Cool Tools

Scripting old-style imports using CatalogMover's command line

Posted by Tony Field on Friday, May 10, 2013 - 15:26 Web Experience Management, Cool Tools, Development catalogmover, FatWire, Import, WEM

For over a decade, WebCenter Sites (FutureTense Content Server, OpenMarket Content Server, FatWire Content Server, etc.) used a text-based import format exclusively for bulk content import and export. The format was HTML-based and essentially exported a database table into a HTML table. Files were written to disk in folders alongside the HTML file.

A mini Swing Java app was created that allowed you to connect to the UI, and you then had a few tools you could use to list catalog data, select database rows to export, and import one or more files. Lightweight and very basic, it did...

'Varnish' Your Drupal Setup

Posted by Hani Atalla on Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 13:18 Cool Tools, Drupal Caching, Drupal, Varnish

For every high performance website that gets hammered by a decent traffic volume, some sort of caching mechanism is essential and Drupal is no exception. The Drupal caching approach, to a great extent, depends upon the type of visitors who frequent the website and this suggests different Drupal specific caching techniques depending upon the type of visitors to the website; for instance if the predominant visitors to the website are authenticated users versus unauthenticated. So in this blog, I’d like to discuss Varnish as a caching option for...

Simulating Data with the Splunk Event Generator

Posted by Kevin Chu on Friday, February 22, 2013 - 13:29 Operational Intelligence, Cool Tools, Development Cool Tools, Data Inputs, Development, Event Generator, eventgen, Splunk

While installing a new app to your Splunk search head can usually be considered a rather benign action, sometimes the introduction of a TA on your forwarders and indexers requires more attention. This is commonly the case, especially if your production environment is guarded by change control. The problem is that without the data generated by those inputs your newly installed app may not display properly, and without seeing your new app’s dashboards populated with data, you may not be able to conclude how useful it really is. I suppose deploying a fully mirrored “dev” environment to...

Passwords: Sharks Can Smell a Breach a Mile Away

Posted by Jon Reid on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 - 14:22 Best Practices, Cool Tools, Data Security Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

2013 is not shaping up to be a banner year for Internet security. 2012 saw data breaches like 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes leaked, 420,000 member accounts from social network Formspring, Yahoo! Voices more than 400,000 usernames and passwords, 1.5 million passwords from the online dating site eHarmony. Twitter is the latest system to suffer an embarrassing security breach with accompanying data loss. Approximately 250,000 accounts holders have had their usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords stolen. Twitter has been as proactive as...

WebLogic + Splunk = Splunk for Oracle WebLogic Server

Posted by Sandeep Khaneja on Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 17:55 Operational Intelligence, Cool Tools Oracle WebLogic Server, Splunk

As many of you know, from our website and blogs, we Function1-ers provide world-class consulting services for a few Oracle enterprise products as well as Splunk. Having this unique blend of experience on the Function1 team, we often try to experiment with new ideas that would be helpful to both sets of clients. One such experiment has yielded our new 1.0 Beta release of the Splunk for Oracle WebLogic Server app....

WebCenter Sites CSDT tip: Recommended Order of @ALL_ASSETS for Error-free Imports

Posted by Somen De on Friday, January 18, 2013 - 15:06 Web Experience Management, Cool Tools, Development, Best Practices Cool Tools, CSDT, Development, FatWire, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Web Experience Management, WEM

As anyone who has worked with Oracle WebCenter Sites "Content Server Development Tools" (CSDT) already knows, the import process can get a little “tricky”, especially when trying to import "@ALL_ASSETS".

Regardless if you're operating from the command line or via Eclipse's CSDT plug-in, there are inevitable errors that occur because of the complexity of certain sites, and all the dependencies that arise between workspace resources.

When a CSDT import error occurs during “@ALL_ASSETS”, it’s typically difficult to pinpoint which specific element caused the error, and there’s...

Accessing a Windows share from Linux

Posted by Mitul Patel on Monday, December 17, 2012 - 16:16 Cool Tools CIFS, File Share, linux, Samba, VM

So I recently started working on a new WebCenter Sites project and found myself needing to run some *nix shell scripts locally, but unfortunately for me I do my Java development on a Windows 7 machine. Blasphemous I know. Anyhow I happened to have a Linux VM sitting around that I could use to run any *nix scripts I needed. I found myself wanting to keep the files and folders I need for my development environment on my Windows 7 host, so I decided to see if I could access and run unix scipts that act on...

How to use Vanity URLs in the GSF with WebCenter Sites

Posted by Tony Field on Monday, November 19, 2012 - 16:34 Web Experience Management, Best Practices, Cool Tools, Development architecture, design, FatWire, GSF, Oracle WebCenter Sites, Vanity URL, Web Experience Management, WEM

WebCenter Sites does not support vanity URLs without customization. The GSF provides a great vanity URL package that is flexible and easy to use, and this post will describe how to set it up.

Background

First, a little background. Native URLs in WebCenter Sites all have to include a query string parameter called "pagename". If the page is rendering an asset, "c" and "cid" are also included, and recently, other parameters like "childpagename" have crept into the standard set of parameters that are found in URLs. This simply doesn't cut...

How to install both GSF and CSDT in WebCenter Sites

Posted by David Chesebro on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - 15:31 Web Experience Management, Best Practices, Cool Tools CSDT, FatWire, GSF, Oracle WebCenter Sites

So you're building a new website in WebCenter Sites and you've decided to use CSDT (Content Server Developer Tools) and GSF (GST Site Foundation) to help make the development process as efficient as possible. The steps for installing GSF are quite simple. Copy a few files, click a few links, and you're done. Setting up CSDT is easy too -- once you get the hang of the differences between importing and exporting and what direction those commands sync your assets -- always think of it relative your WebCenter Sites installation: You import to WebCenter Sites, and export from...

What is this whole GST Site Foundation thing?

Posted by Tony Field on Friday, October 26, 2012 - 15:45 Web Experience Management, Best Practices, Cool Tools, Development FatWire, GSF, support, WebCenter Sites

You've heard about it... the GST Site Foundation. Maybe you've heard of it as the "GSF". But what is it?

The GSF is a set of core architectural patterns and tools that support building websites with WebCenter Sites.

Think WebCenter Sites on Rails.

So why does it exist? Well, WebCenter Sites provides very flexible and powerful APIs. They are so powerful that the entire editorial interface, asset infrastructure, and all of the tools that are part of the application itself are built on the same APIs that we can use on our own websites...