OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview - Release Notes

Published: April 2003

Last Updated: 02-May-2003

1. Introduction

OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview as the name suggest is a developer preview release, which includes a few new features and numerous bug fixes. This release is meant for development and test environments only and under no circumstances should be used in production environments. The only channel of customer support is the Oracle technology network discussion forum accessible at http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jsp?forum=46.

This release is for standalone use only. It can not replace the OC4J embedded with an Oracle9iAS installation. It cannot replace the OC4J embedded in JDeveloper - however you may deploy into an OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview from JDeveloper.

Deploying applications built using this release on to your current Oracle9iAS production version is not supported. 

The documentation accompanying this release is beta and can be found at /tech/java/oc4j/904/documentation_preview.html. 

The important new features, bugs fixed and known issues in this release are listed in the following sections.

2. New Features

The following new features have been added in this release:

• Support for rolling over of OC4J log files.
  
  
• Support for startup and shutdown classes.
  
  
• Datasources now support RAC.
  
  
• Obfuscation of password in datasources.xml.
  
  
• JSTL is packaged into OC4J.
  
  
• Provision of a lightweight JMS 1.0 provider (OC4J JMS) in addition to the Oracle JMS provider delivered in earlier releases.
  
  
• Support for MDB with both Oracle JMS (AQ) and lightweight OC4J JMS.
  
  
• Support for java.util.Date, java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time, java.sql.Timestamp in EJB-QL has been included.

3.  Other Important Changes

OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview supports JDK 1.4.1, JDK 1.4.0-b92, JDK 1.3.1_05.

Important Note: The use of JDK 1.4.x now requires you to have all imported classes contained in packages. For further details, please see the second half of point#8 at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/compatibility.html - incompatibilities1.4

Also, unlike earlier OC4J standalone releases, this Developer Preview release does not ship tools.jar. Please install the supported version of JDK and set appropriate environment variables before using OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview.

Several default settings have changed in this release:

• In OC4J 9.0.3, for relationship mapping for a one-to-many relationship, the default scenario used an association table. Now, the default is to use a foreign key. If you want to use association table as default then you have to start OC4J with a Java system property of -DassociateUsingThirdTable=true.
  
  
• The default value for the trans-attribute for CMP 2.0 entity beans is changed to Required.
  
  
• The max-tx-retries default value is zero. 
  
  
• The max-instances default value is set to zero for all EJBs. 
  
  
• Directory location changed for global application libraries
  
  In OC4J 9.0.4, global application libraries (e.g. jars/zips) are no longer loaded from j2ee/home/lib directory as was done in earlier versions. The j2ee/home/lib directory is now reserved for OC4J system libraries. If your current applications require libraries to be loaded at the system level then please create a directory named 'applib' in the j2ee/home directory and move all of your application libraries to that directory, instead of putting them in the j2ee/home/lib directory.
  
  If you want to restore the prior behavior, i.e. loading application libraries from j2ee/home/lib directory, you can add the following directive in the j2ee/home/config/application.xml :
  
  <library path="../../home/lib" />

4. Major Bugs Fixed

• List of important JSP and Servlet bugs fixed in OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview
  
  
• List of important EJB bugs fixed in OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview
  
  
• List of important security bugs fixed in OC4J 9.0.4 Developer Preview
  
  
• List of important bugs fixed for configuration
  

5. Known Issues

5.1 Known Issues with Documentation

Demonstrations mentioned in documentation not yet available

Some of the demonstrations that are described in the documentation as being on OTN are not yet available. OTN will respond with a page not found error when the specified URL is entered. The demonstrations will be posted and made available at the specified URL for the production release of OC4J.

5.2 Known Issues with Web Containers

Using JSP 1.1 TLDs

You will encounter the following error when using JSP 1.1 TLDs that do not include a DOCTYPE.

Error: Unable to load taghandler class: /WEB-INF/abc-tags.tld

The possible workarounds for this are:

1. Add DOCTYPE to your JSP 1.1 compliant TLD.
   
   <!DOCTYPE taglib PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD JSP Tag Library @ 1.1//EN" "http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-jsptaglibrary_1_1.dtd">
   
   - or -
   
   
2. Turn off TLD caching by adding the following attribute to the orion-web-app element in the the j2ee/home/config/global-web-application.xml file
   
   <orion-web-app ... jsp-cache-tlds="false">
   

5.2 Known Issues with EJB Container

List of Known Bugs

Custom User Managers Deployed within EJB-JAR Files can not be found

OC4J is not able to load customer user managers when they are packaged within an EJB-JAR file.

The workaround is to add an explicit <library> element to the orion-application.xml file for the application which points at the EJB-JAR file containing the custom user manager classes. This will allow the custom user manager to be resolved and instantiated.

<orion-application ....>
  ...

  <librarypath="d:\oc4j904\j2ee\home\applications\XmlnewsEar\XmlnewsEjb.jar"/>

  ...

</orion-application>