Process Accelerators for BPM Suite

August 20, 2014 Leave a comment

This page contains documentation and installation downloads for the latest Oracle Process

Accelerators version (11.1.1.7.1)

Product / File Description

File Size

Download

Documentation

28 MB

OraclePADocumentation111171.zip

Installation

665 MB

OraclePA111171.zip

Oracle Process Accelerators version (11.1.1.7.1) run on Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11.1.1.7. Please refer to the Installation Guide for the complete set of prerequisites

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OSB unit testing, part 1 by Qualogy

August 19, 2014 Leave a comment

First you need to implement the simple bpel process like this :
Testcase-execIn my current project, I inherited a lot of OSB components that have been developed by (former) team members, but they all lack unit tests. This is a situation I really dislike, since this makes it much harder to refactor or bug-fix the existing code base. So, for all newly created components (and components I have to bug-fix) I strive to add unit tests. Of course, the unit tests will be created using my favourite testing tool: soapUI ! Unit of test The unit test should be created for the service composition, which in OSB terms should be the proxy service combination with its business service. Now, since you do not want to rely on any other services, you should provide mock services for all services invoked from your Component-Under-Test. In a previous article, I wrote about mocking your services in soapUI. While this approach would also be valid here, creating a mock service (and certainly deploying it on a separate WebServer) does violate one of the core principles of unit testing: to make your unit tests as self-contained as possible, i.e. not depending on any external components. In this article, I will show you how to achieve this by simply providing a mock response inside your unit test. Scenario The scenario I implement for testing is a simple currency converter; the external request consists of a from and a to currency, and an amount (in currency from). The service will perform an exchange rate lookup using the WebServiceX CurrencyConverter and return a response to the caller consisting of both the source and target currencies and amounts. For the purpose of unit testing, I will implement a mock response for the exchange rate lookup. Read the complete article here.

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Configuring the SOA Human Task Hostname by Antonis Antoniou

August 17, 2014 1 Comment

When a human task is opened in BPM Workspace, it will try by default to connect to either localhost or the server’s alias. So if you try to access the BPM Workspace remotely (from a computer other than where Oracle SOA is running) you will get an http error (unable to connect).

You can fix this issue at run-time using the Enterprise Manager (EM). Login to EM and from the farm navigator select your composite by expanding the "SOA", "soa-infra" and your partition node. Read the complete article here.

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Integrating with Fusion Applications using SOAP web services and REST APIs (Part 1 of 2) by Arvind Srinivasamoorthy

August 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Fusion Applications provides several types of interfaces to facilitate integration with other applications within the enterprise and on the cloud.As one of the key integration interfaces, Fusion Applications (FA) supports SOAP services based integration, both inbound and outbound. At this point FA doesn’t provide REST API’s but it is planned for a future release. It is however possible to invoke external REST APIs from FA which we will discuss. Oracle continues to invest in improving both SOAP and REST based connectivity. The content in this blog is based on features that were available at the time of writing it.

In this two part blog, I will cover the following topics briefly.

    1. Invoking FA SOAP web services from external applications
        1. Identifying the FA SOAP web service to be invoked
        2. Sample invocation from an external application
        3. Techniques to invoke FA services from an ADF application
    2. Invoking external SOAP Web Services from FA (covered in Part 2)
    3. Invoking external REST APIs from FA (covered in Part 2)

    I’ll touch upon some basics, so that you can quickly build a few SOAP/REST interactions with FA. If you do not already have access to an FA instance (on-premise or SaaS), you can request for a free 30 day trial of the Oracle Sales Cloud using http://cloud.oracle.com

    1. Invoking FA SOAP web services from external applications

    There are two main types of services that FA exposes
    -  ADF Services – These services allow you to perform CRUD operations on Fusion business objects. For example, Sales Party Service, Opportunity Service etc. Using these services you can typically perform operations such as get, find, create, delete, update etc on FA objects.These services are typically useful for UI driven integrations such as looking up FA information from external application UIs, using third party Interfaces to create/update data in FA. They are also used in non-UI driven integration uses cases such as initial upload of business or setup data, synchronizing data with an external systems, etc.
    – Composite Services – These services involve more logic than CRUD and often involving human workflows, rules etc. These services perform a business function such as Get Orchestration Order Service and are used when building larger process based integrations with external systems.These services are usually asynchronous in nature and are not typically used for UI integration patterns.

    1a. Identifying the FA SOAP web service to be invoked

    All FA web service metadata is available through an OER instance (Oracle Enterprise Repository) which is publicly available via http://fusionappsoer.oracle.com. This is the starting point for you to discover the services that you are going to work with. You do not need to own a FA account to browse the services using the above UI

    You can use the search area on the left to narrow down your search to what you are looking for. For example, you can choose the type as by ADF Services or Composite, you can narrow your search to a specific FA version, Product Family etc. Read the complete article here.

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OAG/OES Integration for Web API Security: skin and guts by Andre Correa

August 15, 2014 Leave a comment

Introduction

When it comes to defining a strategy for web API security, OAG (Oracle API Gateway) and OES (Oracle Entitlements Server) together present a very interesting choice and are a very powerful combination indeed.

In this post we’re going to take a look at what each component brings in (the skin) and then get our hands on actually describing the integration in detail (the guts).

OAG is designed to inspect and act on various types of messages that are delivered to it or just pass through it. It’s usually positioned to be deployed on the DMZ (the De-Militarized Zone) within corporate networks. As such, it can block malicious traffic, authenticate users with a variety of protocols, integrate with anti-virus products, perform message throttling, thus delivering only the good stuff to your intranet servers and also off-loading them, decisively contributing to achieve some IT operational SLAs. More than that, OAG can switch protocols and transform messages. For instance, an organization may have SOAP-based web services and want to expose them as REST without any re-writing. Or implement SAML federation without touching origin systems. Or talk Kerberos or OAuth with clients and speak SAML with back-end servers. Or use it as an FTP server so that incoming files are immediately sent to a processing pipeline. The possibilities are numerous. Having mentioned these few features and examples, it’s not unreasonable to think deploying OAG inside intranets. And that’s not unusual, actually. It is a nice bridge with obvious benefits.

OES is designed to provide fine-grained authorization with externalized policies to client applications. It takes the coding of access decisions away from developers. Besides the obvious security pro, it shortens the change cycle, when a new security policy needs to be deployed. You simply avoid going through all the phases required for re-deploying your application just because of that change. It’s true the new policy needs testing, but that’s nowhere near when compared to what it takes to re-deploy a new application version. The time to market is drastically reduced. Now to the fine-grained part. OES can take a bunch of aspects in consideration when authorizing: the user identity, user roles, user attributes, context information about the request being made (like originating IP address), factors external to the request (like time of day, day of week, etc) and, of course, request data. Those combined makes it a very powerful authorization engine. It’s not coincidence that OES is the component behind OAM’s (Oracle Access Manager) authorization engine.

While OAG itself brings in authorization capabilities, in this field OES offers a much richer model. And if the organization already employs OES elsewhere, integrating it with OAG makes a lot of sense, because we end up with a single and consistent approach for authorization across applications.

Main Article

The Integration

OES basic architecture comprises a server and different client modules, called SMs (Security Modules). The server connects to a repository where policies are physically kept. The SMs are attached to client applications and connect either to OES server or to the repository directly, depending on their configured mode (I will touch up on this later). There are SMs available for Java, RMI, web services, Weblogic server, Websphere, JBoss, MS Sharepoint. When integrating with OAG, a Java SM is used. Despite its core being a C process, OAG forks up a JVM for some of its functions.
The integration hook between OAG and OES is the “OES 11g Authorization” filter, as seen below: Read the complete article here.

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Five Mobile Strategy Best Practices by Sanjay Singh and Susnigdha Balagari

August 14, 2014 Leave a comment

To reap the benefits of mobility in the enterprise, CIOs will need to deliver reliable services in an environment of constant complexity and change.

Organizational leaders are increasingly realizing that a robust mobile strategy will enable them to unlock their company’s full business potential. According to the 2013 Accenture Mobility CIO Survey, CIOs said mobility would provide substantial sources of new revenue and significantly improve customer interactions. 36 percent of CIOs are engaging customers via mobile devices, and 34 percent are driving revenue through transactions on mobile devices.

CIOs also see mobility as a key measure to drive and improve their organization’s business processes. Remote access to content and applications allows workers to take full advantage of their on-road time. According to the Accenture survey, 83 percent of CIOs said mobility would significantly affect their overall business productivity. 43 percent said mobility would improve field/customer service delivery with instant data, and 33 percent said mobility would accelerate the sales cycle with improved access to backend systems.

All of these numbers demonstrate that mobility is top of mind for CIOs. In fact, 30 percent of CIOs plan to invest more than a third of their discretionary IT budget in mobility. However, 42 percent of CIOs do not have a formal mobile strategy.

Mobile Enterprise IT Best Practices

In order to fully reap the potential benefits of mobility in the enterprise, CIOs will need a strategy that gives them the capabilities to deliver reliable services in an environment of constant complexity and change. Here are five core components CIOs need to keep in mind for a successful enterprise mobility strategy.

30 percent of CIOs plan to invest more than a third of their discretionary IT budget in mobility. However, 42 percent of CIOs do not have a formal mobile strategy.

    1. An integrated development environment. Such an environment enables native, web access, and hybrid apps to be delivered cross-platform without the need to re-code for each device. The tools used should be based on familiar languages – HTML5 or JavaScript. An integrated environment will enable companies to develop cross platform, multi-channel and multi-device applications; decide on mobile development frameworks and UI technology; and adapt existing websites and portals for mobile.
    2. Integrated to the back office. Enterprise apps delivered on mobile devices need to be integrated easily to back-office applications. This means enterprises need to have middleware that can enable business process management (BPM) processes that are activated from the device. Such a capability will enable the integration of data and services across the enterprise and mobile devices. Read the complete article here.

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AMIS Oracle Enterprise Mobility conference May 2014 – by Lucas Jellema

August 13, 2014 Leave a comment

imageThis article will provide a live account of the three day Enterprise Mobility conference, hosted by AMIS in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. Oracle ADF Product Managers Frank Nimphius and Chris Muir are the keynote speakers. They are joined by Willem de Pater, Steven Davelaar and Lancy Silveira from Oracle and Luc Bors, Frank Houweling, Paul Swiggers, Aino Andriessen and Lucas Jellema from AMIS. The presentations and demonstration during this conference cover the next step for most enterprises (with ADF or without): introducing enterprise mobility. Many of the themes currently or shortly relevant to any organization will take center stage: multi device UI, mobility, security, agile & automated software engineering, performance & scalability, user experience, web & mobile oriented architecture and cloud. It will discuss and demonstrate Oracle’s vision and the upcoming generation of products.

The audience is composed of about 40 experienced ADF application architects and developers that not just sit back and relax, but share their experiences and ask the tough questions. How well does ADF fit in the mobile world? What is the role of ADF in a future that consists of HTML 5 and mobile? What is the long term evolution of ADF – and the use Oracle itself makes of the framework? Read the complete article here.

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Using Oracle’s Edition-Based Redefinition to support multiple SOA Suite revisions with the database adapter by Betty van Dongen

August 12, 2014 Leave a comment

SOA_EBRWhen using the Oracle SOA Suite for web service development, chances are that you are also using an Oracle database and that you are at some point in need of a database adapter in one of your SOA composites. If that happens to be the case, you might also encounter the requirement to support multiple composite revisions and keep them as stabile as possible.

This requirement leads to development of multiple SOA composite revisions, but there is only one database. What if you need more database functionality in your new revision? And let’s say, for example, the package specification you are using in the database adapter needs to change. Is that going to be a problem or can you also have multiple database versions? Normally if the package specification changes the older composite revision will fail and you do have a problem in supporting multiple composite revisions. If you are working with an Oracle Database 11g Release 2 or higher one of its killer features, Edition-Based Redefinition, could provide a solution!

This feature was introduced to the database for hot deployment. It is meant to reduce or eliminate application upgrade down-time, as the Oracle documentation explains it (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/appdev.112/e10471/adfns_editions.htm#ADFNS0201).

With EBR it is possible to create multiple releases of your software in the database. When you create a new edition you can install the same software a second time (or more) in the same database without changing the older version of that same software. For hot deployment this means that a new release can be installed in the database next to the current situation and as soon as the new release is installed correctly the old release can be removed from the database. For more details on EBR I’d like to refer to the Oracle documentation. Read the complete article here.

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MockServer: Easy mocking of HTTP(S) services (e.g. SOAP or JSON) by Maarten Smeets

August 11, 2014 1 Comment

Testing services as an atomic entity can be difficult. Especially if these services are part of a call chain or call other services. Often in such cases mock services are developed to reduce test dependencies and exclude services which are not interesting to the specific test case. For example, I’m testing service A. Service A calls service B. I’m not interested in service B (or service B is maintained by another department on which I don’t want to depend). I would mock service B when testing service A in this case. There are several methods to create mock services. These methods however are mostly not easily usable by testers since they require developing/coding mock services. Testers would benefit from being able to create their own mock services in order to create different tests for a specific service.

In this blog post I provide a brief introduction and describe some features of MockServer. An open source product which can be used to mock services. For a more detailed article (with more examples) you can look at the following written by my colleague Robert van Mölken:  Read the complete article here.

 

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Message Correlation using JMS by Martien van den Akker

August 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Last year I created a few OSB services with the asynchronous request response message exchange pattern. OSB does not support this out of the box, since OSB is in fact synchronous in nature. Although OSB supports the WS – Addressing namespaces, you need to set the WS-Addressing elements programmatically.

Since OSB is synchronous the request and response flows in the Asynchronous Request/Response pattern are completely seperated implemented from eachother. That means that in the response flow you don’t know what request message was responsible for the current response. Even worse: you don’t know what client did the request and how to respond to that client in a way you can correlate to the initating instance. Using SOA/BPM Suite as a client, you want to correlate to the requesting process instance.

There are of course several ways to solve this. I choose to use a Universal Distributed Queue for several reasons, where knowledge of JMS and performance were a few. I only need to temporarly store a message against a key. Coherence was not on my CV yet. And a database table requires a database(connection) with the query-overhead, etc.

Unfortunately you can’t use the OSB transports or SOASuite JMS adapters to get/browse for a message using a correlation-id in a synchronous way. When you create a proxy service on a jms transport or configure a JMS Adapter for read it will be a polling construction. But it’s quite easy to do it in Java, so I created a java-method to get a message based on a CorrelationId.

One thing I did not know back then was that if you put a message on the queue from one OSB Server Node (having a JMS Server) it can’t be read from the other node, as such. Messages are stored in the local JMS Server member of the Queue.

I found that you can quite easily reach the local member of a Universal Distributed Queue on a certain JMSServer on Weblogic by prefixing the JNDI name of the queue with the JMSServer separated with the at-sign (‘@’): Read the complete article here.

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