May 2009 Archives

LiveCycle Café is a web-connected desktop application made to help you stay in touch with the LiveCycle community, receive news, find information, and aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES in a timely and customized fashion. Created with Adobe AIR, LiveCycle Café is the one tool you need to search across the entire community knowledge base and stay in touch with the Adobe LiveCycle teams.

LiveCycle Café provides the following capabilities:
• Timely News - Highlights important news and alerts about LiveCycle and other enterprise relevant Adobe software
• Targeted Search - A dedicated tool searching across multiple targeted sites focusing on LiveCycle related content.
• RSS Reader - A feature-rich content aggregator that lets you share stories via AIM, Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, email and more without copying and pasting, or dragging and dropping.
• Persistent Notes - Saves search results and other text snippets for viewing later, whether you are online or offline.
• LC Events - Allows you to quickly locate upcoming LiveCycle events in your area or online.
• LC Forums - A direct view into the latest information found in the LiveCycle section of Adobe Forums.

For more information and to download LiveCycle Café, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/cafe

Based on the success of Tour de Flex, the platform evangelism team decided to offer a similar tool exploring the features of LiveCycle ES. They combined forces with Avoka Technologies’ LiveCycle gurus and created a vast collection of content including samples, videos, whitepapers and more.

If you are curious about LiveCycle ES, this is a great first step. If you are an existing LiveCycle ES customer, you will find Tour de LiveCycle a valuable reference tool.

More information on Tour de LiveCycle is available here.

Starting Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific / 12:00 p.m. Eastern we are starting a monthly series of eSeminars called "Ask the Experts".  Each month we will feature a new guest speaker with a new topic of interest for LiveCycle developers and architects. This month's featured speaker: Scott MacDonald on The Adobe LiveCycle SDK and Quick Starts.

For details on the events and to add them to your calendar, please go to http://asktheexperts.host.adobe.com/.

Adobe releases service packs for LiveCycle ES roughly once a quarter. There are separate service packs for LiveCycle Designer, Workbench as well as the Server. The Server service packs are usually about 1 GB in size. Since the older service packs are backed up, your server's disk space requirements will keep going up as you apply more service packs.

At a high level, the following are the steps you need to perform to update your LiveCycle installation with a new service pack:

1) Apply the service pack to your existing LiveCycle installation
2) Using LCM, re-build the EAR files
3) Undeploy the existing EAR files from the appserver(s)
4) Deploy the newly-built EAR files
5) Re-start the appserver instances
6) Using LCM, re-deploy the DSCs. Those DSCs that haven't changed will be left alone while others would be updated.
7) Perform basic validation tests

There is NO NEED to re-bootstrap the database.

If a DSC was changed, the lcm.0.log file at $LIVECYCLE_INSTALL_ROOT/configurationManager/log/ will have entries such as this:
com.adobe.livecycle.lcm.feature.deployment.DeployDSCs, DSC already installed but at a different version. DSC will now be updated with: com.adobe.livecycle.Assembler:8.2.3026.1.197218.8

Otherwise, the entries would look something like this:
com.adobe.livecycle.lcm.feature.deployment.DeployDSCs, DSC already installed. Skipping update for: com.adobe.repository.bindings.dsc.RepositoryService:8.2.2176.1.183920.1

For a long-running, stable configuration of the WebSphere JDBC Connection Pool for a database (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server 2005), there are additional configuration steps that can be performed.

1) Enable pre-testing of pooled connections
2) Enable pre-testing of existing pooled connections

In the WebSphere Admin Console, navigate to JDBC providers->[Your_JDBC_Provider_Name]->Data sources->[Your_JDBC_Data_Source_Name]->WebSphere Application Server data source properties.

Check the checkbox for "Pretest existing pooled connections"
Check the checkbox for Pretest new connections.

In the "Pretest SQL string" field, enter:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM LCDB2.EDCVERSIONENTITY.
Replace "LCDB2" with the actual name of your schema.

Apply and save the changes.

Repeat this for all of LiveCycle's data sources (IDP_DS, EDC_DS, JMS_DS).

Re-start the WebSphere appserver instances that host LiveCycle.