Oracle Named a Leader in Analyst Evaluation for Digital Process Automation Software

May 9, 2018 Leave a comment

 

Oracle positimageioned as a leader and selected for evaluation based on proven customer adoption, strong go-to-market strategy, and breadth of capabilities

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Oracle today announced it has been named a leader in the Forrester Wave™ Digital Process Automation (DPA) Software report. This placement confirms leadership for Oracle Process Cloud, which is part of Oracle Cloud Platform.

"By delivering comprehensive process automation capabilities such as no- and low-code process design, case management and simplified connections to SaaS, Social, Cloud and on-premise systems, Oracle provides customers with a powerful option to continuously deliver engaging customer, employee, and partner experiences at every stage in their business transformation journey," said Vikas Anand, vice president, product management, Oracle. "Today business process automation augmented with intelligent machine learning is helping organizations drive best next actions and provide them with better, timely decision making capabilities."

In Forrester’s 30-criteria evaluation of DPA vendors, they evaluated 12 significant software providers. Oracle was cited as a leader with the highest possible scores in the low-code/no-code, smart forms and user experience, process flow and design, mobile engagement, API support, data virtualization, deployment options, and ease of implementation criteria.

Download Forrester’s Wave report for "Digital Process Automation Software, Q3 2017" here.

Oracle Process Cloud Service was built from the ground up for the cloud to provide enterprises of all sizes with the low-code app dev platform that they need to build business agility and control their digital destiny. With full lifecycle support for end-to-end process automation spanning departments, SaaS apps, and on-premises systems of record, Oracle Process Cloud Service empowers business analysts and process designers with the tools they need to rapidly deliver differentiating experiences in a collaborative manner. Oracle Process Cloud Service comes with Quick Start App templates and pre-built integrations to companion platform services including, Content Management, Integration, Mobile, Intelligent Bots, and IoT Apps, to enable rapid delivery of engaging experiences across channels and devices.

Customer Momentum
"Process automation is central to our integration strategy," said Ravi Gade, senior director of apps IT and digital transformation, Calix. "Calix leverages Oracle Process Cloud to reduce IT backlog, ensure compliance, and simplify connections across our rapidly evolving SaaS and on-premises business systems."

"Using a combination of Oracle Process Cloud Service and Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service along with the cloud-native best practices introduced by our partner, Rubicon Red, we have a comprehensive, integrated cloud platform that enables us to deliver innovative, modern solutions," said Ryan Klose, general manager, corporate, National Pharmacies. "The Oracle Cloud Platform gives us flexibility to connect to all our core systems, and easily deliver to a range of user interfaces, whether they be online, mobile/tablet, devices/IoT, or emerging chatbot technology."

"Oracle Process Cloud Service has allowed us to dramatically shorten our time-to-market by up to 40 percent," said Matt Wright, chief technology officer, Rubicon Red. "Oracle provides developers with immediate access to a full lifecycle process management environment—including development, test, and production—and enterprise-quality tooling, without needing to build and maintain an IT infrastructure."

Additional information:

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How We Added a Spoon of Agility to a Large Oracle Service Bus Project by Pavel Samolysov

May 7, 2018 Leave a comment

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Several months ago I already shared how to ensure guaranteed delivery for 5.000.000 messages handled per day by Oracle Service Bus (OSB). In the case, OSB is heavy used to integrate a customer relationship management application (the CRM) in a solid environment with many regional billing systems, provisioning, ERP and ordering management system (OMS), etc. Also, the integration solution is deployed across four ex-standalone corporations, each of which has its own IT infrastructure, and this circumstance makes the project more and more interesting.
The common problem from a manager’s point of view is to provide consistency among services deployed on the bus, the main client application (the CRM), and numerous 3rd party applications. Also, there is a time lag in development and end up to production these parts of the infrastructure. And the development team forever must have guaranteed stable and ready to deploy code of the service bus.
The situation is usual for almost all integration projects in the World. The releases of an enterprise service bus must be delivered in a reliable way, no one integration flow (neither the client -> service bus nor the service bus -> 3rd party application communication) must fail after the release is deployed to the production environment.
Let me explain the features of our project.

  1. A one pizza size development team, not more than 5 developers are there.
  2. Hovewer, the team has developed and delivered 13 services and 46 adapters to a wide range of enterprise applications. The services provide very different business logic – from just wrapping a stored procedure into a SOAP-based web service till a complex orchestration employing the Splig-Join component of Oracle Service Bus.
  3. SVN is utilized as a source code management tool.
  4. Oracle Service Bus out of the box provides no capability for service versioning, so it’s impossible to expose numerous versions of the same service simultaneously. Although the main service client, CRM application, is developed by a team working for the same company, we are able to deliver releases of the service bus regardless of this capability. Read the complete article here.

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Check Composite State of Oracle SOA Suite by Command Line by Dirk Nachbar

May 6, 2018 Leave a comment

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I was currently fighting a bit with the monitoring of Oracle SOA Suite 12c Composites.
The goal was to check the state of deployed Composites on an Oracle SOA Suite 12c with following requirements/dependencies:

  • No Oracle Cloud Control
  • Capture only Active Composites and not Retired Composites

After some discussions with colleagues and a lot of Google and serveral tests with Python Scripts in wlst, I came to following solution:

  • one main Pythin Script, called check_composite_state.py which is checking the State of a non retired given Composite Name for a given Partition|Folder and a given Managed Server
  • one property file called domain.properties which will be used by the Python Script in order to build the required connect string to the Admin Server of the SOA Suite
  • one wrapper Shell Script, which takes the required 3 Arguments (Name of Managed Server, Composite Name and Partition|Folder Name). Read the complete article here.

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Jump-Start your Oracle SOA Projects in FlexDeploy by Dan Reynebeau

May 5, 2018 Leave a comment

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In an effort to simplify the population of existing composites on a server into FlexDeploy projects, we have provided a utility to extract composites from a SOA server into a comma delimited file. This file can then be the basis for a spreadsheet that can be loaded directly into FlexDeploy, through the use of templates, and all of the composite projects can be created in seconds. I will talk about templates in another blog post.

The composite extraction from a SOA server can be done with the attached zip file (extractComposites).  There are three components in the zip file:

  • Property file that contains the userName, password, hostName and hostPort for the targeted SOA server
  1. #Weblogic server username and password
  2. server.user=weblogic
  3. server.password=welcome1
  4. #server.host=
  5. server.host=soalt06.flexagon
  6. #server.port=
  7. server.port=8001
  • CompositeMgmt.jar that contains the code that interrogates the targeted server
  • ExtractComposites.sh that contains the script that manages the jvm and classpath

Read the complete article here.

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Avoiding Service Call Failures in Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite by Rolando Carrasco

May 4, 2018 Leave a comment

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Introduction

This article is targeted at Oracle Service Bus (OSB) developers and architects who want to learn/validate their strategies for avoiding service call failures within their integration pipelines.

Having dual roles as architects and developers the authors have seen many projects in which the developer or the architect didn’t design or implement a good exception/failure management strategy.

This article will streamline a series of strategies to avoid such failures.

Some of the ideas in this article are were originally presented by our colleague David Hernández in a December 2015 session at a Microservices and API Management Symposium in Lima, Peru. That session focused on various strategies for mitigating failures in the development of Services:

  1. Circuit breakers
  2. Bulkheads
  3. Timeouts
  4. Redundancy

In this article we will apply these strategies to Oracle Service Bus.

These strategies can be implemented using OSB and Oracle SOA Suite (composites). Some features of the current latest release (12.2.1) will help you to facilitate the implementation; other strategies are very basic configurations in OSB that many people skip and therefore struggle to maintain stability in their Service Bus implementation.

Let’s always keep in mind that the Service Bus is a core element in any infrastructure that implements it. CIOs and managers sometimes do not give that specific weight to this platform and wonder why, if the OSB/SOA Suite is not available, the infrastructure crashes. Or sometimes they wonder why the OSB struggles when a platform is not available or is under heavy load. The answer is simple: OSB is the integration pipeline within your infrastructure and architecture. Imagine if a water pipeline in your house breaks: you don’t see it, but a real mess is happening behind your walls or beneath the floor. The same idea applies here.

Let’s also bear in mind that 60% of the development of a service is related to exception management and the ability to avoid failures. If we don’t take care of this, or expect that someone else will take care of it, we are wrong. You need to be able to identify the following scenarios: Read the complete article here.

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Purging Strategies in Oracle SOA Suite 12c – Part II by Arturo Viveros

May 3, 2018 Leave a comment

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In my earlier post about purging the Oracle SOA product database, I mentioned that this is one of the most critical tasks when it comes to ensuring the stability and performance of SOA/BPM Suite production environments.

Read the 1st part here

This means that you should never neglect this or expect it to magically take care of itself.

So let’s take a look at a couple of extra tips to get a better grip on this:

In 12c we have auto-purge, which can be configured and scheduled from the EM console. Unfortunately, EM still lacks a reporting / alerting feature to provide purging statistics or at least make sure the jobs are actually running successfully. So, if you’re blindly trusting this feature, it could very well be that instances are piling up by the millions without you noticing until it becomes a problem.

Luckily, there’s a very simple way to find out and keep track, just by looking into the SOA_PURGE_HISTORY table inside the SOAINFRA schema:

This table is pretty straightforward, as it will tell us the start & end time, if it was the single or the parallel script and the final status: C (Completed) or R (Rollbacked).

The out-of-the-box scripts are quite sensitive and enforce a lot of validations, which means that if anything goes wrong they will rollback everything and no instances will be purged whatsoever. So in case there’s a malfunction it’s good to be able to know and take the necessary steps to correct it before everything blows up. Read the complete article here.

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FAQ: Integrating E-Business Suite using Integration Cloud Service by Naveen Nahata

May 2, 2018 Leave a comment

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1. Is the connectivity agent necessary for the EBS Adapter even when my services are deployed inside DMZ and publically accessible.

No. The connectivity agent is only required when EBS REST services are not available on public internet.

2. Can I connect to EBS database from ICS and invoke PL/SQL procedures?

Yes, you can use DB adapter. However, JDBC connections are not allowed by ICS so the connectivity agent is required to connect to EBS database

3. Is it required for the connectivity agent to be accessible from ICS?

No. ICS does not call the connectivity agent. Instead the connectivity agent calls ICS. Since it is a HTTPS call over port 443, most organizations do not restrict it.

4. Our organization requires a proxy to connect to internet. How do I handle it?

The connectivity agent allows the use of proxy. You can provide proxy details such as proxy host/port and optional username/password as parameters to the startup script.

-ph=<PROXY_HOST> -pp=<PROXY_PORT> -pu=<PROXY_USERNAME> -ppw=<PROXY_PASSWORD>

5. How does ICS invoke EBS web services or PL/SQL procedures when it can connect to neither the database/web server nor the connectivity agent.

Whenever ICS needs to communicate with EBS or its database, it posts a message in a queue. Connectivity agent periodically polls this queue and retrieves the messages. It then invokes EBS web services or makes a database call.

6. I’ve created an integration which is triggered on an EBS Business Event. How does connectivity agent handle this?

The connectivity agent is only required during the intial activation of the integration. Once the integration is activated, its endpoint is registered with EBS Workflow Business Event System. EBS directly invokes ICS integration when the event fires.

You can check this by opening the Business Event and looking at the subscription ICS creates. Read the complete article here.

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Custom functions to extend ICS transformations – ICS Definitive Guide by Robert van Mölken

May 1, 2018 Leave a comment

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In the second release of 2017 (17.2.5) ICS will introduce the capability of importing and using custom functions. These functions are created using JavaScript and can be used in transformations, expressions and as a action in Orchestrations. In this definitive guide I will go through all ins and outs of this new capability.

Custom functions – a new pillar of ICS

In our book we talked about the pillars of ICS; Connections, Integrations, Lookups, Agents, Adapters and Packages. This release introduced Libraries. A library is a set of Javascript functions. Keep in mind that the JavaScript functions are running server-side so some browser/client-side capabilities/APIs are not available. Functions can’t be created within ICS, but can be uploaded as part of a library in both JS and JAR file (collection of JS files) formats.

For this guide we have created two library files; string-utils and date-utils. The string-utils library contains seven functions and the date-utils library contains only two functions. Below is the contents of the latter library, where the first function calculates the duration between to two dates by returning a dayTimeDuration string as result. The second function is used for parsing ISO dates since the javascript engine ICS uses does not support ISO date when creating new Dates in javascript. Read the complete article here.

 

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ICS roles by Niall Commiskey

April 30, 2018 Leave a comment

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I get quite a lot of questions about the user roles available in ICS. Some of the questions relate to user access to data. For example, how do I prevent developers seeing payload values, such as credit card number.
The starting place for eliciting such information should be the ORCL docs – here I read

Read the complete article here.

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Top tweets SOA Partner Community – April 2018

April 29, 2018 Leave a comment

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April 2018  top tweets by soaCommunity

Send your tweets @soacommunity #PaaSCommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity. Make sure you share your content with the community!

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Technorati Tags: twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress,SOA Community twitter

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