Human readable JVM GC timestamps

When we are diagnosing problems in a Java (EE or otherwise) application, is often a good idea to check how garbage collection is performing. One of the basic and most unobtrusive actions is to enable garbage collection logging.

Continuous Integration with Oracle PL/SQL, utPLSQL and Hudson

PL/SQL is not exactly the coolest technology around these days but many businesses rely on it for their day-to-day operation. The fact that it is relatively old and does not mean that you cannot apply Extreme Programming(XP)…

Dynamically changing log level with Weblogic, log4j, JMX and WLST

Logging is an uninteresting but nevertheless fundamental part of application development. It is useful not just when you are coding an application but in diagnosing problems of any nature once an application passes…

Persistence Strategies for Amazon EC2

At The Server Labs, we often run into a need that comes naturally with the on-demand nature of Cloud Computing. Namely, we’d like to keep our team’s AWS bill in check by ensuring that we can safely turn off our Amazon EC2 instances when not in use. In fact, we’d…

ALSB/OSB customization using WLST

One of the primary tasks in release management is environment promotion. From development to test or from test to production, environment promotion is a step which should be as much automated as possible.

Quick introduction to TIBCO iProcess components

From observing material available on the internet and in discussions with our customers, it is clear that there is a fair amount of confusion as to which components are available in TIBCO iProcess suite and what they are used for. This article…

Using Java Enums

This week I discovered two useful things you can do with Enums in Java.

The first and probably the more useful of the two is for formatting error messages in a consise and type safe way.

public enum ErrorMessageKey {