Oracle Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook – Initial thoughts

Hi All,

Recently I managed to get my hands on the recently launched Oracle Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook written by some of the industries most talented people in the FMW space, namely Guido Schmutz, Edwin Biemond, Jan van Zoggel , Mischa Kölliker and Eric Elzinga

The Book contains several recipes for real life problems we face when integrating using the Oracle Service Bus and some other components of the SOA Suite.

I haven’t still finished reading the book which will take me a few more days simply because the title contains over 80 recipes and I do plan to go through every single one of these even if that means I get my hands dirty.

It does make life easier as they have provided set up scripts to set up your environment and solutions for each of these recipes and they deserve credit for that. What that also means that you don’t need to complete all the problems before you get to a specific recipe.

I would be sharing more on my thoughts after going through some of these recipes but my initial impressions of the book are it’s quite promising and would soon be a must have for all OSB and Fusion Middleware developers.

If you can’t wait for my review then the book is available on Amazon and You can buy this book from Amazon using the link below.

Also on PackT @ http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-service-bus-11g-development-cookbook/book

You can view our sample chapters and prefaces of this title on PacktLib or download sample chapters in PDF format

Watch out this space for more on the OSB cook book and some recipes from the book.

Oracle Announces Process Accelerators for Oracle BPM

Hi All,

 

I came across this piece of information about Process Accelerators for Oracle BPM in their press release available @ http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/511982

In summary, process accelerators are ready to use processes, process frameworks or building blocks, and extensible process templates that will accelerate time to value for customers. Based on inputs from our strategic customers and partners we are focusing on two types of accelerators in the beginning:

1. Simple every day process that most organizations need but that IT rarely has resources for. Our customers tell us that these processes end up happening over emails or adhoc solutions and if Oracle provided process accelerators it will be extremely useful. Examples of these type of processes include travel approval, document routing and approval.
2. Processes that may vary from customer to customer but have common repeatable pattern. These may be horizontal processes such as onboarding including employee onboarding, client onboarding, partner onboarding. Or these may be industry specific processes such as Incident Reporting in public sector.

Reference: http://blogs.oracle.com/bpm/entry/oracle_process_accelerators

 

 

Integrating OBPM with Oracle Service Bus

Over the past few years I have seen many of our customers use a combination of Oracle BPM/Aqualogic BPM and Oracle Service Bus/Aqualogic Service Bus.  These two products are very complimentary within a company’s SOA environment.  OSB can provide the service aggregation, transformation, and security while OBPM can provide the orchestration of the services that OSB exposes.  This blog post will describe the different use cases for integrating OBPM and OSB and in follow up posts each integration will be covered in more detail.

There are several ways in which OSB and OBPM can be combined.  The basic architecture that represents most of these ways is displayed below.  This design consists of an application layer, the service bus layer, the process layer, and a web services layer.

The approaches in which OSB and OBPM can be integrated can be categorized into two categories, OBPM Consuming OSB Services and OSB Exposing OBPM Services.

OBPM Consuming OSB Services

Consuming OSB services via Oracle BPM is the most commonly used integration.  This integration approach facilitates the service orchestration use case where you have a set of web services exposed through OSB.  These services usually provide an interface to a backend datasource or legacy system.  Just like any other web service, OBPM can consume the proxy services that are exposed from OSB by providing the WSDL file to OBPM and having a Web Service object generated in your component catalog.  There is also a more direct integration between OBPM Studio and OSB where you can view the list of available services directly from within OBPM Studio and select the service to add to your catalog.  Both of these ways of consuming services within OBPM will be covered in more detail in a follow up post.

OSB Exposing OBPM Services

There are 3 ways in which OBPM can expose services to OSB:

• Process Web Services
• PAPI-WS
• JMS Queue

Process Web Services – The ability to expose a process as a web service is a built in capability of OBPM.  With this approach, you can expose either Process Instance Creation or Process Notification easily from within Studio.

PAPI-WS – This is a web service version of the Process API (PAPI).  This API is much lower level then the Process Web Services but also provides much more functionality such as searching for process instances and executing activities.

JMS Queue – This requires creating JMS based XML Business Services in OSB to post the messages to the JMS Queue.  OBPM can then use a Global Automatic activity to listen to the same queue and create process instances based on the incoming messages.  It is also possible to have a response queue as well which allows you to simulate a synchronous process.  In this case, the web service call does not return to the client until OSB receives a response message on the response queue.  Your BPM process would send this response message at the end of the process.  However, the synchronous use case is only practical in completely automated processes.

As you can see, there are a number of different ways you can combine Oracle BPM and Oracle Service Bus to provide flexibility within an SOA environment.  The combination of OBPM and OSB has been utilized by a number of our clients with great success due to the flexibility provided by both systems.

In the upcoming weeks I will follow up this post with additional details on each of these integrations and will cover consuming OSB services in OBPM, exposing process web services, exposing PAPI-WS, and exposing processes as synchronous web services using JSM.

_{Referenced from Avion Consulting Blog}