How to debug if your calls to external resources (web services calls) are passing through a proxy

JavaProblem

You need to consume an external resource via a web service and you are getting the next error on your server logs or in your browser:

Unable to tunnel through proxy. Proxy returns “HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable”

proxy_doTunneling

And you don´t have any kind of access or documentation of the environments where your code is running that can tell you if there is a proxy configured or not.

How can you be sure that in fact there is a proxy? and that the Proxy is blocking the communication?, you can add next lines to your code to determine that:

if (LOG.isLoggable(WsLevel.INFO)) {
    if ( connection.usingProxy() ) {
        LOG.log(WsLevel.INFO, '-- doPost() -- Connection is using proxy');
    }
     
    String proxyHost = System.getProperty('http.proxyHost');
    if (null != proxyHost) {
        LOG.log(WsLevel.INFO, '-- doPost() -- http.proxyHost: ' + proxyHost);
    }
    String proxyPort = System.getProperty('http.proxyPort');
    if (null != proxyPort) {
        LOG.log(WsLevel.INFO, '-- doPost() -- http.proxyPort: ' + proxyPort);
    }
}

Kudos to my teammate Xavier Muniz by discover this solution.

I really hope you find this information useful.

Base22, LLC transforms enterprise portal design

Base22CreedFlagBase22 builds its solution on IBM Digital Experience technology. “What we’ve created is a software framework composed of building blocks designed to use the IBM platform, because we’ve found it to be the best available to support the dynamic, enterprise-scale solutions our customers expect.”Cody Burleson

You can read the full story here: Base22, LLC transforms enterprise portal design

I really hope you find this information useful.

IBM Digital Experience vNext Technical T3 sessions

WebSphereLogoAll of the presentations and replays of the IBM Portal v8.5 tech talks from April 23rd have been posted to Partner World

Hope you find this information useful!!

How to access page parameters from a WebSphere Portal Theme

WebSphereLogoKudos to my teammate Cody Burleson to share on the Base22 wiki: How to access page parameters from a WebSphere Portal theme. This tip is very useful if you are developing Themes for IBM WebSphere Portal and you want to avoid set the same parameters but using custom JVM properties.

Hope you find this information useful!!

Apache Solr v4.3.1 on IBM WebSphere Application Server v8.0 series

ApacheSolrSolr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.”

Kudos to my teammate Marco Balderas, who was able to integrate Apache Solr under IBM WebSphere Application Server v8.0, if you want to know how he did that, please check the series in the the Base22.com public knowledge wiki.

I really hope you find this information useful.

Integrating Atlassian Confluence with WebSphere Portal v8

logoConfluence-390x242In Base22.com site there is a section called Knowledge Base Wiki that shows the most resent entries of the public Knowledge Wiki of the company, a space were we share the best practices and lessons-learned about methods and the technology platforms we use.

If you want to see how we integrate Atlassian Confluence with WebSphere Portal v8, read: Integrating Atlassian Confluence with WebSphere Portal v8 in the Base22 Knowledge Wiki.

Hope you find this information useful!!

Activity Stream portlet for IBM Connections 4.5

IBM Connections 4On April 9 of 2013, Luis Benitez announced on his blog that the IBM Connections portlets for IBM WebSphere Portal had been updated and were ready for download. During May 20 – 23, 2013, I was able to attend to the IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2013 Americas at the Hilton Chicago Hotel where more information was revealed of these new portlets.

I was particularly interested to know more about the portlet for the Activity Stream. The speakers showed a demo (a part of that demo is available here) of how it looks under IBM WebSphere Portal v8 and in resume:

  • This portlet expose the same layout and functionality of the Activity Stream that can be found inside Connections v.4/4.5 (you can test it under IBM Greenhouse)
    • This is because they reused the same code and just was adapted to run under IBM WebSphere Portal.
    • So, you don´t lose any functionality or get new ones  – (As expected)

    Active_stream_1

  • Is possible to pin it to a specific filter (i.e. a community) – (pretty cool!!)

active_stream_2

active_stream_3

  • It will not work correctly in a mobile device since the pop-ups will not be displayed – (to bad!!)
    • Consider to use the mobile version instead.
    • Is possible to configure if you want that the pop-ups be displayed (Ok)
  • Is possible to customize the look & feel of the portlet via CSS (too limited in my opinion)
  • Uses embedded applications to enable full interaction model – (pretty cool!!)

Update: Thank you to Adam Ginsburg – Product Manager at IBM that allowed me to add some screenshots of this new portlet.

Hope you find this information useful!!

Base22 runs on IBM WebSphere Portal

Base22CreedFlagKudos to all my Base22 colleagues that has been working on this awesome project to bring our new web site on live!!

In words of Ben Shoemate, one of the founders of the company: “We just completed the transition and re-launch of Base22.com. The main objective of this re-launch was to use the latest version of IBM WebSphere Portal (currently 8.0.0.1) in order to showcase many of the reusable assets we have built for our clients and the talents of our designers and developers. Another important reason for the redesign was to add mobile capability. Visit this site with your phone or tablet (or just shrink your browser down to a smaller size) to see how the page adapts to the smaller screens of mobile devices. We are far from done and have many more features planned, but now we have the platform to evolve the site much better than we could on WordPress.”