When my articles appear on Developer.com, they have 120 days exclusive rights. Rather than have readers wait four months, I post a link to the article here (when I remember to).
The latest is 10 Things You Should Know About WebLogic Server 10.3, handy if you are considering a move to the latest version of WLS.
In WLS, deployment plans let you change the values in deployment descriptors at deployment time. This is really handy when you want to move your deployment archives from one environment to the next (i.e., from Staging to Production) and need different settings based on the environment. Maxence Button blogged an excellent how-to at http://m-button.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-use-deployment-plan.html
I’m the first to admit that if you are looking for breaking news, I am not the source. Broken news, maybe…
Anyway, I just noticed the FastSwap feature for WLS 10.3. This allows for updating classes in a running instance without having to do a full redeploy. If you have spent anytime developing WebLogic Portal applications, you know what a boon this is. Two of the major productivity killers in building WLP solutions is the time it takes to redeploy the whole portal to test every little change, and eventual Out of Memory errors that will occur with repeated redeployment of the same application.
Turning on the feature is a simple matter of updating weblogic.xml and weblogic-application.xml (see the documentation for the specifics).
One note of caution: This is for development use only. If your deployment processes do not include either deployment plans or environment-specific deployment descriptors, you will need to maintain a local copy outside of your normal source control.
While the message does not impact functionality, if you have to read the logs it becomes tedious to scroll past the following over and over:
<BEA-403302> <An unexpected SQL exception occured java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001:
unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated.
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001: unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated
at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:112)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:331)
Not to mention how the fun of having every person who hasn’t looked at your application before reporting it as a problem or insisting it is the root of a bug you are chasing (it isn’t).
If you have a support account, you can surpress this with the following WLP 10.2 patch:
VZGR | 9AS6D7D9