Pondering the Oracle Service Bus by René van Wijk
September 29, 2014 Leave a comment
What we are going to do in this post, is present some real-life problems and show how to obtain the necessary data, analyze it, and make corrective actions. Oracle Service Bus architecture is centered around an Enterprise Service Bus. The bus provides message delivery services, based on standards including SOAP, HTTP and Java Messaging Service (JMS). It is typically designed for high-throughput, guaranteed message delivery to a variety of service producers and consumers. It supports XML as a native data type, while also offering alternatives for handling other data types. Oracle Service Bus is policy driven and enables us to establish loose coupling between service clients and business services, while maintaining a centralized point of security control and monitoring. It stores persistent policy, proxy service, and related resource configurations in metadata, that can be customized and propagated from development through staging to production environments required. The message-brokering engine accesses this configuration information from its metadata cache. 
Oracle Service Bus is an intermediary that processes incoming service request messages, determines routing logic, and transforms these messages for compatibility with other service consumers. It receives messages through a transport protocol such as HTTP(S), JMS, File, and FTP, and sends messages through the same or a different transport protocol. Service response messages follow the inverse path. Thne message processing by Oracle Service Bus is driven by metadata, specified in the message flow definition of a proxy service.
The processing of messages occurs in the following sequence of events:
- Processing of the inbound transport
- Message flow execution
- Processing of the outbound transport
After a message is sent to an endpoint (either a business service or another proxy service), Oracle Service Bus processes the response message in a similar model as that described in the preceding sequence of events.
No response? How is that possible?
In this case the Oracle Service Bus came to a ‘stand-still’ for a particular interval. Read the complete article here.
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In 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. 
The Split-Join can be a very useful tool in your OSB services yet seems to be underestimated. When I did some asking around it turned out not many developers use this, even though I can come up with plenty of uses for the Split-Join. The Split-Join’s strength is in numbers, meaning it is the most powerful when you need to process a lot of pieces of similar data. For this example I used a simplified version of a project I am working on. In this project mobile devices are set to send data about rainfall to a database. The data is collected at a regular interfal creating a record and sent to the database per session which contains a large set of records. Instead of processing these records one at time I can process them concurrently and save a lot of processing (and waiting) time.
I published a OSB11g tutorial considering the use case described in my earlier blog posts. The tutorial can be accessed from 
I have created a white paper explaining the OSB threading model with a focus on the HTTP transport. I have heard from several customers who have experienced difficulty with tuning HTTP services with relation to the use of work managers. This paper’s goal is to explain the threads involved in servicing a proxy and how work managers fit into that model.
For proxy services utilizing the JMS transport, OSB receives messages from destinations by using an MDB. These MDBs get generated and deployed during activation of the service configuration. OSB creates a random, unique name for the J2EE application that gets deployed to WLS. The name starts with “_ALSB_” and ends in a unique series of digits. The EAR files are written to the sbgen subdirectory of the domain home directory. You will see these applications on the WLS console page for “Deployments”.
As a follow-up on my 
EAIESB “Advanced OSB in 21 Days” provides developers, with step by step instructions to learn and use OSB components transports (File, FTP, JMS, Database, and Email), Java Callout, Service Callout, Dynamic Routing, Securing SOA and OSB proxy services and Exception handling in OSB using sbconsole. For more details 
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