory\eclipse\plugins\ directory. If your WID is not running start it and if it is running just restart the IDE. Once the WebSphere Integration Developer is up click on About ->About IBM WebSphere Integration Developer -> Plugin Details. This would bring all the currently installed plugins. If your installation was successful you will see an entry with plugin name as ‘VSS Plugin Functions for Eclipse’ and provider as ‘Marcus Nylander (marcus.nylander @ bredband.net)’. The version displayed will be 1.6.0 and plugin id will be ‘org.vssplugin’.

Now go to Window -> Preference -> Team -> VSS for configuring any general settings. Also from Window ->Preferences -> Workbench -> Label Decorations, make sure that ‘VSS Plugin Team Decorator’ is checked. If you are not able to find the Team option in Window -> Preferences, go to Preferences->Work bench->Capabilities and enable the Team capability or just right click on any project and select Team -> Share Project. From the window opened select VSS Configuration Wizard and click on Next, now the WebSphere Integration Developer would ask you to enable the team feature as its not enabled. Just say yes .

To integrate the given project with right click on the project and select Team -> Share Project -> VSS Configuration Wizard and enter your details. Now from within the IDE you would be able to check in/check out files from VSS.

I was in bench for the last few days. Last day when I had a chat with my manager he said that my new project will be in WPS (WebSphere Process Server). I am totally new to WebSphere process server (even I haven’t seen that interface), so I though of learning some WebSphere Process Server stuff. I am not sure from where I came to a conclusion that WebSphere Process Server is something related to web services, anyway it happened. So I though it will be a great idea to learn Web Services tutorial first, before actually jumping into WebSphere Process Server.

As usual I opened my web browser (For most of the time I use Firefox and for serious browsing I use Internet Explorer as I think Internet Explorer is more secure ), and typed “Java web service tutorial”. Great!. more than millions of results came up and as expected the first result was a link to java.sun.com. I became so happy as I am a big fan of Sun Java tutorials. In fact I learned Java by reading the tutorials from Sun only. So I thought this would be great start again.

After the page got opened up, I just started going through the table of contents. In fact I did not want to read the complete tutorial as I was so lazy and I just wanted a Hello World tutorial to start with. I belive all our learning starts with Hello World and that should be the first program every developer should try . But amazingly I did not find a Hello World web service tutorial there. I could see everything except web service in Sun’s web service tutorial. They are talking about JAXB, STAX, ABCD, XYZ etc. But no web service. Amazingly I couldn’t find any Hello World tutorial in most of the web service tutorial links I got from google search.

Did I miss something? or there is no Hello World web service tutorial or what? Its very unfortunate that there is no hello world web service tutorial on net. After reading this you may ask why you are not writing a hello world tutorial on web service? The answer is very simple, still I am in search for a Hello World tutorial. Let me write a Hello World web service, after that I will write the tutorial.

To add a new menu in organization administration console we need to edit the ‘BuySiteAdminConsole.xml’ which is present in the
the following locations.

Commerce Toolkit installation directory\xml\tools\buyerconsole\BuySiteAdminConsole.xml

or

WCS installation directory\CommerceServer\xml\tools\buyerconsole\BuySiteAdminConsole.xml

If we want to add a new menu, use the menuitem tag or else (ie for adding submenu) use the node tag.

For eg:

Here name of the menu will be the text displayed in the admin console against the menu. For The users tag contains the roles of all the users who can access this menu. The node tag represents a sub menu. the url will be the action associated with the submenu. Depending on our requirement we can have Wizard, Notebook, Dialog, DynamicList etc views. In the above example the ActionXMLFile points to an xml file present in the ‘mydir’ directory. Before using the xmlfile name here we need to define the xml file definition inside the resources.xml file present in the ‘mydir’ directory. cmd stands for the viewname associated with the submenu action.

The name of the xml file (which is defined inside the attribute ‘name’) is coming from the corresponding properties file. The default properties file for BuySiteAdminConsole.xml is BuyAdminConsoleNLS.properties. This file is present inside the following directory.

Commerce Toolkit Install Directory\properties\com\ibm\commerce\tools\buyerconsole\properties\BuyAdminConsoleNLS.properties

or

Appserver install directory\AppServer\installedApps\\\properties\com\ibm\commerce\tools\buyerconsole\properties\BuyAdminConsoleNLS.properties

Depending upon the locale you may need to edit one more properties file which is present in the same directory. For eg: if your locale is en_us you need to edit BuyAdminConsoleNLS_en_US.properties file also.

How to connect to internet from Java program through a proxy? The answer is very simple Just add the following arguments to the virtual machine

    java -Dhttp.proxyHost=hostname -Dhttp.proxyPort=port -Dhttp.proxyUser=username  -Dhttp.proxyPassword=passowrd

or just put set these System properties using the code.

   System.getProperties().put("http.proxyHost", "hostname");
   System.getProperties().put("http.proxyPort", "port");
   System.getProperties().put("http.proxyUser", "username");
   System.getProperties().put("http.proxyPassword", "password");

If your proxy doesn’t require an authentication, you just need to set proxyHost and proxyPort properties only.

But the fist method wouldn’t work if we are running our program from within Eclipse as we don’t have command line access. So to set the proxy properties in Eclipse just go to Run menu and click on Run. A dialog box would appear and in the first tab (Main tab) enter your main class and other information and in the Arguments tab under VM arguments just add the following line.

   -Dhttp.proxyHost=hostnmae -Dhttp.proxyPort=port