OSB: Disable Chunked Streaming Mode recommendation by Martien van den Akker

Intro

These weeks I got involved in a document generation performance issue. This ran for several months, maybe years even. But it stayed quite unclear what the actual issue was.
Often we got complaints that document generation from the front-end application (based on Siebel) was taking very long. End users often hit the button several times, but with no luck. Asking further, it did not mean that there appeared a document in the content management system (Oracle UCM/WCC). So, we concluded that it wasn’t so much a performance issue, but an exception along the process of document generation. Since we upgraded BI Publisher to 12c, it was figured that it might got something to do with that. But we did not find any problems with BI Publisher, itself. Also, there was an issue with Siebel it’s self, but that’s also out of the scope of this article.

The investigation

First, on OSB the retry interval of the particular Business Service was decreased from 60 seconds to 10. And the performance increased. Since the retry interval was shorter, OSB does a retry on shorter notice. But of course this did not solve the problem.
As Service developers we often are quite laconical about retries. We make up some settings. Quite default is an interval of 30 seconds and a retry count of 3. But, we should actually think about this and figure out what the possible failures could be and what a sensible retry setting would be. For instance: is it likely that the remote system is out of order? What are the SLA’s for hoisting it back up again? If the system startup is 10 minutes, then a retry count of 3 and interval of 30 seconds is not making sense. The retries are done long before the system’s up again. But of course, in our case sensible settings for system outage would cause delays being too long. We apparently needed to cater for network issues. Read the complete article here.

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SOA Suite 12c: keep running instances using ANT by Martien van den Akker

At my current customer I implemented a poor man’s devops solution for Release and Deploy. It was based on a framework created as bunch of Ant projects, that I created years ago. It was based on scripts from Edwin Biemond. See for instance here, here and here. I never wrote about my solution, because although I refactored them quite intensively, the basics were already described thoroughly by him.
What I did was that I modularized the lot, split the environment property files, added logging, added OSB 12c  support, based on the config jar tool, etc.
One thing I ran into this week was that at first deployment from our team to the test environment using my framework, the running instances for the BPM projects were aborted.
Now, if you take a look at the deploy.sarLocation target in Edwin’s article about deploying soa suite composites  you’ll find that he also supported the overwrite and forceDefault properties.
When re-deploying a composite from JDeveloper you’re probably familiar with the ‘keep running instances’ checkbox. I was looking for the ANT alternative in the ${oracle.home}/bin/ant-sca-deploy.xml scripting. First I looked in the 12c docs (see 47.9.4 How to Use ant to Deploy a SOA Composite Application), but it is not documented there.
But when I opened the particular ant-sca-deploy.xml script I read: Read the complete article here.

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Good SOA Pipeline Plumbing by Gregory Hughlett

Starting Up

The arrival of the Jenkins Pipeline feature coincided with the the addition of Maven in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c release.  Jenkins pipelines now easily leverage Maven phases and goals for Fusion Middleware application deployments, including SOA/BPM composite applications and Service Bus projects.  This is the first in a series of blogs that will present three deployment workflows (pipelines) implemented in Jenkins for Oracle SOA projects.  The workflows will utilize Git source control, Git Flow branching methodology and scripts.  It also assumes the use of a managed Maven repository where application and FMW Maven artifacts are centralized.  Although the blogs primarily address SOA, there will be discussions about Metadata Services (MDS) and Service Bus (OSB) deployments.     

Although the approach defined here in Jenkins is leverages open source tools organizations should weigh the approach outlined here to the benefits (e.g. support and upgrades) that a commercial product brings to the table, like MyST from Rubicon Red.  MyST provides both platform provisioning and application release management tools that enable you to move the associated WebLogic artifacts (like data sources, queues, topics) when the application is promoted to higher environments.  Both are versioned nicely in MyST and easily migrated in the MyST release management dashboard. 

Jenkins however is the most widely adopted open source build server available, highly scalable, with a very large library of plugins to accomplish virtually any build task.  Jenkins provides a way to automate the tasks associated with building and deploying a application component using the Groovy language that leverages an extensive plugin library exposed through Java, referred to as a "pipeline".   The pipeline provides a graphical view of the deployment, as a series of stages, e.g. "Checkout", "Package", "Deploy", "Test".   Additionally there are manual gateways that can be implemented in a pipeline that only certain groups or users can performed, in the form of role-based assignments. Read the complete article here.

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Enable WebService test client on SOA/BPM production mode environments by Martien van den Akker

At my current assignment I need to trouble shoot the identity service because of a BPM->OID coupling. I use the support document 1327140.1 for it, that suggest to test http://<soa-server&gt;:<port>/integration/services/IdentityService/identity
Doing so in a production mode soa or bpm environment, you’ll soon find out that it uses the WebService test client via uri /ws_utc, and that this does not work. Resulting in http-404 Not found errors.
First I found a blog of Maarten of Amis mentioning this as well. But unfortunately, he could not get around it either. But luckily I found note 1915317.1, that tells me that the WebServices test Client is not enabled by default.
You can enable it on your domain via the EM: Read the complete article here.

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