JSON in DB 12c: One more reason to upgrade

If you have not upgraded your Oracle database to the 12c version or you are considering database for your new project, than check this neat feature of the Oracle Database 12c. It may outweigh the competitors.

XSLT: Namespace awareness.

This is the short one, I mean it.
If your mapping does not pass the test and you have no  result that you expect to have - check namespaces folks! I'm deadly serious: first check namespaces than start with names, character registers, and syntax. You may save yourself hell lot of the time. 

XSLT. Apples and Oranges.

Believe me or not, I'm not going to compare XSL processors or whining about poor support for XSLT 2.0. Recently I have faced the situation,  where I should merge two property lists and produce combined result. Let's do some shopping and play with the grocery lists. The reasons why I'm writing this post are:

• SOA 11g/12c supports XSLT 2.0 transformations and you can use all the power of it. 
• XSLT Mapper is far behind the processor and may eve lie to you with the error messages. 

The example below is a little trinket, but it may save you hours on developing external services for the data transformation. 

Apache Maven and SOA 11g. Enable the composite.

Okay everyone, holidays are over and it's time to complete this super long read. If you haven't seen 3 previous posts you may go and check the first one here. Today we will discuss how to enable Maven for the SOA projects. Bad thing - it has a proprietary compiler and there is no Maven plugin at all, good thing the compiler uses Ant tasks to build and deploy Oracle SOA 11g composites. Now we have a plan and our project model should be able to:

• Compile Java code and package it along with the SOA artifacts. The reason is your composite may use custom Java classes to perform some activities that hard or impossible to implement with the XPath/XQuery/XSLT tools you have. 
• Test Java code, before build or install, especially if you use JUnit to cover your code. 
• Build SCA archive with the proper Ant task 
• Deploy composite archive to the SOA servers.

Rephrasing those steps in the project configuration terms we will talk about:

• Additional properties for the SOA-specific tasks. 
• Configure Java compiler and package plugin
• Configure Ant plugin for Maven