Thursday, January 12, 2017

WebLogic Server: Logging the SOAP action in the access.log

WebLogic Server allows you to customize your access.log. This can be very powerful if you want to monitor for example service response times in a tool like Splunk (see here). When working with SOAP services though, especially those with many operations, it can be insufficient to monitor services to the level of the individual endpoint. You want to also know with which intent the endpoint is called. In this blog I will show how this can be achieved.

Monday, January 9, 2017

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS). Implementing custom APIs using JavaScript on Node.js.

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is a mobile backend as a service. MCS does its magic by providing a lot of features to make implementing mobile services easy such as (among many other) authentication, logging/analytics, lookups and calling other services. There are also features available to make integration with mobile clients easy such as providing an easy way to implement push notifications.

Personally I think one of the most powerful features of MCS is the ability to write custom JavaScript code and use that as an API implementation. This custom code can (among the regular JavaScript features) call MCS connectors and platform services. This provides a lot of flexibility in defining API behavior.

In this blog I will show how you can use this custom Node.js code to create an end to end example. I will use a RAML file to define my interface. Next I will define a connector in MCS to call the OpenWeatherMap API. This API returns (amongst other things) the temperature at a location in Kelvin. I want to define my own custom result message (with the temperature in Celsius) which better matches the requirements of my mobile client. I will use a custom JavaScript implementation to call the connector which calls the OpenWeatherMap API and create a custom response message from the result.

The described example is not suitable for a production implementation and is based on limited experience (and watching some really nice YouTube presentations). It is provided to give an idea on how to get started easily with a simple working example.