The quick introduction to the Integration Cloud Service (Oracle PaaS– ICS) by Lucas Jellema

Integration is the term we employ for ‘what ties systems together into end-to-end interaction flows’. Integration describes what we have to do to make applications in one domain talk to those in another, or systems in one enterprise talk to those in another. And to systems running in one cloud interact with those running in another cloud or those running on premises. Integration is ideally approached based on standard based service interfaces and encapsulated implementations. With generic integration facilities handling most of the protocol, format, and technology specific details, and translating interactions as much as possible to standard SOAP and REST exchanges. And with that generic platform handling monitoring, security, system errors and state when asynchronous exchanges are required.

The Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS from now on) provides the cloud based integration platform that can run and manage these integration flows. ICS exposes a browser based user interface through which the integration is first designed, then activated and managed. ICS provides adapters to easily interact with a number of popular SaaS applications (Salesforce, Oracle HCM Cloud, Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle SalesCloud, Service Cloud | Right Now, Eloqua, CPQ, Gmail & Google Task, Evernote, …) and Platform Services and technologies (Oracle Database, Oracle Messaging Cloud Service, FTP, SOAP and REST services) as well as a collection of Social Networks (Twitter, Linked In, Facebook). With ICS it is straightforward to connect to any of these as a target and expose an tailor made, easy to use interface to ICS consumers. Some of these can also be a source for interactions: events in SaaS applications  – such as creation or update of a business object – can trigger ICS to perform an integration flow – pushing data derived from the event to some target.

In this article I will introduce some of the core terminology for ICS and demonstrate my first steps. I will create a SOAP service that exposes a simple operation to convert distances in meters to their equivalent in yards. This service is the based on an existing conversion service offered by a third party. ICS is used to virtualize this service and map to and from between the business friendly interface that I have devised and the pre-existing service interface.

Overview

You will see how I have to first create two connections. Connection is the ICS term for an external link – either outbound from ICS to target systems  (comparable to business services in Service Bus or a Reference in SCA composites) or inbound into ICS (from external consumers), similar to Proxy Service in Service Bus and Service in SCA composites. One connection is outbound, to the third party service that does distance conversions. The other connection is inbound – it describes the SOAP interface that I want to expose from ICS to my consumers. Read the complete article here.

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