Most application that allows multiple windows allow you to switch between them using ctrl+tab key. Not eclipse. It uses ctrl+F6 and so does RAD etc. But this can be changed. To change the key that switches between classes (small windows within eclipse),

• go to Window > Preferences > expand Workbench > select Keys
• In the Category dropdown, select Window
• In the Name dropdown, select Next Editor
• Put the cursor in the Name field in the Key Sequence section and press ctrl+tab. Do not type ctrl+tab, press those keys
• Click Add, the key assignment is added to Assignments section
• Optionally, remove the ctrl+F6 assignment by selecting it and clicking Remove button
• Click Apply and then OK buttons to close the dialog box

If you are using eclipse 3.1.2 OR WebSphere Application Server toolkit v6.1, the procedure is similar but the buttons are little different:

• go to Window > Preferences > expand General > select Keys
• In the Category dropdown, select Window
• In the Name dropdown, select Next Editor
• Put the cursor in the Name field in the Key Sequence section and press ctrl+tab. Do not type ctrl+tab, press those keys
• Click Add, the key assignment is added to Assignments section
• Optionally, remove the ctrl+F6 assignment by selecting it and clicking Remove button
• Click Apply and then OK buttons to close the dialog box

There are all kinds of considerations when migrating an application from WAS 5.x to 6.x. But I want to talk about moving projects from WAS 5.x to WAS 6.x within Rational Application Developer. This change could come in two flavors:

1. Moving from WSAD to RAD
2. Moving from RAD using WAS 5.1 to WAS 6.0

Before we talk about specific steps to follow, it must be noted that every J2EE project in WSAD or RAD uses at least 2 variables. Both of these variables are predefined in the IDE and point to specific set of jar files:

1. JRE System Library variable, which can be configured to point to any valid JRE. While you have the option to use the eclipse JRE that comes with the IDE, I recommend against it. The JRE System Library variable should point to WebSphere JRE because the code is ultimately going to run in WAS runtime environment.
2. WebSphere v5.1 runtime, which is added by WSAD or RAD when the project was created for WAS 5.x server. This variable includes all the J2EE and WebSphere libraries needed to build the project 

In any case you can follow these steps to move the project:

1. If the project doesn't exist in RAD already, import it using File > Import > Existing Project into Workspace, select the directory that contains the .project file and click Finish
2. Upon successful import, one or more of the following could happen:

• If you are using RAD and if you have installed WAS 5.x test environment, you should not get any errors. To use WAS 6.x runtime in this case,

1. Right click the project, select Properties > Java Build Path > Libraries tab
2. Select JRE System Library variable and click Edit button
3. Click Alternate JRE radio button, select WebSphere v6 JRE from the dropdown and click Finish
4. Go to the Server section in the Properties dialog box and select WebSphere Application Server v6.0 in the Target runtime dropdown
5. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box, the project should rebuild itself

• If you haven't installed WAS 5.x test environment, you will get errors upon importing a project that has WAS 5.x entries in its classpath. In that case,

1. Right click the project, select Properties > Java Build Path > Libraries tab
2. If the JRE System Library variable has an error, remove it
3. Click Add Library button, select JRE System Library click Next
4. Click Alternate JRE radio button, select WebSphere v6 JRE from the dropdown and click Finish
5. Remove the WebSphere v5.1 runtime entry
6. Go to the Server section in the Properties dialog box and select WebSphere Application Server v6.0 in the Target runtime dropdown
7. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box, the project should rebuild itself

If any of your projects had generated EJB code, you will get a number of compilation errors that won't make much sense, just delete all the generated code and do a clean build. If you will start using JDK 1.4 with this move and have assert statements in your code, there are some other considerations but I will write about that later.

On Thursday November 17, 2005, I wrote a blog entry about going solo. Today, I am writing this entry to announce that I have actually gone solo. In a search engine friendly language, "I have become an independent consultant providing problem definition, analysis, architecture, design, development and knowledge services in the Information Technology area."

The first draft of this entry contained details about my prior consulting experience, my wide experience in solving IT problems in pretty much all the industries and my specialty in SOA/web services and J2EE/WebSphere. But all that self promotion was overshadowing this enthusiastic "going solo" announcement; so, I am going to save those things for the future.

The new life

Am I doing something totally different than what I was doing before? No. Life doesn't change much as an independent consultant - especially when I have pretty much always worked for consulting companies! I still go to the client location every day, I still work on IT projects, I still move from one project to another, I still work with clients and go through the daily dynamics of the client-consultant relationship and above all, I still have family, mortgage and car. A number of things have changed however. I can now do consulting within the framework of my core values and beliefs. I can truly shape my career by focusing on areas of my interest and by choosing my projects. I don't have to worry about my utilization and that next promotion. I get paid for all the hours I work and I am accountable for all the hours I don't work.

The details

I have formed a Limited Liability Company named Taraba Consulting LLC. As part of this company, I will help clients identify, analyze and solve IT problems. For now, I will only accept contract positions in Chicago land area. These days I am working for a healthcare client in downtown Chicago re-architecting and redesigning a web services based messaging application.

The influences

While working at two of the big five consulting companies, I had always wanted to cut the crap and focus on the consulting aspects I really loved. Working for a corporation for a very short period of time made me realize that I had to be a consultant or a teacher (ideally both) to keep my sanity. My wife helped me see my potential and encouraged me to work hard to realize that potential. And finally, two of my team members on a project at my last employer provided me with the environment that helped me make this happen sooner than later.

I have much more to share on this topic. In fact, starting today, visitors will see a new category named 'Consulting' in my blog but more on that later.

WebSphere v6.1 is out for a while now. I recently got an opportunity to use it in the development environment and wanted to list my quick thoughts here:

• First off, there is no production release of Rational Application Developer (RAD) for WebSphere v6.1 yet. WAS 6.1 ships with a so called Application Server Toolkit (AST). In my personal opinion, toolkit is a misleading word as it makes customers think it's some sort of beta tool and not suitable for serious development. This perceived lack of development tools may even cause a delay in WAS 6.1 adoption. While I believe IBM should have released RAD 6.1 with WAS 6.1 (more on this in some other post), I also believe the toolkit has all the coding features an average development project needs. Some RAD features e.g. UML modeling are missing. If you are still not clear what AST offers, think of AST as WSAD for WAS 6.1
• Second, you cannot install the toolkit with WAS 6.1 test environment. You must install WAS 6.1 and toolkit separately and then point the toolkit to WAS 6.1 installation directory to use the server. I am not sure whether this is how RAD 7.0 (which is supposed to be the IDE for WAS 6.1) will work or RAD 7.0 will continue to have WAS install within its runtimes directory. Personally, I like the ability to use separate installation of WAS. This gives the flexibility to run the server outside the IDE and deploy and run applications on it.
• Third, the toolkit appears to support export and import of server profiles. Thank you IBM! In WSAD, an experienced developer could configure all the server parameters and distribute the server profile to the rest of the team. In RAD, this feature disappeared forcing every developer to go through the painful steps of configuring the server. But, looks like now this feature is back. At least it's back in the toolkit. I haven't personally used it yet (may be I will use it next week)
• Forth, Since I am using a separate server installation, I have to rely on the log files created within the server. In other words, not everything is printed on the old friend console within the IDE. This may not be true for RAD 7.0 but it's true for the toolkit. Also, if you are using WAS 5.x, the log files are at <app_server_home>/logs/<server_name>/<log_file_name>.log but WAS 6.x uses the concept of cell, node and profile. The new location for the log files is, <app_server_home>/profiles/<profile_name>/logs/<server_name>/<log_file_name>.log

Listed above are all the WAS 6.1/toolkit features related observations. Here are some miscellaneous observations. It's possible that some of these were implemented in WAS 6.0; consequently, the list below is more useful to some one migrating from WAS 5.x:

• By default WAS 6.1 installs as a windows service. I wish I could choose against it
• Security on WAS installation is turned on by default
• Default urls have changed as follows:
• Admin console is available on http://<hostname>:9061/ibm/console
• Applications are deployed on http://<hostname>:9081/<web_app>
• Universal Test Client is available on http://<hostname>:9081/UTC
• Server startup takes longer. It appears that the server initializes some out of the box applications. I have yet to dig into this

In a nutshell, you can now go to the Contact Me section of my website and send me a message. This section silently didn't work until today.

If you use Joomla and have had the same problem, read on. I had configured the global configuration file by adding email parameters in the Mail tab but this is not enough to receive emails from the website. I had to go to Component > Contacts > Manage Contacts and edit the only available contact. Joomla keeps a default contact with name = Name, email = This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and so on. Obviously, these are all dummy values. The Contact Me section is configured to display contact information of this contact and send emails to this user. I changed this user to contain my information and that's it!

Before we move on, let's do a quick recapture of what we have done so far:

1. We decided to do some Java EE development
2. We downloaded, installed and configured GlassFish application server , which is an open source (beta) reference implementation of the Java EE specifications
3. We downloaded and installed NetBeans
4. We configured NetBeans to use GlassFish application server; we will use this setup to write code in NetBeans and deploy it on GlassFish
5. This blog entry talks about how to install the database (will be used to persist data as part of developing JPA code) 

In my first blog about Java EE development, I had mentioned that I was going to use Oracle XE for that. The installation and configuration of Oracle XE is really easy on windows platform. You simply download Oracle XE from http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html, double click the exe, follow the prompts and you are done.

Oracle XE gives a nice browser based GUI tool to manage the database. This was easy, let's quickly create the user (schema) we will be using for Java EE development. Note the following about this db user:

• This user is the application user that will be used to configure data source in GlassFish server for our application to interact with the database
• This user will have connect and resource privileges on the database. Read more about privileges at http://www.oracle.com/pls/xe102/homepage
• Connect privilege allows the user to connect to the database. Usually, applications users are given this privilege BUT we want our application user to be able to create tables (as part of JPA annotated Entity classes)
• Resource privilege allows the user to create certain type of schema objects in his own schema (e.g. create tables, views etc.). The specific types of objects this user is allowed to create can be selected using the 'Direct Grant System Privileges' list. As shown in the screen shot below, we have selected all the options in the list
• DBA privilege enables the user to perform administrative functions. We will not give javaee user this privilege 

To create the application user, go to Home > Administration > Manage Database Users, Click Create, Fill in the data as shown below (I am using username=javaee and password=javaee):

This step created the database schema. In Oracle, the terms user and schema are used interchangeably but I will not get into those details here. The javaee schema we just created will eventually hold all the tables, views and other database objects.

Just to make sure everything went well, we will now connect to the database and run a sql from command line:

• Open a command prompt by selecting Run SQL Command Line from the Oracle start menu entry
• Login as the user using connect javaee/javaee command. You should see a "connected" message
• Save the following sql as address.sql

• Run the address.sql file using SQL>@"<full_path_to_file>." Note the following about running the sql:
• @ sign runs the sql in the file
• Double quotes are required if your path contains spaces
• You will get an error "table or view does not exist." This is because the first line of the script drops the table but the table doesn't exist yet. Any subsequent runs of this file won't display the error message
• Run desc ADDRESS. This will describe the table ADDRESS 

In the next installment we will create an Address entity from the ADDRESS table. JPA also allows you to create entity classes first and use them to create database table. We will use this feature for some of the other entity classes.