Enhancing ICS Mappings with Custom Java Classes by Ricardo Ferreira

January 4, 2017 Leave a comment

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Introduction

One of the most common tasks performed during the creation of integrations in ICS (Integration Cloud Service) is the implementation of mappings. In a nutshell, mappings are the resources that ICS uses to allow messages coming from the configured source application to be sent to the configured target application. Failure in properly defining and configuring these mappings directly impacts how integrations are going to behave while sending messages downstream.

In order to build mappings in ICS, users make use of the mapping editor. The mapping editor allows for the creation of complex XPath expressions via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Besides the support for XPath expressions, it is also possible to use built-in XSLT functions available within the Mapping Components section of the mapping editor, as shown in figure 1.

However, it is not uncommon to find situations in which the set of built-in functions is not adequate to perform a specific data handling operation. When that happens, most people using ICS feel they’ve hit a roadblock due to the fact that there is no way to simply add a custom function. While there is always the possibility to open an SR (Service Request) within Oracle and request an enhancement, sometimes this is not possible because the ongoing project requires at least a workaround in order to be able to finish the use case in a timely manner.

This blog is going to show how classes from ICS’s Fusion Middleware foundation can be leveraged to provide custom data handling in mappings. To illustrate this, the following sections will show how to perform Base64 data decoding, using a utility class from the Oracle WebLogic API.

Programming in XLST Directly

In contrast to what many people think, ICS is not a black box. You can access pretty much everything that is generated by ICS when you export the integration, as shown in figure 2. Once you have access to the integration archive file, you can see what ICS generated for you and in case of mappings, even change it. Read the complete article here.

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Implementing an SFDC Upsert Operation in ICS by Ricardo Ferreira Leave a Comment

October 26, 2016 Leave a comment

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Introduction

While designing SOA services; especially those ones that represent operations around a business object, a common implementation pattern used is upsert. Upsert is an acronym that means the union of “update plus insert”. The idea behind is having a unique operation that decides which action to take – either update the existing record or insert a new one – based on information available in the message. Having one operation instead of two, makes the SOA service interface definition clearer and simpler.

Some SaaS applications offer upsert capabilities in their exposed services, and leveraging these capabilities can considerably decrease the amount of effort required while designing SOA services in an integration platform such as ICS. For instance, if you need to develop an upsert operation and the SaaS application does not have this functionality; you will have to implement that logic using some sort of conditional routing (see Content-Based Router pattern) or via multiple update and insert operations.

Salesforce.com (or SFDC for short) is one of those SaaS applications that offers built-in support for the upsert operation. This post will show how to leverage this support with ICS. Read the complete article here.

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Custom Transports in Service Bus 12.2.1 by Ricardo Ferreira

July 1, 2016 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002Oracle Service Bus (or Service Bus for short) provides a very powerful set of APIs that allow experienced Java developers to create custom transport providers. This is called Service Bus Transport SDK. By using this SDK, it is possible to create custom transport providers to handle both inbound and outbound message handling for specific protocols, without having to worry with the internal details of Service Bus.

The objective of this post is not about how the Service Bus Transport SDK works, neither about providing examples about how to use it. This is very detailed in the Service Bus documentation. Instead, we are going to cover the specifics about creating custom transport providers for Service Bus 12.2.1. Thus; this post will walk through the changes and challenges introduced by this new version, which may help people that want to port their custom transports from previous versions of Service Bus to 12.2.1.

Changes in the Classpath

No matter which IDE you commonly use to develop the code for custom transport providers, when you try to open your project you will face some annoying classpath issues. This will happen because the 12.2.1 version of Service Bus changed many of its JAR files, in an attempt to create a more consistent system library classpath. This is also true for some JAR files that belongs to WebLogic, and many others from the Fusion Middleware stack.

Therefore, you will have to adapt your classpath to be able to compile your source-code again, either compiling the code from the IDE or using the Ant javac task. The XML snippet below is an Eclipse user library export with some of the most important JARs that you might need while working with Service Bus 12.2.1. Read the complete article here.

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Caching in OSB 12c without Out-Of-Process Coherence Servers by Ricardo Ferreira

March 20, 2015 1 Comment

 

clip_image002Introduction

One of the most popular use cases for Oracle Service Bus (OSB) is the mediation of synchronous service interactions. In this scenario, a client invokes the service through a proxy instead of the actual service endpoint, guaranteeing that the consumer is decoupled from the producer. This type of architecture allows producers to be changed without impacting the consumers, allowing greater agility for projects with volatile requirements.

Synchronous services that return results that do not change often are good candidates to have their results cached by OSB, through a feature called Result Caching. This improves performance by reducing network overhead to access the back-end service. Result caching can help to improve scalability by reducing the load on the back-end servers that host the service. Figure 1 illustrates a client invoking a synchronous service with Result Caching enabled.

Although using the Result Caching feature may seem to always be a good idea, it is important to evaluate its side effects. When this feature is activated, all results are cached in the JVM heap. That means that heap can rapidly become full after a number of service invocations occur. This could lead to serious garbage collection (GC) issues once the JVM starts to reclaim the used space when it hits the high water-mark of 80% of the heap size. Eventually, full GC pauses will start to occur and jeopardize OSB performance.

To avoid using too much heap space with Result Caching, out-of-process Coherence servers can be set up to run in their own JVMs to hold the cached results. They are termed “out-of-process” because they execute in a JVM different from the OSB JVM. The technique here is to allocate data off the OSB JVM letting the Coherence servers use their own heap space without affecting the heap space OSB uses to process messages. This technique is also called off-heap caching. Figure 2 shows an OSB domain using out-of-process Coherence servers to hold the cached results. Read the complete article here.

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OEP workshop November 21st 2014 Düsseldorf Germany

November 6, 2014 Leave a comment

clip_image002We would like to invite you to attend our OEP  Workshop on Friday November 21st 2014 in Düsseldorf Germany.

For registration  please contact Kevin Li

Schedule

Full Day November 21st 2014

Oracle Düsseldorf, Hamborner Straße 51,  40472 Düsseldorf, Germany

Direction: http://www.oracle.com/de/corporate/contact/directions-oracle-gs-duesseldorf-1623482-de.pdf

Trainer

Yogesh Sontakke & Lloyd Williams

Agenda

Introduction to Oracle Event Processing (1 hr)

OEP Stream Explorer (45 mins)

Business Activity Monitoring 12c (45 mins)

OEP with SOA Event Delivery Network (30 mins)

OEP for Financial Services (30 mins) 

OEP for Telecommunications (30 mins)

OEP for Transportation/Logistics (30 mins)

Hands-on Lab (2 hrs)

 

Registration: Please contact Kevin Li

 

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Interoperability between Microsoft and SOA Suite 12c by Ricardo Ferreira

November 6, 2014 Leave a comment

Testcase-execIntroduction
During the design of SOA applications it is inevitable that from time to time you will need to interface with Microsoft-based applications. While technologies like SOAP and REST do a great job when request-reply communication is needed, most people struggle when a messaging-based communication is required. This blog will present two approaches to get messaging working between Microsoft and SOA Suite 12c.
Which Choices Do I have?
SOA Suite 12c offers a complete set of tools to integrate with Microsoft applications using messaging. Which one to use is a simple question of asking where the messaging system resides. If the messaging system to be accessed sits on SOA Suite side (WebLogic JMS) then you should use the WebLogic JMS .NET Client. If the messaging system to be accessed sits on Microsoft side (Microsoft Message Queuing) then you should use the JCA adapter for MSMQ. Using the WebLogic JMS .NET Client allows code written in .NET to access the WebLogic JMS server using the T3 protocol, just like any other Java application. Using the JCA adapter for MSMQ allows SOA composites and OSB applications to send/receive messages to/from MSMQ queues.
Using the WebLogic JMS .NET Client
The implementation of the WebLogic JMS .NET Client is very straightforward. All you have to do is deploy your .NET application with the WebLogic.Messaging.dll assembly file. You still need to code how your application will send/receive messages to/from the WebLogic JMS destinations. You can easily find the WebLogic.Messaging.dll assembly file in the following location: $FMW_HOME/wlserver/modules/com.bea.weblogic.jms.dotnetclient_x.x.x.x. In the same location you can find the WebLogic JMS .NET Client API documentation. For those of you that are familiar with the JMS API, it will be easy to understand since the API design is almost the same. For beginners, I have provided the following C# sample code that shows how to publish messages to an WebLogic JMS queue. Read the complete article here.

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