Book Review: Getting Started with Oracle SOA B2B Integration by Jon Petter Av Hjulstad

February 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Before last OOW my only experience with Oracle B2B was Ronald van Luttikhuizen’s presentation at OUGN this year. After some sessions at OOW, and reading this book on the plane back I now know more about it. Unfortunately I do not have any practical project experience yet.

I like this book – it gives a good summary of what B2B is and what the Oracle B2B product can do. Not all of you will come across B2B, but when you need it – then you really need it. B2B functionality is not something you would like to code yourself from scratch. I like that it is a "Hands-On Tutorial", so you can try it out using the virtual image of the Oracle SOA Suite patch release PS5 (11.1.1.6).

Here are the book details:

Publisher: PACKT
Title: Getting Started with Oracle SOA B2B Integration: A Hands-On Tutorial
Link to site: here
Language : English
Paperback : 332 pages
Release Date : July 2013
ISBN : 1849688869, ISBN 13 : 9781849688864
Author(s) : Krishnaprem Bhatia, Alan Perlovsky, Scott Haaland

Read the complete article here. Looking for additional SOA books or if you have published a book, please feel free to add it to our publications wiki!

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Podcast Show Notes: Old Habits Die Hard in the New SOA World By OTN ArchBeat

February 10, 2014 Leave a comment

Like the previous series, the latest OTN ArchBeat Podcast program was also recorded in a hotel room just around the corner from Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco just a few weeks ago. All experts, members of the OTN architect community agreed to participate in an informal roundtable discussion of what’s happening in Service Oriented Architecture. As you’ll hear, the conversation ranged from the maturity of Service Oriented Architecture technology and tools, to the the lingering and typically self-imposed problems that can prevent organizations from realizing the full potential of SOA, to what SOA means in the era of *aaS, mobile computing, and big data. You can listen the podcast here.

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Configure Auto-Recovery in Oracle SOA Suite by Danilo Schmiedel

February 9, 2014 Leave a comment

Oracle SOA Suite 11g has some great features to recover faulted instances automatically. When a BPEL process flow errors out, it is retried with all its invocations. This is undesirable in some cases. For example if re-calling a composite results in duplicated data, data have been changed before the recovery is planned to be executed or you do not want to create too many composite instances in order to save the space in your SOAINFRA-schema. See below the different places where automatic recoveries are configured / disabled.
1) Change RecurringScheduleConfig (see also the screenshot below)

  • Right-click soa-infra (SOA_cluster_name)
  • Choose SOA Administration > BPEL Properties
  • Click “More BPEL Configuration Properties”
  • Click “Recovery Config”
  • Change values for RecurringScheduleConfig
    • maxMessageRaiseSize = 0
    • startWindowTime = 00:00
    • stopWindowTime = 00:00

Read the complete article here.

 

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Event-Driven SOA part of Industrial SOA series

February 7, 2014 Leave a comment

imgAbstract: If we consider real companies and their business transactions, we see that the real world is not really service-driven at all, but much more event-driven. A new customer is created in the system, a new car reservation is made, a vehicle is returned or needs to be taken to the shop. All of these "functions" can be supported by services, but often also by precisely defined process chains.

However, complex business processes can rarely be automated "in one piece," as the real exceptions and dependencies of diverse business processes are highly dynamic. That brings us to the point where the concept of "event" becomes useful in our architectures. In this article, we therefore want to shine light on event-driven architectures and tie them into our current argumentation chains in SOA.

Dealing with Business Events
Most companies now collect business-relevant information by aggregating available data. As a rule, this is in the domain of data warehouses which condense information a follow-up to preceding events. Here the focus is directly on the data and not on the process information, which is actually much more interesting. We miss out on the ability to process business information in near-realtime, which would allow the company management to react much more quickly to events as they occur. The discipline of business intelligence is developing rapidly in order to take this issue into account. In the following, we want to consider the underlying mechanisms, or the events which allow faster reactions to important changes. Read the complete article here.

Share your comments and feedback on the Industrial SOA series by using the hashtag #industrialSOA. Read the full article at the Service Technology Magazine or Oracle Technology Network. Missed an article of the Industrial SOA series visit the overview at OTN.

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Norway Post Improves Customer Service and Saves Major Annual Costs by Boosting Call-Center Productivity thanks to Accenture and Capgemini

February 6, 2014 Leave a comment

Norway Post AS, founded in 1647, is the Norwegian postal service. The company, owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications, manages mail distribution throughout the country and has businesses in other parts of the Nordic region. In 2002, Norway Post changed its corporate structure to become a joint-stock company in preparation for Norwegian postal market deregulation.

Challenges

  • Streamline operations and reduce costs, including IT expenses for the company’s five customer-service call centers in response to shrinking revenues, as the volume of mail has fallen 40% since 1999
  • Enable customer-service representatives to more efficiently and accurately help customers, including answering questions, tracking missing or delayed mail, and making compensation payments
  • Increase customer and employee satisfaction
  • Expand insight into customer behavior and preferences and use the information to improve service and product offerings
  • Create a solution that is easy to roll out to new organizations as Norway Post acquires additional companies.

Oracle solution

  • Implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Suite to integrate the company’s cloud-based, Salesforce.com, customer-relationship management (CRM) system with its customer-service call centers’ on-premise, back-end systems – such as those used to manage customer lists, addresses, financial and procurement systems, and a mail-tracking solution – so employees can access them from a single, user interface and deliver faster and more thorough assistance
  • Cut time needed to access customer and tracking information from back-office systems – improving customer and employee satisfaction
  • Saved major costs annually, thanks to improved call-center productivity
  • Achieved additional significant savings in time and effort and improved data quality by ensuring that information changes made in the integrated, back-end system are automatically synchronized in all other integrated systems, thanks to Oracle SOA Suite
  • Expanded customer insight through more efficient customer-service call centers, enabled by cloud integration – which improves services and increases customer satisfaction and the company’s profitability
  • Created a solution that makes it easy for companies that Norway Post acquires to implement – accelerating time to value
  • Eliminated previous skepticism toward integration between cloud computing and on-premise back-end systems to facilitate more benefits from this type of solution by using it in other parts of the organization

The partner reference program – submit your cloud and mobile SOA & Business Process Management reference now!

  • Enables partners to be recognized by both Oracle and our customers
  • Provides an opportunity for partners to showcase successes with their customers on Oracle solutions
  • Helps raise awareness of our partners’ capabilities, elevating them above their competition

Time to submit a SOA and Business Process Management  reference request today.

Specially we are interested in new cloud and mobile integration references! Please contact Thrasos for further details.

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Additional new content SOA & BPM Partner Community

February 4, 2014 Leave a comment

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Manual Recovery Mechanisms in SOA Suite and AIA by Shreenidhi Raghuram

January 28, 2014 Leave a comment

Introduction

Integration flows can fail at run-time with a variety of errors. The cause of these failures could be either Business errors or System errors.

When Synchronous Integration Flows fail, they are restarted from the beginning. On the other hand, Asynchronous Integration flows when they error can potentially be resubmitted/recovered from designated/pre-configured milestones within the flow. These milestones could be persistence points like queues topics or database tables, where the state of the flow was last persisted. Recovery is a mechanism whereby a faulted Asynchronous Flow can be rerun from such a persistence milestone.

1The SOA Suite 11g and AIA products provides various Automated and Manual recovery mechanisms to recover from asynchronous fault scenarios. They differ based on the SOA component that encounters the error. For instance, recovering from a BPEL fault may be quite different than recovering from a Resequencer fault. In this blog, we look at the various Manual Recovery mechanisms and options available to an end user. Manual recovery mechanisms require an Admin user to take appropriate action on the faulted instance from the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control [EM FMWC Console].

The intention of this blog is to provide a quick reference for Manual Recovery of Faults within the SOA and AIA contexts. It aims to present some of the valuable information regarding Manual recovery in one place. These are currently available across many sources such as SOA Developers Guide, SOA Admin Guide, AIAFP Developers Guide and AIAFP Infrastructure and Utilities Guide.

Next we look at the various Manual recovery mechanisms available in SOA Suite 11g and AIA, starting with the BPEL Message Recovery.

BPEL Message Recovery

To understand the BPEL Message Recovery, let us briefly look into how BPEL Service engine performs asynchronous processing. Asynchronous BPEL processes use an intermediate Delivery Store in the SOA Infrastructure Database to store the incoming request. The message is then picked up and further BPEL processing happens in an Invoke Thread.

The Invoke Thread is one among the free threads from the ‘Invoke Thread Pool’ configured for BPEL Service Engine. The processing of the message from the delivery Store onwards until the next dehydration in the BPEL process or the next commit point in the flow constitutes a transaction. Figure below shows at a high level the Asynchronous request handling by BPEL Invoke Thread. Read the complete article here.

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BPEL, retrieving the validate activity fault message by Eric Elzinga

January 27, 2014 Leave a comment

The ‘Validate’ activity in Oracle BPEL gives us the functionality to validate variables again schema definitions.

When using it in your bpel process you will get a nice informative message in the ‘Flow trace’.

validate1

When you are using some generic error hospital functionality you also want this message to be available in there.

First try would be, add a Scope around the activity and catch the ‘invalidVariables’ System Fault.

When using a getFaultString on the fault variable or after assigning it to your own fault variable you will see the fault stack will be empty.

validate2

Read the complete article here.

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Deliver on the promise of SOA with Governance

January 26, 2014 Leave a comment

SOA Governance is about improving visibility control of your service-oriented architecture. With Oracle SOA Governance organizations can reduce risk, lower TCO, and streamline their operations. Only Oracle has the most complete solution for delivering a broad range of governance capabilities including: SOA Management, API Management and SOA Security, In this resource kit you will learn how to:

  • Prove quick return on your SOA investment through automated governance
  • Reduce total cost of ownership by using a unified governance framework that delivers a complete solution
  • Mitigate risk and improve efficiency and reuse
  • Align business and IT and deliver organizational agility

Register now to view case studies, white papers, and other valuable resources for SOA Governance.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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SOA Suite 11g: Consuming web service which enforce security policies on their WSDL files by esentri

January 25, 2014 Leave a comment

Concrete WSDL VersionThe basic principle behind a Service Oriented Architecture is to orchestrate functional building blocks, primarily web services, in order to achieve a solution which fulfills the given requirements. In order to create a robust solution using Oracle SOA Suite several best practices emerged, one being decoupling web services in order to overcome dependencies during server/composite startup. A general approach for achieving this best practice is to use abstract and concrete WSDLs in combination.

An example for a working reference definition within the composite could look like follows:

<reference name="FooBarService" ui:wsdlLocation="oramds:/apps/com/foo/v1/bar.wsdl">

  <interface.wsdl interface="http://foo.com/BarService#wsdl.interface(BarService)"/&gt;

  <binding.ws port="http://foo.com/BarService#wsdl.endpoint(BarService/FooBarEndpoint)&quot;

    soapVersion="1.1"

    location="http://foo.com:7001/soa-infra/services/foo/bar/FooBarEndpoint?WSDL"&gt;

  </binding.ws>

</reference>

On a recent project we ran into some problems while implementing this best practice as some web services we had to consume not only protected their operations but also their WSDLs using basic authentication web security. Although we were able to access the operations by providing the security credentials within WebLogic Server using the Credential Store Framework (CSF), the solution never managed to successfully access the secured WSDL files.

After trying several approaches to overcome this problem, we implemented a workaround by storing an abstract WSDL within the shared MDS project as well as a concrete WSDL within the composite project in order to access the affected web services. We stored the concrete WSDLs within a wsdl folder in the project. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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