Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the architectural framework needed to integrate diverse systems together and create new composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 provides the tools needed to turn an SOA architecture into a working solution. SOA Suite provides the developer with several high level components such as:
- Oracle Service Bus (OSB), an enterprise strength service bus for full support of service bus patterns including validation, enrichment, transformation, and routing (the VETRO pattern)
- Service Component Architecture (SCA) that hosts a number of components
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that provides real-time reporting on SOA Suite activities
SCA components include:
- Mediator for light weight transformation and routing
- Rules for abstraction of business rules
- BPEL for orchestrating long running or complex integrations
- Human workflow (HWF) for allowing human interaction with long running processes
- Spring for integrating Java Spring components
This book looks at many common problems that are encountered when integrating systems and provides solutions to them in the form of more than 67 cookbook recipes. The solutions explain the problem to be solved alongside clear step by step instructions to implement a solution using SOA Suite components. Each recipe also includes a discussion of how it works and what additional problems may be tackled by the solution presented.
Chapter 1, Building an SOA Suite Cluster, explains how to prepare the environment to follow Oracle's Enterprise Deployment Guide. The Enterprise Deployment Guide is Oracle's blueprint for building a highly available SOA Suite cluster. The chapter includes key questions to ask the network storage team, the networking team, and the Database Administrators before the actual SOA Suite installation and deployment begins.
Chapter 2, Using the Metadata Service to Share XML Artifacts, explains how we can use MDS to share XML artifacts, such as XML schemas, WSDL's fault policies, XSLT Transformations, EDLs for event EDN event definitions and Schematrons between multiple composites.
Chapter 3, Working with Transactions, looks at the different ways to use transactions within SOA Suite. This includes enrolling a BPEL process in an existing transaction, forcibly committing or aborting a transaction within BPEL and catching faults that have caused the transaction to be rolled back. It also covers how to apply reversing transactions when a system does not support transaction functionality in its public interface.
Chapter 4, Mapping Data, covers how to copy and transform data using the SCA container. It includes how to deal with missing XML elements and how to control the mapping of Java objects to XML including dealing with abstract Java classes. It also covers how to process arrays of data in both BPEL and XML stylesheet transforms (XSLT).
Chapter 5, Composite Messaging Patterns, explores some of the more complex but relatively common message interaction patterns used in a typical SOA deployment. It includes recipes for implementing patterns around message aggregation, singletons, and the dynamic scheduling of BPEL processes and services.
Chapter 6, OSB Messaging Patterns, explores some common message processing design patterns for delegation of execution to downstream services and provides recipes for implementing them using Oracle Service Bus. It includes recipes for dynamic binding to services, splitting out messages, as well as dynamic Split-Joins.
Chapter 7, Integrating OSB with JSON, covers how we can use the Service Bus to integrate with RESTful web services that exchange data using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) instead of XML. It also looks at how to expose OSB Services as RESTful JSON web services.
Chapter 8, Compressed File Adapter Patterns, explains how to use the file/FTP adapter to compress/uncompress the contents of exchanged files. This is particularly common in Business-to-Business scenarios, where network bandwidth is more of a constraint.
Chapter 9, Integrating Java with SOA Suite, explains different ways to integrate Java code into SOA Suite. This is demonstrated through creating a custom XPath function for use in SCA and OSB, as well as re-using EJBs and Spring Beans in SOA Suite. It also shows how to access the SOA runtime environment from within a BPEL process.
Chapter 10, Securing Composites and Calling Secure Web Services, shows the developer how to restrict access to a composite by applying a security policy, as well as showing how to create a new security policy. It also explains how to make a call to a security protected service and how to manage security stores.
Chapter 11, Configuring the Identity Service, details how to configure the Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) to use various LDAP providers for authentication and authorization within the Oracle SOA Suite. It covers configuration for Active Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, Sun iPlanet, and Oracle Virtual Directory.
Chapter 12, Configuring OSB to use Foreign JMS Queues, covers how to configure the Service Bus to read/write messages from various JMS providers, including OC4J, JBoss, and across WebLogic domains.
Chapter 13, Monitoring and Management, includes recipes to monitor the completion status of SOA composites through the EM dashboard, measuring their message throughput in real time. It also covers setting up the SOA environment to use the SOA Suite provided Monitor Express reports to take advantage of pre-built BAM dashboards.