Random Learnings by Ralph Palomar

There are some palette resources we never or rarely use in TIBCO, and one of them is the Java Event Source. This activity is used to create a custom process starter in the process definition. I wonder what would be the use case to customize a process starter. Is there ever a functionality not available in TIBCO out-of-the-box? Nevertheless, I have gone exploring this function which also led me to some advanced topics in Java. So, this is how Java Event Source looks like. You have two options when writing the code: you can modify the embedded source code in Designer or you can use an external class. Your external class needs to extend the abstract class JavaProcessStarter from the package com.tibco.plugin.java and export it as a jar file, which is kind of cumbersome since you need to include the external library in the class path so that you can compile the code. Preferably, writing the code in Designer is more convenient. Conversely, what if writing the logic itself is mor...

There are times when you don't have full access to TIBCO Administrator but you have full access to the UNIX server where the application was deployed and you wanted to start an application. You can do that on the terminal by running the shell script that is automatically created upon deploying the application. Go to < TRA_DOMAIN_HOME> : /tibco/tra/domain/<DOMAIN_NAME>/application/<APPLICATION_NAME> APPLICATION_NAME is the name you have given to the Enterprise Archive resource in your Designer project. After deploying the application, a script file and a TRA file are created into this path. You can also check it on TIBCO Administrator and it is part of the Deployment Name after the dash. You can directly run the shell file as a separate process (by using ampersand), or you can issue the following: <TIBCO_BW_HOME>/bwengine --run --pid --propFile <PATH_TO_APPLICATION_TRA_FILE> There is one downside to using the shell file since it creates a d...

Web service is a standard and reliable way of communication between two applications over the Internet. It is a secure way of exposing functions that a client application can use without revealing the internal mechanism of the providing application. For example, you want to get a list of all items from a store which have a name that starts with letter A. You send a request to the providing application specifying the operation and you get a response that is the list of all items. You are not certain whether the records came from a file, a database, or another cloud application. As long as you correctly specify the request in the format expected by the provider, the rest of the details are unknown to you. This is how the exchange of information works with web services. A protocol agreed by both the provider and the client needs to be established. The protocol is the set of rules the caller of the web service needs to follow in order to invoke the web service successfully. Most common of...

There are cases when it is preferable to use Java code instead of XSLT when doing a complex string manipulation. For example, you would like to produce a single string from the different segments of an XML. You can do this by using XML To Java activity in TIBCO. Suppose you have the following XML: <?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8"?> <Employees xmlns = "http://xmlns.tibco.com/javaschema/javaschema.Employees"> <Employee> <Age>24</Age> <Level>2</Level> <Name>Mark Cruz</Name> <Role>Technology Consultant</Role> <Skill>Java</Skill> <Skill>TIBCO</Skill> <Skill>Ruby</Skill> </Employee> <Employee> <Age>25</Age> <Level>1</Level> <Name>John Cruz</Name> <Role>Technology Consultant</Role> <Skill>TIBCO BW</Skill> <Skill>PHP</Skill> ...

Just recently I started learning a new programming language called Ruby. The first language that I ever learned way back in college is Java so I can't help but compare the two languages. Learning a new language for me is apparently not very difficult since I have a strong foundation in programming logic theoretically as well as based on experience. I was quite amazed on how Ruby has made coding fast, easy, and simple with its intuitive, shorter syntax, and also available online sources ( http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby /) will help you learn the language quickly. So, I started reading the first five sections of the documentation and I was too eager to put my hands on it and write some codes. By the way, installing the compiler on Windows is no sweat and you can download it on  http://rubyonrails.org/download . The installer automatically appends C:\Ruby200\bin to the system path so you can run the code right away on the command prompt. You just have to create a file wit...