soa magazine iv 01.2015.pdf

SOA

SOA Myth Busters - Episode #1

B2B as a Critical Mission Hub

In-depth look into API Catalog

BPM

Oracle BPM 12c Gateways

ADF Runtime Interface Generator for BPM Human Tasks

Top 10 Things You Should Know About BPM 11g/12

Edition IV

January 2015

Copyright © 2015 | All Rights Reserved

SOA Magazine IV 1

Dear SOA Magazine Readers,

The SOA Magazine IV edition focuses on Industrial SOA articles which showcase that SOA is much more than a web

service. Rolando Carrasco and Arturo Viveros showcase in their SOA Myth Busters article the evolution of the SOA

Suite towards a complete platform over the last 10 years. An industrial SOA platform contains also API

management to secure web services, as well b2b as a trading hub between external partners.

What is the use case for Business Process Management versus Services Oriented Architecture. SOA is mainly used

for data mediation and process orchestration between different IT systems. BPM is focused on automation on

human based processes like an employee holiday request. Key is to re-use the SOA web services for your BPM

deployment. In our holiday request example we can re-use a web service from the HR system which informs the

employee of the available holidays. In this magazine edition you learn on the BPM Side more about Gateways and

how Link Consulting is using a generator to create Human tasks. Thanks to Mark Foster who highlights in his article

10 best practices for SOA Suite and BPM Suite a must read!

This quarterly newsletter is for both customers and partners who are active in the SOA space. The content includes

articles for IT decision makers, architects and developers. The goal of the newsletter is to update you on the latest

SOA technologies, market studies, trainings & certifications and conferences. We publish the newsletter in English

and some articles will be in Portuguese especially for the Brazilian marketing, thanks to Ricardo Puttini and his

team. Contribution is open for everybody! We want to publish your content! Like case studies, best practice,

technical examples and solutions and conferences. Feel free to submit your content to Marcello Marinho

(Portuguese articles) & Jürgen Kress (for English articles)

Ricardo Puttini & Jürgen Kress

mailto:[email protected]?subject=SOA%20Magazine%20call%20for%20content

mailto:[email protected]?subject=SOA%20Magazine%20call%20for%20content%20English


SOA Magazine IV 2

Table of Content

SOA Myth Busters - Episode #1: “BPEL vs. OSB”........................................................................................... 3

SOA Suite/B2B as a Critical Mission Hub for a High Volume Message Use Case ........................................ 13

ADF Runtime Interface Generator for BPM Human Tasks .......................................................................... 21

In-depth look into Oracle API Catalog (OAC) 12c ........................................................................................ 44

Order to Cash Process Integration for Telecommunications ...................................................................... 67

Next Generation SOA: A Concise Introduction to Service Technology & Service-Orientation ................... 78

BPM 12c Gateways ..................................................................................................................................... 79

Top 10 Things You Should Know About BPM 11g/12c ............................................................................. 125

Cloud Service Brokers – the integration story of your cloud .................................................................... 131


SOA Magazine IV 3

SOA Myth Busters - Episode #1: “BPEL vs. OSB”

Introduction

So, do you work with Oracle SOA Suite?, that’s great because we also do, every single day since a long

time ago. As Oracle professionals, we’ve seen the SOA stack grow, change, incorporating new products

and technology with each version, from 10g to 12c.

We’re Rolando Carrasco (Oracle ACE) and Arturo Viveros (Oracle ACE Associate), the SOA Myth Busters

from Mexico, and as we go with this series we will put to the test a number of questions, myths and

urban legends regarding both SOA & the Oracle SOA Platform in seek of finding out which myths are

true and which are not.

BPEL vs OSB

In this episode, we will dive into one of the hottest arguments Oracle SOA Practitioners have been

sustaining over the years: BPEL against Service Bus. Can and should they work together? Is one of them

better than the other? Are there any well-founded guidelines that I can rely on in order to decide

between them? And what about SOA Suite 12c? Around this subject there seem to be plenty of myths,

misunderstandings and misconceptions, so let’s get it on and uncover as much of the truth as possible.

Let’s get started

First and foremost, the two things we are comparing are pretty much standards before

products.

BPEL – Business Process Execution Language. It’s a standard for services orchestration,

delivered and maintained by OASIS. It became popular in the early 2000s. Many software

companies, like IBM, Oracle, have been actively working on the improvement of the standard.

Many software companies offer products that support this standard. For example: Oracle BPEL

PM.

Service Bus (a.k.a. Enterprise Service Bus). Since the old days of integration and EAI, the

concept of having something in the middle to be able to intercommunicate heterogeneous

systems and services has been present. This ESB as a standard, should support: Dynamic

Routing, Mediation, Virtualization, Content Enrichment, Service Invocation, etc. A good way to

start learning about the standard of a Service Bus, is the book of David Chappell “Enterprise

Service Bus” (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596006754.do). This book has already 10

years, but David represented quite well what a Service Bus is, and all the concepts are current

to our days.


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Now, it happens that Oracle has a product by the name Oracle BPEL Process Manager and

another named Oracle Service Bus. That’s what can add a little bit more of confusion to the

comparison. And this question: should I use BPEL or Service Bus? It is a common one within the

Oracle SOA professionals and we think to any other software company that supports these two

standards.

A little bit of history

So let’s start looking into this from a historic perspective. We’ll need to go back in time a few

years, so we can attempt to locate the source of the aforementioned controversy and identify

some myths.

We remember our first years with this technologies, it was back in 2003-2004, when Oracle first

released Oracle BPEL PM. In those days, Oracle did have something to offer in the integration

space: Oracle Interconnect. But it was not that popular. When Oracle released BPEL PM, it

changed everything. It changed many professional careers, as well as it changed the market.

Oracle didn’t yet had a product quite resembling an ESB, but it did have Oracle BPEL PM. With

that product it was able to compete in the Orchestration stage against players like BEA

Weblogic Integration, TIBCO, and Web Methods.

Ever since those days, Oracle BPEL PM (we’re referring to the tool, not the standard) was

capable of: routing calls, enrichment of messages, virtualizing the access to other services, data

model/format transformation through adapters to EIS systems like SAP, Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft,

Siebel, Mainframe, etc. Oracle hadn’t started the rampage of buying PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc. so

there was no tight integration with them. It was just adapters and this tool which was able to

easily communicate with them.


SOA Magazine IV 5

As time went by, a combination of market pressure and industry trends, caused Oracle to

include in the 10g release of SOA Suite (year 2007) something called: Oracle Enterprise Service

Bus (OESB). Then Oracle could finally say: we do have as part of our stack an Enterprise Service

Bus.

As fancy as it sounded, this former version of Oracle’s ESB was somehow limited and never

really qualified as a best-of-breed product. Furthermore, it never boded well with architects,

developers and administrators who found it a tad complicated and unfriendly.

So, it seems like we’ve identified a first milestone in this BPEL vs OSB discussion. An early

version of the SOA Suite we’ve come to know (10g), which included:

An already robust and highly-liked product based on an up and coming industry

standard (BPEL)

A below average ESB as an optional component of the suite

At the time, Oracle ESB (OESB) wound up not being heavily used in most integration projects

outside of AIA implementations. For the time being and the state of industry requirements,

BPEL could exist and function mostly by its own.

Then in 2008, Oracle buys BEA Systems, and with this acquisition we come into a second

relevant milestone: The release of Oracle SOA Suite 11g in mid-2009. This new and revamped

stack introduced some very relevant changes:

1. Oracle WebLogic Server as the runtime platform for all of the tools included in the Suite.

2. Oracle Service Bus (based on the former BEA AquaLogic Service Bus) comes along, as a

true ESB capable of positioning itself as one of the market-leading players.

3. 10g’s ESB (OESB), is rebranded as “Mediator” and stays as an optional component of the

Suite.

This proved to be a great move by Oracle, and from the technology/architecture standpoint it

gave to the components its specific weight. Now the Enterprise Service Bus

standards/capabilities were very well identified inside Oracle Service Bus. But if your SOA

initiative included orchestration, business activity monitoring, business rules, the Oracle SOA

Suite with the rest of the components, was an excellent option.

With this new stack, OSB could even be licensed on its own for clients that wanted to have the

ESB alone as a cornerstone for their SOA implementation, though the most usual scenario is for

the customers to have both the SOA Suite and the OSB as part of a multifaceted and well

complimented SOA Toolkit.


SOA Magazine IV 6

On the other hand, OESB’s rebranding stirred some confusion and otherwise felt a little like a

demotion for an incumbent product that didn’t quite stick and was replaced by a more

powerful tool.

Finally, coming back to the present we find ourselves months removed from a third big

milestone: SOA Suite 12c. In this new major release, the stack itself has been realigned

according to the current industry trends (Industrial SOA, Developer Productivity, Cloud and

Mobile). The tools are now more integrated than ever and Oracle’s intention is clearly to

revolutionize the way we approach and implement SOA.

In SOA Suite 12c it has become much more evident where and when to use BPEL or Service Bus,

or when to use them together. According to Oracle, there should be less confusion around this.

And in the way the IDEs, engines and monitoring are integrated in this release, the architecture

definitions should be clearer than ever.

So let’s summarize everything that we just mentioned:

Year BPEL ESB

2003-2007 Acquisition of Collaxa by Oracle leads to Oracle BPEL PM

BPEL PM provides integration, web-services and BPM capabilities

It quickly becomes the product of choice for Oracle SOA Practitioners

Oracle doesn’t have a traditional ESB offering throughout this period of time

2007-2009 BPEL PM continues to evolve and features in Oracle SOA Suite 10g with some new capabilities

The JDeveloper BPEL designer is vastly improved facilitating the SOA developer’s work

Oracle ESB debuts as a component in SOA Suite 10g

Its main purpose is to “move data among multiple endpoints, both within and outside of an enterprise”

OESB includes a design-time modeler in JDev as well as a web-based runtime console (Oracle ESB Control)

2009-2013 Oracle BPEL PM continues to headline SOA Suite 11g

Both the runtime and the

OESB is rebranded as Oracle Mediator and remains as a component


SOA Magazine IV 7

design time for BPEL are vastly improved

The adoption of WLS as the flagship application server by Oracle, makes BPEL a lot more powerful than it was before, especially performance-wise.

in SOA Suite Oracle Service Bus (OSB)

leverages the former ALSB and is positioned immediately as a full-fledged ESB with lots of capabilities.

The design-time tool for OSB is Eclipse-based (OEPE)

2014 + Oracle BPEL PM and OSB have finally converged into an integrated developer environment (JDev) with the release of SOA Suite 12c The concepts of Industrial SOA, Developer Productivity, Mobility

and Cloud Integration drive the improvements in the products, and have been equally applied to both tools, making them more compatible and complimentary than ever.

Looking at this timeline, one can easily see where a lot of confusion could have arisen despite

Oracle’s best efforts, especially before 12c:

BPEL Developers that have been working with the tool for a long time just love it, and

have seen the product grow and evolve in an orderly and standardized fashion, with a

constant IDE. This as opposed to an ESB that has suffered many changes so far and has

not been as easy to get familiarized with. This can lead to radical opinions that are not at

all uncommon like: “BPEL is unquestionably better than the Service Bus”, where a sound

product like OSB ends up being disqualified for all the wrong reasons.

SOA Professionals that were already used to work with BEA WebLogic Server, WLS

Workbench, Aqua Logic, Fuego etc., are much more prone to like OSB and understand

its potential and capabilities. They may even find it easier and more dynamic than BPEL

PM due to familiarity with the IDE and web-console. “OSB is just friendlier than BPEL and

Eclipse is a much better IDE than JDev”. It wouldn’t be strange to hear an assessment

like this one from an accomplished developer with a background in BEA technology.

People that are newer to Oracle FMW’s stack, always seem to be wondering which one

of the products is the best alternative, if they are making the right choice and even if

they are over-utilizing or sub-utilizing one of them. In this case, rather than

understanding the products as complimentary to each other, we would be unnecessarily

stressing out and questioning ourselves over which one to choose.

Architects and programmers that used to work with the tools from a different vendor

(IBM, Software AG, TIBCO, etc.) and are now working with Oracle FMW, usually have

trouble identifying the stack at first glance, so they tend to gravitate towards the

product which seems to be more familiar and less problematic to them and stay away


SOA Magazine IV 8

from the rest based on their past good / bad experiences. This kind of scenario often

leads to the most disparate opinions such as: “BPEL just doesn’t work at all and its use

implies a terrible danger for the client, we’ll be better off by using exclusively a Service

Bus”. Just imagine the turmoil an statement like this can produce, especially when

pronounced by an “expert” with a long track record in integration projects.

But is this controversy really just a matter of perception, past-experience, or even post-

traumatic stress disorder? We’ve already dived enough into the history, so let’s have a look

now at some other kind of facts.

SOA Design Patterns

We saw in the past section how much the products have matured over time. At the same time, SOA as a

methodology has also been evolving and maturing through a series of contributions from industry

leaders, standards organizations, academics, professionals, architects and technology enthusiasts.

As a result of this contributions, we have a well identified set of SOA Design Patterns: proven solutions

to common problems.

NOTE:

*If you want to know more about SOA Design Patterns, make sure to visit the following site for a

thorough explanation:

http://www.soapatterns.org/

Here we’ll have a look at some of these patterns and whether they are more suitable to be applied by

the utilization of BPEL and/or Service Bus:

SOA Design Pattern BPEL OSB

Data Model Transformation X x

Data Format Transformation x

State Repository X

Rules Centralization X x

Process Abstraction X

Process Centralization X

Asynchronous Queuing X x

Intermediate Routing x

Event-Driven Messaging X x

Protocol Bridging x

Atomic Service Transaction X

Compensating Service Transaction X

Reliable Messaging x

Policy Centralization x

http://www.soapatterns.org/


SOA Magazine IV 9

As we can see in the table, each tool has its own set of relevant capabilities, some of them shared by

both. JCA Adapters can also help us extend the native functionality of the products, especially in the

case of BPEL.

Based on the information we’ve just analyzed, we can definitely come up with a collection of pretty

accurate guidelines regarding the use of one product or the other for certain scenarios:

For service virtualization and brokering activities use OSB

For long running and stateful orchestrated tasks, use Oracle BPEL

For automatizing business activities based on a process definition use Oracle BPEL

For incorporating Human Workflow and/or Oracle Business Rules, use Oracle BPEL PM

For applying policy-centralization and reliable-messaging techniques on web-services,

use OSB

For stateless and short-lived web-service orchestrations use OSB

For synchronous entity-based services or pass-through operations use OSB

This gives us more clarity, providing appropriate separation of concerns without meaning that we

cannot use OSB and BPEL in conjunction for solving sophisticated integration scenarios:

BPEL

Service virtualization using OSB

OSB performing mediation duties in a Service Composition


SOA Magazine IV 10

Asynchronous queuing scenario with one-way invocation of a BPEL process through OSB

And how does this look in Oracle SOA Suite 12c?

After looking at the historic perspective, some of the great advantages of SOA Suite 12c have to

do with:

Stability

Continuity

Maturity

Unlike past releases, there’s not a major change in the runtime engine, nor in the set of

products that conform the suite. This has allowed Oracle to focus on substantially improving

each one of the tools, taking in account customer / developer feedback as well as industry

trends and requirements.

Oracle SOA Suite 12c, if anything, encourages SOA Practitioners to use BPEL and OSB together

in order to design and implement robust solutions with the ability to provide the required

flexibility, SLA compliance and transactional capacity the industry looks for.

The following improvements (among many others) seem to be the most relevant in this regard:


SOA Magazine IV 11

Unified IDE for BPEL and OSB (JDeveloper)

Unified Monitoring Console with end-to-end tracing capabilities (EM)

Quick start SOA Suite installer bundle for developers including OSB

Integrated Debugger for BPEL / OSB

Error Hospital

MDS tighter integration

Continuous Integration through Maven artifacts

Modularity profiles

Conclusion

While there indeed was a time when one product was more robust and mature than the

other in the Oracle FMW Stack (BPEL > Service Bus), this is not true anymore. Even in

11g this point was arguable to some degree, but in 12c both tools have been equally

upgraded and aligned with the industry tendencies mentioned beforehand.

Some of the controversy between these tools, especially among developers, had to do

with the presence of different IDEs for BPEL PM and OSB. This proved to be a very

impractical situation that has already been taken care of in 12c. JDev is now the IDE of

choice for developing Oracle SOA Suite components, whether it is with BPEL or Service

Bus.

Even though BPEL + Service Bus have always been able to work together, in the past

there was no pressing need to design solutions based on such a combination. Moreover,

the separation of concerns between the tools was not as clear as it is now, thanks to the

maturation of SOA Methodology. Nowadays, especially with SOA Suite 12c, BPEL & OSB

comprise a terrific and necessary combination. A dynamic duo whose combined

capabilities will let us face and successfully figure out the multiple challenges of

Industrial SOA, as well as reap its significant benefits.

We certainly hope that this body of work has been interesting, useful and enjoyable for you

appreciated reader. Let’s meet again in our next episode!! The SOA Myth Busters


SOA Magazine IV 12

Rolando Carrasco

Rolando Carrasco is a SOA Architect, co-founder and part of the S&P

Solutions team in Mexico and Latin America. He’s been working with

Oracle SOA since 2003/2004, and his professional career has been

focused in the integration space. He worked for HP and Oracle.

In Oracle he was part of the Product Management team with

responsibilities in the Latin-American region. Rolando is also co-

director of the Oracle Users Group in Mexico – ORAMEX. This user group is focused on Oracle

Technology, and since 2012 has been coordinating activities oriented to deliver events for the

community, and among other things to coordinate the OTN Tour.

The projects where Rolando has participated involve the usage of SOA, BPM, Webcenter, Identity

Management, Weblogic, Exalogic, and Webcenter. All of those technologies have been implemented

successfully in different customers, industries and even countries (Costa Rica, Peru, and Honduras).

Rolando has several published articles/videos at his own blog (oracleradio.blogspot.com) and also in the

Oracle Technology Network in Spanish.

Rolando is also an Oracle ACE.

Contact: Blog LinkedIn Twitter

Arturo Viveros

Arturo is an outstanding professional currently based in Mexico City, with 10

years of experience in the development, design, architecture and delivery of

IT Projects for a variety of industries. He is also a regular speaker in

technology conferences, both in Mexico and abroad. He is an Oracle ACE

Associate and works as an IT Senior Architect in S&P Solutions.

Arturo is also part of the coordinating committee for ORAMEX (Oracle User

Group in Mexico) and has recently achieved the Oracle SOA Certified IT

Architect certification as well as the Cloud Certified Architect and SOA

Certified Architect grades from Arcitura Inc. He is a certified trainer

authorized to deliver the SOA School and Cloud School modules both in English and in Spanish.

Arturo’s technical articles are frequently published on Oracle OTN (Spanish), and his blog

(oracletechnocore.blogspot.com) includes also several articles about Oracle technology in both

languages.

Contact: LinkedIn Twitter

http://oracleradio.blogspot.com/

http://mx.linkedin.com/in/rolandocarrasco

https://twitter.com/borland_c

http://mx.linkedin.com/pub/francisco-arturo-viveros/76/a4b/52a/

mailto:@gugalnikov


SOA Magazine IV 13

SOA Suite/B2B as a Critical Mission Hub for a High Volume Message Use

Case

Introduction

Stop. Think. Ok…, in the meanwhile 2 seconds has passed and 250 messages more were processed by a

mission critical hub built with Oracle B2B and SOA Suite which connects thousands of trading partners

and processes millions of messages per day, handling 40% of Global Air cargo Traffic.

In this article, you will find described high availability solution architecture, covering B2B and core SOA

Suite components as BPEL, along with Business Rules, Mediator and BAM integration, as well as lessons

learned in conducting such complex and mission-critical project starting from a set of legacy

applications.

Imagine now how many messages were processed when you finish reading it.

Mission and scope

The mission was to build a high available and performant message hub between different intervenients

in the air cargo industry integrating 15 thousand trading partners exchanging 3 Billion messages every

year and execute complex document validation, multi-factor identification, correlation and batching,

dynamic routing, transformations and monitoring.

The document standards involved elevated B2B core product for the implementation due to its

enhanced features available for document management. Main document standards are Air Cargo

market defined standards as IATA - Cargo Interchange Message Procedures (CIMP), EDI CargoFact and

CargoXML, as long other customer tailored documents based in FlatFile, XML and other custom format

totalling 238 different document types. Another important and distinctive requirement was the relation


SOA Magazine IV 14

between the envelope types in the exchanged messages. In this respect, except the standardize formats

EDI, XML that implicitly define the envelope type to follow, all the others, including CIMP, are decoupled

from the type of envelope that can wrap the message, and we are talking about 99 different and

customizable envelope types built to be used with any document format.

The transportation channels that can be used for message exchange are quite vast as well: different

trading partner can communicate with the platform using 8 different transportation protocols, both for

inbound and outbound.

All of these enhancements were done, never neglecting the flexibility that allows evolving the platform

for on-boarding customers, new message and envelope types achieving the desirable expansibility

needed in a constant change market wherein the velocity to add capabilities is preponderant.

Oracle B2B and SOA Suite – ‘Nice to meet you’

Due to its strong features, Oracle B2B was elected as the core product for this type of implementation

together with SOA suite components as BPEL, Mediator and Business Rules for back-ended operations. It

thus provide a centralized platform for document, partners and agreements management as a reliable

platform for document exchange between business partners.

The following features are per se the reasons to elect B2B as centre of this implemented architecture:

Multiple document protocol support as EDI, XML, Flat File and Custom-Defined

Document definition tools available with possibility to implement rich and complex validation rules

- Oracle Document Editor + Custom Editors for custom documents


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Document definition design time testing

Document translation and validation

Ability to set document callouts to handle custom document

Ability to set Channel callouts for custom inbound/outbound message processing

Document batching

Message resubmission capabilities

Message store-and-forward capabilities

Complex message identification and correlation

Complex sender and recipient identification based in different envelope types

Automatic message retry

Support for large documents

Message acknowledge support

Messaging security enablement (EDI)

Multiple envelope support

Envelope generation

Transport management

Multiple transport protocols supported – HTTP, SMTP, SOAP, TCP, JMS, MQ, FILE, FTP

Trading partner management

Trading partner downtime

Native integration with Oracle SOA suite and Oracle BAM

API for message and Trading Partner metadata access

E2E Message monitoring and auditing

Message metrics dashboards and reports

Partner Agreements

User Access management

Self Service Provisioning

Exception handling

On the document management side, it’s the ideal platform to leverage business standard documents

and manage agreements. However, Oracle B2B acts as a gateway requiring architecture to manage the

complete end-to-end business processes. This is where Oracle SOA Suite Service Component

Architecture (SCA) components come into picture. Oracle BPEL, Mediator and Business Rules play the

major role as back-end pieces in the global architecture.

Oracle B2B is in fact a component part of Oracle SOA Suite what makes the integration quite simple and

efficient. The integration between both components is ensured via out-of-the-box adapter implemented

as binding component in a SCA. All of this leveraged by the use of SOA Metadata Services repository

(MDS) allowing the sharing of different artefacts, as XML schemas or WSDL files among different

architectural components as central repository for B2B artefacts and configuration.

Service Composite Applications components were ultimate to implement the following capacities:


SOA Magazine IV 16

Routing and document handling business rules

Service orchestration

Message enrichment

Message canonicalization/normalization

Message duplication

Mapping and transformations

Document conversion

Message splitting

Message rejection

Message deferring

Message acknowledge

Legacy system integration

Exception handling

Oracle B2B and SOA Suite, together provide a natural and integrated architecture that enables a unified

platform with end-to-end instance capabilities, empowering standardization, governance, and security.

Solution architecture

B2B as a hub assumes that it is acting both as inbound and outbound gateway sharing the same

configuration for both directions. Trading partners are connected via inbound listening channels and

trading partner channels for delivery. In the message exchange process, B2B is responsible for

identifying both the sender and recipient(s) of the message, identifying the message type and verifying if

the sender is active to send such type of message, if the recipient is able to receive it and in which

format it is able to. Message validation and parsing (from raw to XML) for inbound messages and

message construction (from XML to raw) for outbound are also performed on B2B domain.

The host trading partner will be the virtual receiver of all incoming documents and the virtual sender of

all outgoing documents eliminating any point to point relation between trading partners and

documents. All of this consolidates the possibility of document normalization, allowing the definition of

message classes. This facilitates the usage of common objects between message types and formats


SOA Magazine IV 17

implemented in a canonical model eliminating point-to-point transformations and allowing putting in

place a mechanism of global mappings from the message format to canonical structure and from

canonical structure to the message format.

A native integration between Oracle B2B and Oracle SOA SCA allows covering all the necessary

requirements. In the picture bellow it’s shown a correspondence between components domains and

functionalities succeeding the message processing timeline.

Apart of the functionalities mapped to B2B and SOA SCA, its integration across the SOA platform allows

to naturally implementing an end to end process tracking and exception handling having all exceptions

being delivered to SCA to be handled in properly. In this case in particular, the solution is covering

acknowledge to the sender that the message failed and the reasons behind the exception. This is an

extremely valuable solution feature, since most of the exceptions are typically generated from invalid

documents. This allows the sender to correct and fix the messages interactively reducing the time

needed to implement such corrections.

This is also helps the customers to fit to the market standards reducing custom made message

definitions.

Inbound

Transport callouts are assigned to Inbound/Outbound B2B channels responsible for parsing the

envelope to a B2B Internal Properties native structure. Then, two possible paths can be followed for

document parsing:


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Native xEngine used for supported documents

Document Callouts for custom documents processing

This functionality offers the possibility to implement custom classes to deal with document types that

are not covered out-of-the-box. In this implementation, a custom parser was implemented to generate

XSD and JAVA classes from standard language Augmented Backus–Naur Form i(ABNF) that can be

associated as B2B Document Callout to dynamically execute parsing, construction and validation of

documents. Please, bear in mind that a good architecture of this callouts is paramount to guarantee full

performance answer when processing such documents.

SCA Core processing

The message is delivered via B2BAdapter to a composite and so entering the core domain of the

solution. It is then in this domain that the message is handled and all the necessary core functionalities

are provided:

Mapping from message type structure to canonical structure. Normalizing the message allows to

reuse functionalities that become agnostic to every different message type to be processed. Those

mappings are implemented using XSLTs that are read dynamically from the MDS

Business rules are verified and deliver an outcome list of functionalities that affects the message

exchange processing

The message is orchestrated to the different core functionalities guided by rules

Communication with the B2B repository for enrichment and operations using the API provided

The message is mapped from canonical structure to the message type structure and delivered via

B2BAdapter to B2B

Outbound

Similar to the inbound. the message and envelope are constructed using the xEngine or Document

callout and delivered to the final recipient using the configured trading partner channel.

BAM Integration

The integration between the components and BAM is established on the B2B side by native integration

based in Advance Queue and from SOA SCA via sensors.

Exception Handling

The exception handling implemented transversally allows end-to-end coverage of exceptions. B2B

exceptions are communicated natively to a SCA via B2B exception handling queue. EDN infrastructure

together with B2B Exception handling and SOA Fault Handling Framework is used for exception handling

purpose guaranteeing 100% message reliability on the platform.

What about performance?


SOA Magazine IV 19

For performance, a full implementation of the message processing without the need to set any database

connection was defined leveraging all the configuration and persistence on the Oracle SOA Infra; This

significantly reduced the interactions with the DB.

Cherry picking the components to reduce dehydration and persistence allowed to maintain reliability

and adequate performance. On composites side a one-way-delivery policy exchange pattern was

defined as a core pattern allowing the composites to be fine-tuned in order to reduce the persistence

and improve performance.

Since B2B and SOA Suite SCA were running in the same domain, the integration adapter between B2B

and SCA was configured to use in-memory methods; a very effective option in terms of performance and

reliability. Other options as JMS or AQ can be used in case B2B and SOA are not running in the same

domain.

Bottom line

This was a demanding project but represents an important challenge for a platform that excels in all of

the full capabilities of Oracle B2B. It was a winning strategy since most of core functionalities were

presented and thanks to a close collaboration between implementation team and Oracle’s Product

Management and Development teams elevated B2B to a more complete solution meeting recent

market demands.

Success Factors:

Standardization of messages supported by the platform permitted reduction of costs compared to

custom tailor made messages oriented solution

Reducing consumption of invalid messages allowed freeing up of physical resources resulting in a

more scalable platform targeted for a greater return on investment

Flexibility became key and the users are now empowered using graphical tools for provisioning new

documents definitions using Oracle B2B Document Editor and XSLT to perform the canonicalization

of those messages

Bringing standardization and normalization on the messages allowed the customer to agilize the

process of onboarding and reduce costs, providing simultaneously better service to their clients

The platform is 100% Cargo-XML ready – IATA is pushing to use this format rather than old

fashioned CIMP standard; an IATA Cargo-XML Task Force initiative now exists to force this move

Final remarks

Access all of these Oracle B2B functionalities on Oracle SOA Suite 12c or, for the version 11g, by

downloading and installing the SOA bundle Patch 19190139 11.1.1.7.5 or the merge patch 18952479 via

My Oracle Support.


SOA Magazine IV 20

For more details and guidance on how to use some of this B2B functionalities feel free to have a look at

contents in one of our blogs: http://fusionbpmsoa.blogspot.co.uk/ Article title: Oracle SOA Suite/B2B as

a Critical Mission Hub for a High Volume Message Use Case

Bruno Neves Alves

Company: eProseed - www.eproseed.com

Partner, Technical Director - Member of the CTO Office – eProseed UK

Bruno has been working with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies for 10

years across Europe and South America, holds several Oracle certifications

and is deeply experienced as SOA/BPM Senior Consultant, Solution

Architect, Team Leader and Pre-Sales. Currently he performs the role of

Technical Director as part of the CTO Office and Partner of eProseed UK.

He is experienced in the international delivery of large & complex full

SOA/BPM projects and holds the capability to act as architect defining reference architectures and best

practices guidelines for SOA implementations. Furthermore, he is also speaker in different Oracle events

and has been delivering training all over the world on Oracle University behalf.


http://fusionbpmsoa.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.eproseed.com/

http://fusionbpmsoa.blogspot.co.uk/

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/brunonevesalves

https://twitter.com/b_alves


SOA Magazine IV 21

ADF Runtime Interface Generator for BPM Human Tasks

Abstract

Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) is a leading business innovation platform that enables enterprises to

create and run agile intelligent business applications while providing a wide range of features. These

allow operational efficiency and agility during process development time, in doing so organizations can

reach process quality in a faster and improved way.

OFM platform includes a wide range of tools and technologies in order to satisfy different needs. In our

case we have made use of two important technologies BPM, to streamline customers’ business

processes, and ADF, that simplifies development by providing out-of-the-box infrastructure services and

visual and declarative development experience.

In what concerns BPM technology, human tasks activities are an important player regarding efficiency

and effectiveness since it enables to model an easy interaction with the end user in a BPM process.

The visual and declarative experience of ADF allows us to create these human tasks in two ways. The

first approach is to use the out-of-the-box option to auto-generate the Human Task form. Secondly by

manually creating UI pages as the number of human task forms designed.

The first approach will generate as many, separate, projects as human tasks, the latter will create as

many user interface pages as human task forms. Based on these assumptions we have developed an

ADF custom library that generates, at runtime, the human tasks interface. We have achieved this by

using only one task flow, decreasing our development time significantly.

Complementarily to this task flow we implemented a java library that creates an abstraction layer of the

BPM interactions. In this library we added some processing of the human task payloads, and provide

basic caching of services and user contexts. This mechanism has proved us that having one single

interface can really decrease development time of new processes at least 85.7% as well having cost-

effectiveness in hours. In this article, understand how we implemented our human task interface

generator in major customers on main business areas such as Retail, Finance and Energy.


SOA Magazine IV 22

Introduction

The projects that we have developed in Oracle BPM have plenty of interaction with the use of human

tasks and the options we have for its development can bring a huge complexity by having several

projects, or several user interface pages, to manage.

Develop once reuse often has always been our motto when developing with Oracle ADF, and based on

these assumptions and in our knowledge in BPM’s middleware we focused our efforts on centralizing in

a single interface, Human Task Generator (HTG), all human tasks that we would generate. On this single

interface we are able to display whichever ADF faces components offer, with dependencies between

them, process the human task with custom or system actions, enable or disable user interaction based

on permissions, and display process information as well as help topics so the user can be provided with

context.

In order to achieve this goal we developed our HTG based on a custom made library (BpmLib) that

abstracts BPM’s middleware java classes. In our BpmLib we expose all the needed methods to get

human tasks’ payload, replying actions, and so on.

In the next chapters of this article, we will provide in more detail how we have implemented our HTG as

well as the BPM library.

Architecture

Our HTG was engineered based on the convention that it should be reusable and extensible

interchangeably of the aplication, project or even customer who will use it, so that if our clients

requirements change as well as the application target we could easily adjust to new requests.

We divided our implementation in three layers, (1) Data layer, (2) Business Layer and (2) View Layer, as

shown in Figure 1.


SOA Magazine IV 23

Figure 1 – HTG Architecture

The Data Layer encloses two levels of information: BPM’s data in which BPM Suite resides on, and the

custom made data model which supports the customers’ business logic. In this last case the amount and

type of information depends on each customer. For instance, in one of our clients we did not have the

necessity to implement any type of data logic, while in other we had a fairly complex database model.

The Business Layer clusters and abstracts the features and requirements of the Human Task Generator.

Our BpmLib Library collects the data for each process and their related human tasks through BPM’s

middleware API and exposes it to be consumed by the Model and/or Application Module applications’

as showed in Figure 1. In no case do we bypass BPM’s middleware API to directly access BPM’s data in

the data base. By following this rule we protect our code of any change that may occur in BPM’s data

structure in following releases of oracle’s BPM product. The Model application exposes data through

View Objects. The Application Module application clusters it and exposes them. Here single methods

are also made available to the View Layer.

The View Layer consumes the methods and View Objects exposed by the Business Layer and display data

through the Human Task Generator application. The HTG has the capability to be reused by different

types of environments, for example: (1) ADF applications, (2) ADF Mobile Browser applications, and (3)

MAF applications. Depending on the application target, you may choose the HTG interface to use. Each

one is an application deployed as a Shared Library to allow isolation and reusability providing two

immediately advantages: (1) is available to be deployed as a shared library to any Weblogic Server, and

(2) can be incorporated in any final ADF application.


SOA Magazine IV 24

Custom BPM Library – BpmLib

Looking in more detail to the BpmLib component, it is a java library that is responsible for all the calls to

the BPM API, and returning our custom data types, creating an abstraction layer over the BPM API. It

also has other functions like caching and preprocessing data for the ADF interface generation.

Creating an abstraction layer has all the normal advantages, and in our case have helped us to expose

custom methods in the way we needed them in order to achieve our final goal. The API is very powerful,

allowing all kinds of interactions with the underlying engines. But since we only needed a subset of

those functionalities that meant that there were many options in the API that we didn’t need. We used

the BpmLib to hide those options, for instance when querying processes and tasks the API allows us to

define which columns we want to be returned. This library "hides" that functionality and always returns

the same columns. Another example is the use of flex fields on human tasks. Since we return our own

custom made classes we already include in them the business data that’s stored in the flex fields so that

the upper layers don’t have to be concerned with the origin of the data. Using our own classes also

allows us to flatten the class structure, simplifying access to the other fields.

Instantiating the service objects of the API is a heavy operation and as such we cache those objects.

However this raises a problem, this library is running on a different managed server than the SOA and

BPM Suite. When the SOA managed server is restarted, the connection becomes invalid, and all calls to

the API throw a javax.ejb.EJBException. We had to include a mechanism to catch those exceptions and

invalidate the service cache. On the other hand, since all managed servers are clustered, we did not

need to account for unavailability of the SOA managed server. Given that in the case of unavailability of

the SOA managed server most of the functionality would be unavailable anyway, that was not a

requirement.

Other cached data is the security contexts of the users. Users are authenticated by the ADF

infrastructure, but with that information we then need to create the security contexts that the BPM API

uses. Since this creation is also a heavy operation we cache these contexts. However we had to be

careful to not create vulnerabilities that would allow a user to use the cached context of another. We

also had to invalidate each entry regularly to allow new security definitions, like group and role

membership changes, to be picked up.

Regarding the automatic generation of human tasks interface, this library is responsible for fetching and

preprocessing the payload of the tasks so that ADF layers can generate the interface.

On the BPM side we define the task payload using not only the base XSD types like string and date, but

also other custom types, ranging from generic types like text to indicate to the interface generator that

the field should be rendered has a text area, to other, more business specific types, like account, which

the generator knows how they have to be rendered. This also includes types that have to be rendered as

several controls. These type definitions are deployed to MDS allowing us to share them across


SOA Magazine IV 25

processes. So, as we implement more and more processes, the number of new types for each new

process rapidly decreases allowing us to reduce implementation complexity and times.

Then on the BpmLib we created our own java class representing a payload item, containing the name of

the item (a key to a resource file), its value, type, if it is editable or read only, and if it is visible. Lastly we

expose two methods:

getTaskPayload: for a given tasknumber returns a list of payload items;

updateTaskPayload: for a tasknumber and a Map<String, Object> updates the task

payload of the task.

GetTaskPayload Method

The getTaskPayload method starts by calling the following code:

ITaskMetadataService.getTaskDefinition(context,task).getWorkflowConfiguration().getPayload().getMessageAttribute();

It returns a list of MessageAttributeType. Each MessageAttributeType represents one entry of the task

payload that we see on the .task file. While this gives us some information (name, type, and if it is

updatable) it is not enough, so we need to also get the actual schema of the payload. This schema is

available on the MDS, and there are several ways to access it. We chose to use the URL

http://[host]:[port]/soa-infra/services/[partition]/[composite]/[path_to_file]/[name_of_task]Payload.xsd

We can feed this url to the XSDBuilder like

XMLSchema schema = new XSDBuilder().build(url);

and get an object representing the payload. From here is just a matter of iterating

MessageAttributeType list and for each item get the corresponding XMLElement of the payload and

build our own PayloadItem object to return.

UpdateTaskPayload

The updateTaskPayload method receives the values to update in a Map<String, Object> where the String

(key) is the name of the payload item, and the Object (value) is its value. The actual class of the Object is

dependent on the type of the payload item. For simple types it's the closest equivalent in java to the

type, for example a String, an Integer, or a Date. For complex types it's a String with the XML value that

needs to be stored. It starts by calling the Task.getPayloadAsElement() method to get an XMLElement

with the current payload. Then it also gets the XMLSchema in the same way as the getTaskPayload. This

is needed to know the type of each payload item. It then updates the XMLElement with the values

passed in the parameter and calls the ITaskService().updateTask(context, task) method to save the

changes.


SOA Magazine IV 26

Human Task Generator

The Human Task Generator (HTG) is implemented on the basis of the previous layers, Data and Business

Layer, and centralizes in a single interface all the possible human tasks forms from all feasible BPM

Processes to be implemented.

In order to achieve our goal we divided our HTG Task Generator into smaller and self-contained

modules, each one with their own specific contribution. The modules are: (1) HTG Transformation

Model Engine, the core of the engine where human task’s payload are transformed so that can be

recognized by the interface’s page, (2) HTG Declarative Components, ADF declarative components to be

reused and show data in a particular manner, (3) HTG Generic Task Attributes Bindings, the binding of

the human tasks attributes to the page, (4) HTG Generic Task Attributes Validations, definition of

attributes validations, such as conditional required fields and data validation on fields, and finally (5)

HTG Generic Task Attributes Conditional Visibility, fields visibility based on value changes of specific

attributes during user processing the task.

HTG Transformation Model Engine

The core of the engine where human task’s payload are transformed are located at the Application

Module in the Business Layer, as depicted in Figure 1. Here we expose the ‘getHumanTaskPayload’

method as a class available for clients.

We established our core engine here due to the following reasons:

The ‘getHumanTaskPayload’ method is exposed in the application module and

therefore can be invoked independently of the targeted platform (ADF, ADF Mobile

Browser or Mobile Application Framework);

Deployed as shared library to any Weblogic Server;

Any change made in this module doesn’t affect the upper layer and can be deploy as

demand since the contract doesn’t get broken;

Proximity with BpmLib.

During human task’s payload transformation we are able to support two types of fields: Simple and

Complex. Simple types are single ADF components such as input text, select one choice, or input date as

well as many others. Complex types are custom created components that encapsulate two or more ADF

components. For instance, search field that is the combination of an input text and a button, or a

custom address component as depicted in Figure 2, where we have an arrangement of several

components into a single custom Address component.


SOA Magazine IV 27

Figure 2 - Address Complex Type

Our HTG transformation model Engine is structured on java classes to represent human tasks attributes.

The java classes we have created for that purpose are: HumanTaskAttribute,

HumanTaskAttributeFacade, HumanTaskPayload. Their relationship can be viewed in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - HTG transformation model Engine Java Classes

HumanTaskAttribute java class represent each attribute of the human task payload regardless of being

based on a primitive type, simple type or even complex type. In those cases in which the attribute is a

complex type, each XSD element is represented as a HumanTaskAttribute. The variables we have

defined for this java class are:

name – internal attribute name. If the attribute is a complex type the name is the

concatenation of human task’s attribute name plus the name of the element inside the

XSD.

value – the value the attribute is to be set.

type – contains the type of the attribute, i.e. STRING for string attributes, INTEGER for

integer attributes, and so on. For complex types the type is similar to XSD name in order

to be easily recognized, i.e. ADDRESS for attributes based on address XSD.

isReadOnly – true if the attribute is not editable, otherwise false.

isRequired – true if the attribute is mandatory, otherwise false.

isHidden – true if the attribute must not be displayed on the interface, otherwise false.

This type of attributes behaves like auxiliary variables.


SOA Magazine IV 28

isVisible – true if the attribute should be visible, otherwise false. This variable is useful

for setting conditional visibility of the attributes on the interface.

HumanTaskAttributeFacade java class encloses all attributes of each human task payload’s attribute,

regardless of the type (primitive, simple or complex). In those cases where the attribute is based on a

complex type this java class has as many HumanTaskAttributes as elements in the XSD. In the other

cases, primitive and simple attributes, this class has only one HumanTaskAttribute attribute. This

situation can be viewed in Figure 3. The variables we have defined for this java class are:

type – contains the same value as the attribute type in HumanTaskAttribute java class.

This variable exists only for code simplicity reasons on later data access.

attributes – represents the list of HumanTaskAttributes (List<HumanTaskAttribute>).

For this same java class we have defined four methods:

getValue – get human task’s attribute value based on attributes internal name. If

internal name doesn’t exist a NULL is returned.

setValue – set the new value for attribute’s internal name.

hasKey – returns true if human task’s internal name exists, otherwise returns false.

getValues – get all human task payload attributes. The returning value is a java.util.Map

where the Key contains the attribute internal name and the Value the value of the

attribute.

Regarding HumanTaskPayload, this java class encloses all human task payloads’ attributes regardless of

its attributes complexity (primitive, simple or complex type). This java class has the following variable:

humanTaskPayloadItems – gathers all data of human task payload attributes.

For this same java class we have defined three methods that are based on HumanTaskAttribute’s

methods:

getValues – get all human task payload attributes. The returning value is a java.util.Map

where the Key contains the attribute internal name and the Value the value of the

attribute.

getValue – get human task’s attribute value based on attributes internal name. If

internal name doesn’t exist a NULL is returned.

setValue – set the new value for attribute’s internal name.


SOA Magazine IV 29

In addition to previous java classes we have two more with no less importance HumanTaskUtilities and

HumanTaskGeneratorAMImpl. The first one is a utility class that helps parsing the XSDs’ complex types

while the second one is the implementation class of the “HumanTaskGenerator” application module

where the method “getHumanTaskPayload” is exposed and returns all human task payload attributes

after transformation.

The java class HumanTaskUtilities has the following methods to perform the transformation:

isComplexType – true if the attribute is complex, i.e. attribute based on a XSD,

otherwise false.

typeHasDropDownValues – true if the attribute is based on a XSD and one of its

elements’ name is prefixed with “ddl”, otherwise false.

During iteration over human task payload attributes returned by BpmLib the type for the current

attribute is determined. Depending on its type one of the following methods is called:

addSimpleTypeAttribute – If the attribute is simple or primitive then this method is

called. In this method the variables of HumanTaskAttribute and

HumanTaskAttributeFacade java classes are set, and then added to the top level class

HumanTaskPayload.

addComplexTypeAttribute – If the attribute is complex then this method is called. In this

method we perform the strip of human task attribute’s XSDs in order to get its

elements, set HumanTaskAttribute and HumanTaskAttributeFacade java classes

variables and add them to the top level class HumanTaskPayload.

addDropDownValuesToAttribute – If the attribute is complex and the current XSD

element being parsed has the prefix “ddl” then this method is called. In this method an

extra HumanTaskAttribute entry on the overall structure (Figure 3) is created in order

to store the list of items for the control.

HTG Declarative Components

Declarative components play a major role in showing the same type of data in a desirable layout.

Regarding HTG the declarative components are important for Complex type’s fields available in human

tasks’ payload. By creating this type of components we have gained the following advantages:

Make use of the primitive ADF Faces components;

Define custom behavior logic for each new declarative component, for example during

value change events, etc., of the primitive ADF Faces components;

New declarative components can be created as needed without interfering with the

others.


SOA Magazine IV 30

Deployed as shared library to any Weblogic Server.

The universe of declarative components already developed for a generic target audience is depicted in

Error! Reference source not found..

Table 1 – HTG Declarative Components

Declarative Component Image

Address

BetweenDates

SearchModal

Our experience tell us that many other declarative components are able to be developed with different

levels of complexity depending on each customer needs to display data.

HTG Generic Task Attributes Binding

The HTG is implemented with a single taskflow that encapsulates all logic defined for the human tasks

and is responsible for generation of the components at runtime.

The following diagram represents the execution flow that is performed in our HTG taskflow.

Our HTG module is defined by a set of input parameters. These input parameters are used to determine

which human task to show. Then a preprocessing is done in order to: (1) get the human task payload

based on our custom made BpmLib library and (2) determine if the user that is trying to acquire the task

has permissions to interact with. After this two previous steps are completed each human task attribute

is rendered according to its type.

Input

Parameters

Preprocessing Runtime Component

Design


SOA Magazine IV 31

The generated human tasks have system and custom actions. System actions are equal for all tasks and

are those available in BPM Workspace, the latter are defined for each task during process development.

Regarding the last step of our execution flow, Runtime Component Design, we have developed a task

flow for rendering the human task attributes. The task flow is implemented as depicted in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - HTG Payload Task Flow

All starts by getting human task’s payload attributes with previous transformations already done. Then

it’s time to set attributes visibility. This kind of visibility is related to attributes conditional visibility, i.e. if

there is any attribute that its visibility is based on another attribute’s value then it is defined at this

moment. The next step is about getting the values to populate the selectOneChoice ADF Faces

component. Last but not least, the HTGPayload fragment is responsible for rendering all human task

attributes from any possible Human Task, as shown in Attachment 1.

Note: This task flow may and can be enhanced for those cases you have an ADF faces control where you

need to search information in modal in order to set human tasks attributes values.

In HTGPayload fragment an iteration over all human task payload attributes is performed and

depending on its type it will be rendered by one of the underlying components available from the set of

components inside the “af:foreach” ADF faces component. Any new component needed should be

putted here.

Each component is populated based on the data structure previously presented to represent all human

task payloads’ attributes regardless of its complexity. For more detail about how to assign components

properties you can find an example here.

http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/how-to-create-your-own-dynamic-form


SOA Magazine IV 32

HTG Generic Task Attributes Validations

In regard of task validation we have three types of validations:

Simple Component level. For example: input fields for numeric types only.

Custom Component level. For example, dependent fields in a custom component.

Task submission level. For example, submission of the task form with validation rules for

individual components that cannot be filled.

In what concerns the first type of validation, Simple Components, it is defined in “validator”

components’ property, as depicted in Figure .

Figure 5 - HTG Component Validation

In order to centralize all of this type of validations we have created “ValidatorsHTG” java class. This class

is instantiated with session scope in “Managed Beans” tab of faces-config.xml file. In Figure 5 are shown

two component validations of two different types in “ValidatorsHTG” java class.


SOA Magazine IV 33

Figure 5 - Validators HTG Java Class

Regarding validation for Custom Components, this can be done in two ways: (1) in the “validator”

components’ property of the declarative component, basic validation, or (2) in custom classes for more

complex validation, for example, imagine that Address declarative component is only valid if “Country”

field is filled as well as “Address” and “Postal Code”, otherwise an error message is raised to the

frontend. For this kind of behavior we have developed “HTGComplexTypesValidation” java class where

all generic validations will be available for future reuse. In Figure 6 is shown the Address complex type

validation.


SOA Magazine IV 34

Figure 6 - Address Complex Type Validation

This approach encloses components behavior and complexity in one single place and therefore

promotes more and better reuse.

Finally, validation at task submission reuses complex types’ validations as well as any other validation.

The developer has full freedom and control to do any validation for any human task of any BPM process.

Validations engine is structured as depicted in Figure 7, where “ProcessToValidateA” and

“ProcessToValidateB” are java classes of real future BPM processes.


SOA Magazine IV 35

Figure 7 - HTG Validation Java Classes Architecture

HTGValidations (Figure 8) is the top level java class called by the user just before replying to the human

task. The human task is replied if and only if all attributes (simple or complex attributes) and overall

dependencies between attributes are valid. The method “validateHumanTask” is the main method

called to perform the validation of processes human tasks.


SOA Magazine IV 36

Figure 8 - HTGValidations Java Class

Human tasks’ validation is made inside of each process java class created for the purpose as shown in

Figure 8. For example, inside of “ProcessToValidateA” java class, Figure 9, human tasks’ for this process

will be validated.


SOA Magazine IV 37

Figure 9 - ProcessToValidateA Java Class

HTG Generic Task Attributes Conditional Visibility

There may be cases in which certain human task attributes visibility is based on another attribute’s

value. Conditional visibility has two setting points: (1) one on entering the “htg-payload-flow.xml” task

flow (Figure 4), and (2) other in any value change listener of any ADF Faces component or declarative

component.

Regarding the first setting point, before human task is displayed is needed to check attributes

conditional visibility, and why? Imagine the human task has already been edited before and there is a

dependency between attributes. In this case when reentering in the human task is necessary to gather

the value of the attribute that causes the other attribute to change its visibility.

Human task conditional visibility is developed so that each human task of each process has its own

conditional rules of visibility. This approach promotes flexibility to define attributes visibility.


SOA Magazine IV 38

Real World Benefits

In this chapter we pretend to answer some basic questions: (1) how useful our approach can be in the

development process of a new application, (2) how reusable can it be? There are dependencies on

customer and his business area, and (3) if there is a real world benefit spending more time at the

beginning implementing a generic methodology in spite of following the regular way Oracle developed

its product.

(1) How useful our approach can be in the development process of a new application?

Since we developed our HTG in well-defined building layers (Data Layer, Business Layer and View Layer)

where each one communicates with the nearest layer, they can be developed independently of the

others. Even more, if there isn’t broken contract on methods of above layers.

Each project inside of each layer is available as a “Shared Library” and therefore deployed independently

to the Weblogic server. This approach takes the same advantage, as described before, along with not

being necessary to deploy all the projects to the server if only one has really changed.

When a new application is ready to be developed, independently of the business area, and needs to

provide Human Tasks interfaces, the developer just imports the library into the application and easily

drag-and-drop the HTG wherever is needed. It behaves as a regular ADF Faces component.

The user will be facing a standardized interface for all human tasks independently of the process.

Nevertheless, the developer will have fewer interventions regarding layouts, forgotten fields, etc.., and

therefore lower error-prone probability.

(2) How reusable can it be? There are dependencies on customer and his business area?

Here we do a study on the implementation of the HTG in the three different customers of different

business areas provided us with insight of the level of reusability of our engineered solution. The next

table (Table 2) agglomerates the data by customer’s business area, as well as the total number of

processes and human tasks created using HTG versus human tasks created from scratch.

Table 2 - HTG Percentage of Reusability

Retail Finance Energy Total

Nº Processes 36 9 3 48

Nº Human Tasks 96 34 5 135

Human Task Generator

(HTG)

81 34 5 120


SOA Magazine IV 39

Custom Human Tasks 15 0 0 15

Percentage of Reusability 84.4% 100% 100% 88.9%

Another overall perspective of the previous results can also be seen in the next graphic, Figure 10.

Figure 10 - HTG Percentage of Reusability

The previous table depicts the success of using our solution, in the banking industry the HTG, satisfies all

customer needs. In the retail sector there is a great percentage of satisfaction, and finally in the last case

the customer needs are satisfied but only a few small processes were implemented.

One of the leading reasons for these results was our capability to be able to evolve Complex Component

Types as the customer needed them, with the underlying validations for each component and the

overall human task. The modularization of our HTG in different layers was another advantage since we

never mixed business logic inside viewing data and vice-versa.

(3) Is there a real world benefit spending more time at the beginning implementing a

generic methodology in spite of following the regular way Oracle developed its product?

All our customers wanted their own custom made Workspace, integrated within a single application,

with customized look-and-feel, and custom business rules associated both in the process and interface.

Based on this starting point, in any situation we needed to develop a library to interact with the BPM’s

middleware, the BpmLib. Once we developed our own library, and after some experiments regarding

developing human tasks interfaces, we saw that developing a custom hand-made interface to generate

human tasks was not so far away.

After understanding all these facts we tried to realize the impact of a HTG would have. Therefore we

made some tests to compare our HTG with generating human tasks interfaces using Oracle’s out-of-the-


SOA Magazine IV 40

box approach. The results are based on our customers’ requirements and level of customization needed

to achieve the same final results in both cases. The following results regard the development of each

new human task interface (Table 3).

Table 3 - Spent time setting a human task interface using HTG versus without using

Spent time setting a

human task interface

without using HTG

(In Hours)

Spent time setting a


using HTG

(In Hours)

Generate Interface (ADF Taskflow

based on human task)

0 0

Customize Interface (Create a new

taskflow for each human task with

clients customizations)

3 0

Implement Validations 2 1

Integration of the human task

with the main application

1 0

Data submission 1 0

Total 7 1

As Table 3 depicts, using HTG takes less 6 hours developing each new human task interface,

independently of the process.

Another important conclusion is the cost-effectiveness that we took by using HTG instead of the regular

approach. In the next table we present these results:

Table 4 - Cost-Effective using HTG

Using HTG Without using HTG

Total human tasks which used HTG 120

Total time spent to develop each 1 7


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(In Hours)

Total time spent to develop all

human tasks interfaces

120 840

Cost-Effective (In Hours) 85.7%

As you can see by using our engineered solution we were able to have a cost-effectiveness of 85.7%

hours during our developments fewer interventions and therefore lowering probability of development

errors.

Conclusions

Based on our experience in major projects in different industries, we engineered an accelerator to

automatically generate the interfaces for the processes human tasks. This mechanism has proved to

decrease implementation time at least 85.7%, and thus increasing productivity.

In order to achieve our main goal we developed the HTG (Human Task Generator) based on a custom

library, BpmLib, that abstracts the interactions with the BPM’s middleware. We followed the convention

that HTG should be reusable and extensible interchangeably of the application, project or even

customer.

We structured our HTG in three layers: Data layer, Business layer and View layer, each one with a well

define scope and purpose so that future changes or enhancements could be easily overcome.

The entire module BpmLib, Model, Application Module and HTG is decoupled from the application

business logic, and thus can be used in other BPM applications. Not only can the entire module be

reused, but also its components independently (BPMLib, Model-AppModule).

We have answered some important questions in detail, such as: (1) how useful our approach can be in

the development process of a new application, (2) how reusable can it be depending on the customer

and his business area, and (3) if there is a real world benefit spending more time at the beginning

developing a generic methodology in spite of following the regular use of the product.

In conclusion, this approach of developing a reusable module for human task generation is only feasible

if at starting point we have the knowledge that there is a significant amount of processes/human tasks

to be developed. Having in regard that after the module is developed every change is centralized

allowing time saving in development achieving a better return of investment.


SOA Magazine IV 42

Pedro Gabriel

Pedro Gabriel is an ADF and BPM developer at Link Consulting, a

Portuguese Oracle Platinum Partner. He is responsible for developing and

architecturing ADF solutions for the retail and finance sector. He is also

involved in BPM projects where he implemented well accepted solutions.

Pedro Gabriel interests continue to focus on these technologies and

spread his knowledge to different Oracle technologies. Before, he worked

with Microsoft Technologies

Contact: Blog LinkedIn

Danilo Manmohanlal

Danilo works at Link Consulting since 2010 and is one of the leading ADF

architects. He is involved in enterprise-level BPM/ADF projects and has

implemented solutions for the retail and finance sector.


Diogo Henriques

Diogo Henriques is the BPM Technical Leader at Link Consulting, a Portuguese Oracle Platinum Partner.

He has worked with Oracle BPM for almost 5 years, since 11.1.1.3 Beta, including a few large scale

projects. Before, he worked with Oracle Workflow for 3 years.


https://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/

http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/pedro-gabriel/6/150/807/


http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/danilo-manmohanlal/12/560/714/pt


http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/diogo-henriques/1/451/227/pt


SOA Magazine IV 43

Attachments

Attachment 1 - HTG Payload Fragment


SOA Magazine IV 44

In-depth look into Oracle API Catalog (OAC) 12c

With the release of Oracle Enterprise Repository 12c another product was released. Oracle API Catalog 12c (OAC) allows you to build a catalog of your organization APIs. OAC provides a layer of visibility to those APIs so application development knows what and which one to use. OAC includes a simple metamodel for an API asset, automation to populate OAC, and the ability for users to search OAC for APIs and understand the details of the APIs to assess their fit in the user’s application.

Installation

I’m not going to bore you with the details about the installation by giving a installation guide. It took me about 40 minutes from scratch (excluding downlOERoad time). The steps are describes in the installation guide Oracle provides. OAC is part of the OER 12c installation jar, but can be licensed and installed, as an own managed domain, without licensing and installing OER.

The steps to take on high level (from scratch):

1. Download and install Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware Infrastructure 12c, Oracle Enterprise Repository 12c, RCU patch 18791727 and Weblogic patch 18718889 (these last two are important, else you can’t install OAC).

2. Run RCU (oracle_common/bin/rcu.sh|bat) and create the OAC repository 3. Run Weblogic Domain creation (weblogic/bin/config.sh|bat) and create a new which includes

OAC. 4. After installation and startup of weblogic and managed service you can find the OAC console at

url: http://serverhost:8111/oac

Note: if you harvesting from another weblogic server (like SOA Suite 12c), the weblogic patch should also be installed there.

Taking the first steps

When taking my first steps the official getting started guide can help you a lot. OAC has four high-level features. OAC collects services, it has a harvester which creates API assets in OAC. After harvesting you can add metadata to the API assets like description, tags and documentation. After harvesting and editing an API asset it can be published so it is visible for application development. Published APIs can be discovered and used through the API Catalog console and via the Oracle JDeveloper Oracle Enterprise Repository plug-in.

Logging in for the first time

After installing FMW & OAC 12c and starting the Weblogic server you can login into the provided OAC console (default) running at http://serverhost:8111/oac.

http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/oac/CATIG.pdf

http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/oac/index.html


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OAC12c: Login to the provided console (admin / weblogic 1)

The default username and password is admin / weblogic1. The first time you are asked to change the password.

AOAC12c: First-time login needs password change

After changing the password you will login into the console. The dashboard will be empty because no APIs are harvested yet. But when APIs are harvested they are listed at this page. On this page you can also navigate to “My APIs” which list the API you bookmarked.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/01-oac-login1.png

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/02-oac-change-password1.png


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OAC12c: Empty dashboard after first-time login

As admin, navigate to “Admin”, you can configure Users and Departments, control Sessions, change System settings and Import/Export the catalog. This blog will go in to the Admin features later on.

OAC12c: Admin page for configuring users, departments, sessions and change system settings

Collecting / harvesting services

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/03-oac-ftdashboard.png

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/04-oac-admin-page.png


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The first activity is to harvest APIs into OAC. The harvester is used to populate OAC with API assets from SOA Suite and Service Bus or other deployed services. The harvesting process can be run from the command line or can be integrated into the build process. The latter can be used to automatically do the harvest at build time. Harvested API assets will get a “Draft” state and won’t be visible to developers yet.

For this blog I will use the command line harvester. There are to types of harvesters; one for SOA Suite, OER & File-based assets and one for harvesting OSB. I will use the first harvester and use it with integrated SOA Suite 12c environment.

OAC12c: Harvest assets using command line harvester

For this blog I changed the HarvesterSettings.xml, which is decribed here, and added OAC en SOA server information, including projects to harvest.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/05-oac-harvesteroptions.png

https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/oac/administer-cat/harvest_oac.htm#CATCG433


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OAC12c: Change Harvester Settings in supplied XML configuration

Doing it like this you don’t have to add any parameters to harvest.sh|bat. If you want to harvest a specific asset you can use the command line properties, for example another SOA composite.

harvest.bat -remote_url localhost:7003 -remote_username weblogic -remote_server_type SOASuite -remote_project ValidatePayment_rev1.0 -soa_partition default

The result after running the harvest command should look something like on the image below (in preview mode).

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/06-oac-harvestersettings1.png


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OAC12c: Result of running harvest command (preview mode)

View harvested APIs

After harvesting you first asset(s) you can login the OAC console to see the result. Assets that are harvested will get the “Draft” status, thats why after logging into the OAC console again, no APIs are published and visible on the dashboard. Search on Service Type = Draft to view newly harvested APIs.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/07-oac-harvesterresult1.png


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OAC12c: Search on draft for freshly harvested APIs

To see, edit and publish the API asset details click on the specific row. The details page opens which shows information about the asset like Type of Asset, Endpoint, Harvester properties and WSDL summary including namespace, porttype and methods.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/08-oac-UI-API-harvested.png


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OAC12c: API asset details including endpoint and WSDL summary

Besides the details you can perform some actions (from left to right):

Link, toggle view, bookmark, edit & delete

Link to details page: Get URL of API asset details page you currently look at and can share. Example: http://soabpm:8111/oac/index.jsp?assetid=50003&renderMinMaxButton=false&renderNextPrevButtons=false

Toggle between tabs and view all: You can view the API asset details in tabs (tab per category) and view them on single page like displayed above.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/10-oac-API_FormService1.0-1024x1007.png


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Add to My APIs: Click to bookmark API. After bookmarking API it is visible under MyAPIs page. Edit details: Page to edit API asset details. More about this below. Delete items: Delete the API asset from the repository.

Add metadata to harvested API

To add metadata or edit other details of an API asset click on the edit icon/button to open the Edit Asset page. On this page you can change the name, change the version, add keywords and descriptions, but also add a link to documentation URL and assign/upload an icon. To publish an API change the API status from Draft to Published. It is also possible to set the API active status from Active to Retired.

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/12-oac-API-tabbed-details.png

http://technology.amis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/13-oac-edit-API_FormService1.0-1024x654.png


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OAC12c: On the Edit Asset page details like, keyword, description and version can be changed

Publish a draft API

To publish an API you just need to change the API status to published and saving the asset.

On the overview page the API status is changed and the API details can be exported to Excel and PDF.

OAC12c: API status changes when published

When going back to the dashboard the recently published API is visible. When you click on the name of the API asset the user is redirected to the details page.


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OAC12c: Dashboard listing recently published APIs

On both the dashboard as on the Asset detail page reviews are mentioned. The admin user can’t perform this action. For this we will create some new users.

Sharing the APIs with other users

After taking the first steps the APIs can be shared with other users. To do so new users can be added with specific roles. As admin user click on the “Admin” menu item and choose the Users section (selected by default). From this page new users can be created, you can search for users and edit & delete users.


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OAC12c: Users administration page

Add, search, edit and delete users

To create a new user click in the Users section on the Add User icon on the top-right of the page section. The Create New User page is displayed. The page is divided into three sub sections; user information, roles and departments. The user information section contains form fields for the username, password, real name and email & phone information. It is also possible to force changing the password and allow the password to never expire. A user can have one of four statuses; Active, Inactive, Lockout (after 3 failed logins) and Unapproved.


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OAC12c: Create new user – overview section

The roles section gives the opportunity to give the user specific access. The admin role gives you access to harvest, edit & publish API assets and manage application settings liked described in this blog so far. The curator can harvest and edit & publish API assets and the developer can access / search published APIs.

OAC12c: Create new user – roles section

The department section gives the opportunity to add the user to a specific department. Departments is not more then just a filter of which users belong to that department. It is not necessary to add the new user to a department.

OAC12c: Department Details

To see user details and change user information or even delete a user go back to the Users section. To see user details click on the name of the user and you will be navigated to the User Details page. You can also search on department, role and status. The latter can i.g. be used if a user is lockout of there account. To delete a user just checked the box in front of there username and click on the Delete button.


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OAC12c: Search, edit or delete Users

The User Details page shows the same sub sections; overview and roles & departments the user is assigned to. The interface is very universal throughout the application. On this page you can also switch to tabbed mode, one tab per sub section, and able to navigate to the edit page, duplicating the user (create new user with same roles and departments) or deleting the user from the repository.

OAC12c: User details and actions (edit, duplicate and delete)

Also create a user, developer1. with the Developer role.


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OAC12c: Developer User

Switching user

To switch to a different user you can sign out of the OAC console by selecting the “Sign Out” options under your user menu. Just click on the arrow on the right side of your name.

OAC12c: Switching User by signing out of OAC console

Logging in as Curator will give the same functions as an Administrator, but without the Admin tasks.

OAC12c: Curator Dashboard


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Logging in as Developer will give even less options. A developer can only search in published API and add APIs to there favorites.

OAC12c: Developer Dashboard

Adding an API to My APIs and reviewing the API

Als user you can add APIs to you favorites (My APIs). To add a API to your favorites go to the API asset details page and add the API to My APIs by clicking the “Add this to My APIs” button. After adding it to My APIs the details page is update and shows how many times it is added (usage) in the past 6 months. Users that have added the API to there My APIs can review on the API asset.

OAC12c: Added API asset to My APIs

When you click on the “View Usage History” link a pop-up is opened which shows a graph with usage over past months and which users uses the API.


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OAC12c: API usage history

To view all API that the user had added to My APIs the user van click on the “My APIs” menu item. The My APIs page shows all the APIs the user has added and gives the user the opportunity to view the details by clicking on the name of the API, to write a review about an API or to delete an API from the list.


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OAC12c: My APIs showing all added API and actions to review or delete a API

To write a review about an API click on the first (review) icon on the right side of the APIs name. A pop-up is opened with a form that the user can use to submit a review. The user can give a rating and a comment (max 4000 characters). After submitting the review the page is redirected to the a page which displays all reviews.

OAC12c: Submit a Review and viewing API reviews


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OAC12c: Dashboard shows latest reviews

Other administrator tasks

View sessions

The administrator can perform some other tasks that I didn’t discuss yet. On the Sessions section page all (active) sessions are displayed and an administrator can look into the details of the session. An administrator can also delete sessions, which means if a user is active in the console the user will be logged out.

OAC12c: An administrator can view (active) sessions

OAC12c: An administrator can view session details

System settings

An administrator can change a lot of setting to change the behavior of the OAC console. The system settings page is divided into four main sections; Functional settings, Server Settings, Enterprise Authentication and Import and Export settings (not the actual import/export).

The functional settings sections contains settings for search results and printing details via PDF:


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The server settings section contains settings for embedding HTML in asset details:

The Enterprise Application section contains settings for connection to a LDAP server for user management:


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The Import/Export sections contains settings for setting timeouts:

Import / export repository

The import / export of the repository can be done in the corresponding section, but instead of it being done in the web UI it uses java Webstart.


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My Verdict

To conclude this blog post I will give my verdict about Oracle API Catalog 12c. In the last week I had some ups but also some downs. I started on my windows laptop and installed everything locally. At first everything seemed fine, I could harvest my first Asset, but after trying to view the details I got a error after another. In the days that followed I was helped by Oracle Development and in special by Mark Dutra, but we couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I think it has something to do with security settings and how the laptop is configured (domain wise).

After creating a Linux VM and installed everything again I finally had success and the tables were turned. I really like the interface, it is very clean and uses a common workflow on every page. The use of a separate harvester (command-line or ANT task) is in one way a great solution, because you can use it in your already existing build process, but I missed the option to do this using the OAC console, you don’t always have access to use scripting.

The harvested APIs are added as Draft and an admin or curator can edit the information and publish the API. This version is a great start with lots of information already, like the endpoint, WSDL/WADL summary including methods and message payload. But I miss the possibility to register dependencies between APIs. If API are harvested from one service the separate APIs are not linked to each other.


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Adding APIs to your My APIs and the possibility to write a review can be handy. The simple metrics tell you about the usage and who uses it which is already usefull, hopefully in the future more metrics will be available in OAC.

As an administrator you can perform a lot of tasks using the UI. Adding users, looking at active sessions and import/export the repository. It worked fine on Linux, but on windows I had no result. Also the possibility to connect to an LDAP will make it much easier to add users and departments.

Pros:

Clean and easy UI with common workflow on most pages Harvest through command-line (run-time) or ANT (design-time build) Possibility to edit Assets and add documentation Review on API and give feedback when an API is not working correctly Metrics about usage A great set of administration tools

Cons:

Does not work well with Windows. Catalog features are still basic, no dependency viewer No online harvester, you can’t harvest via the OAC console

Robert van Mölken

Robert is a experienced Fusion Middleware / SOA developer for nearly 7 years. He focuses in particular on building service-oriented business processes. He is mostly very good in IT technologies like Java / JEE, Oracle and SOA. Where his specialty is with BPEL, SCA, SOAP, XPath, XML, OEP, Java, JAX-WS, Advanced Queueing, and PL / SQL.


http://technology.amis.nl/blog/author/robert-van-molken/

nl.linkedin.com/in/rvmolken

https://twitter.com/robertvanmolken


SOA Magazine IV 67

Order to Cash Process Integration for Telecommunications

Excerpt

The Order To Cash Process Integration Pack (O2C PIP)is a packaged solution on top of the Application

Integration Architecture (AIA). AIA is n Oracle SOA solution, designed to deliver building Blocks for

Integrations (AIA Foundation Pack) or pre integrated Integration Solutions, the Process Integration

packs .

The O2C PIP is an important Integration Flow because it is the enabler of Oracle’s Telecommunications

Business Support System (BSS) Order Management Solution, called Rapid Offer Design & Order Delivery

(RODOD).

In the following we will give a high level Introduction to RODOD , a short introduction to the Application

Integration Architecture and a detailed description of the Order To Cash Process Integration Pack

Rapid Offer Design & Order Delivery (RODOD):

RODOD is a Telecommunications BSS Order Management Solution consisting of:

– Siebel, OSM & BRM, which were all 3 acquired by Oracle acquired in the year 2006

– Optionally a Product Master PH4C (Product Hub for Communications), even though RODOD can

work without a Product Master. Ph4C is an Oracle E-Business Suite Instance

– An out of the Box Integration Application Integration Architecture (AIA) with Process

Integration Packs (PIPs) implemented in Oracle SOA with BPEL.

• Master Data Management (MDM) PIP: Sending Product Data from Ph4C to Siebel, BRM

(OSM), optional

• Agent Assisted Billing Care (AABC) PIP: Providing BRM Customer Billing Information into

Siebel, optional but usually implemented

• Order To Cash (O2C) PIP: Integrating Siebel, OSM and BRM for the Order Flow

– All Applications are used independently of RODOD, including AIA. Only the 3 listed Process

Integration Packs are RODOD specific

– RODOD can work without the MDM & AABC PIP but not without the O2C PIP

In virtually any RODOD Implementation, You also find see an Enterprise Service Bus (for Example Oracle

Service Bus) to connect RODOD to external Systems. In particularl OSM will need to talk to the Network

System, Siebel will usually talk to Systems which render eg Client Information.

RODODs equivalent on the Telecommunications Network side (Operating Support Systems) is Oracle’s

Rapid Service Design and Order Delivery (RSDODO) consisting of OSM, Unified Inventory Management

(UIM, Automated Service Activation Program (ASAP)& Oracle Communications IP Service Activator).

RODOD as a Telecommunications Order management Systems supports three main functional areas

with several Order Types.


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• Order Intake, eg in a Call Center, via

Siebel. The Order Intake receives Status

updates from the Provisioning and Billing

Systems and eventually notes down,

which Products a Client has purchased

• Order Provisioning, that is talk to the

network OSS (Operational Support Systems)

to install the Product, via OSM. In case the

Client needs physical Installations other

Modules for scheduling engineers and

shipping hardware will be used

• Customer Billing , via BRM. The service

usage of the Client is fed into BRM via Files,

called Call Data Records. Depending on the

Clients price plan, his bill gets accumulated,

typically once per month

The Order Flow over these Systems is facilitated via the Integration Layer, the so called the Application

Integration Architecture Order To Cash Process Integration pack (AIA O2C PIP).

Application Integration Architecture

The Application Integration Architecture is a layer on top

of Oracle SOA Suite offering building blocks to integrate

Systems. O acle offers industry (e.g. Telecommunication,

Manufacturing) process (CRM, HCM) and vendor

(Oracle2SAP) Application Connectors and Generic

Datamodels. T e AIA Foundation Pack reuses elements of

the SOA Suite like BPEL, Adapters, Mediators and renders a

library for the AIA PIPs.

Customization and Development for AIA is done in

Jdeveloper. The LifeCycle Workbench offers a Repository

to look up and functionally design define AIA Services. The

Composite Application Validation System (CAVS) allows

testing AIA Composites. The Deployment Generator allows

automation of deployments.


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AIA deploys Composites in Weblogic, which can be monitored in Oracle Enterprise Manager. The

SOA Suite runs on a Database with specific Database Schemas, important Tables are the so called

XREF Tables, where concepts common to Application like Orders, Accounts and Products are linked.

The Metadata Service Repository holds AIA Artefacts like EBOs, EBSs, WSDLS etc.

An important Concept of the Application Integration Architecture are the so called Enterprise

Business Object. They offer a Generic Data Model, to which Concepts which are common to all

Applications (Products Customer, Orders) can be easily mapped. AIA connects to Applications via

adapters, called Application Business Connector Services, which are usually written in BPEL.

AIA essentially connects to Applications, translates System specific messages to its generic Data

model and organizes the message exchange with different technologies (Queues, Webservices) and

Integration Patterns.

An Integration layer needs to be able to map equivalent Concepts in different Systems to each

other. This done via so called Cross references. Cross Reference, here XREF tables are a Construct

from the Oracle SOA layer designed to map values for equivalent entities created in different

applications. An XREF Table assigns a common global key to data objects from different applications,

which need to be mapped to each other

In RODOD the AIA layer uses such tables to map Siebel, OSM, BRM and PH4C identifiers and keys for

Products, Customer and Orders.

With an for Products existing in Siebel and BRM:

• A customer wants to add an optional mobile phone internet subscription to his internet

home service.

• The Call Center Agent enters a change order to add mobile phone internet product to his

existing home based internet subscription.

• When the OSM order management sends a fulfillment order billing request to AIA, the O2C

PIP looks up the cross reference based on the Siebel ‘Asset Integration ID’ to find the BRM

service POID.

• The O2C PIP then calls the correct BRM API with the correct arguments to add the product

to the service in BRM

Find a Schema listing the main Concepts with the example of Siebel and BRM communicating via the

O2C PIP in RODOD.


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Enterprise Business Object (EBO):

• standardized data model for common business objects

Enterprise Business Service (EBS):

• Receiving Generic Enterprise Message from Application Business Connector

• Routing to the correct addressee

Enterprise Business Flow (EBF):

• Calling & Orchestrating Enterprise Business Services to fulfil a complex task like an orderflow

Application Business Connector Service (ABCS):

• transforming messages from application-specific format (Application Business Message ABM)

to application independent format (Enterprise Business Message EBM)

• Managing cross-referencing of instance identifiers, validating and enriching content (if required)

• Invoking the Enterprise Business Service / Application Services

• Most AIA ABCS are using BPEL (state full conversations, XSLT is used for transformation


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O2C PIP

The O2C AIA PIP connects RODOD (Siebel, BRM, OSM) via five flows:

• Process Sales Order Fulfilment: Send Orders From Siebel to OSM COM

• Synchronize Fulfilment Order Billing Account: Synchronize Customer Accounts between

Siebel and BRM via OSM COM

• Bill Fulfilment: Initiating Billing from OSM COM towards BRM

• Provision Order and Update Fulfilment Order: Send Order from OSM COM (Fulfilment)

to OSM SOM (Provisioning) to talk to the OSS Network Layer

• Update Sales Order: Update Order Status from OSM COM (Fulfilment) back to Siebel


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OSM is split up in 2 Instances, running on one or two Weblogic Servers:

OSM COM / Fulfilment: orchestrates order tasks in the RODOD BSS Systems. It

generates a plan, how the order should be executed and coordinates the calls

OSM SOM / Provisioning: talks to the OSS Network Systems and coordinates the Order

Provisioning downstream

Note that the O2C can also synchronize Product Model Data. You can use O2C instead of the MDM PIP

in case You plan to use RODOD without the Ph4C Product Master.

O2C - Process Sales Order Fulfilment:

Send Orders From Siebel to OSM COM. Siebel CRM creates an application business message

(SalesOrderABM) with sales order details and enqueues the ABM in the AIA_SALESORDERJMSQUEUE

queue.

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentSiebelCommsJMSConsumer

dequeue the ABM from the queue and passes it on to

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentSiebelCommsReqABCSImpl

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentSiebelCommsReqABCSImpl

transforms the ABM into an enterprise business message

(ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentEBM) and routes it to

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer wraps

the EBM into OSM CreateOrder message format and enqueues

the CreateOrder message into AIA_CRTFO_IN_JMSQ.

The store and forward mechanism forwards the CreateOrder message from AIA WebLogic server to

OSM WebLogic


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O2C - Synchronize Fulfilment Order Billing Account

Synchronize Customer Accounts between Siebel and BRM via OSM COM.

1.

OSM: drops the message into the AIA_CRTCUST_OUT_JMSQ JMS queue.

1.ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingAccountListOSMCFSCommsJMSConsumer:

• picks up an OSM message from JMS queue AIA_CRTCUST_OUT_JMSQ JMS

• routes it to CommsProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingAccountListEBF service


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2.CommsProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingAccountListEBF:

• extracts the relevant customer data to create a ProcessBillingAccountListEBM message

• routes message to CommsProcessBillingAccountListEBF service

3. CommsProcessBillingAccountListEBF:

• Generates QueryCustomerPartyListEBM message

• routes the message to the QueryCustomerPartyListSiebelProvABCSImplV2 service

4.QueryCustomerPartyListSiebelProvABCSImplV2:

• prepares the application business message (ABM)

• invokes Siebel via SWI_Customer_Party_Service with the ABM

• transforms the received ABM to a QueryCustomerPartyListResponseEBM message

• sends EBM back to CommsProcessBillingAccountListEBF service.

6. CommsProcessBillingAccountListEBF :

• instantiates the SyncCustomerPartyListBRMCommsProvABCSImpl service.

7. SyncCustomerPartyListBRMCommsProvABCSImpl

• calls PCM_OP_CUST_COMMIT_CUSTOMER BRM opcode to create an account./

PCM_OP_CUST_UPDATE_CUSTOMER or PCM_OP_CUSTCARE_MOVE_ACCT opcode to update

an existing account

• sends SyncCustomerPartyListResponseEBM message back to

CommsProcessBillingAccountListEBF (asynchronous delayed response mode)

• sends the ProcessBillingAccountListResponseEBM response message to the

CommsProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingAccountListEBF (asynchronous delayed response mode)

8. ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingAccountListRespOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer :

• drops a message into the AIA_UPDCUST_IN_JMSQ store-and-forward queue

• OSM is notified of the SyncCustomer status


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O2C - Bill Fulfilment

Initiates Billing from OSM COM towards BRM. OSM converts

ProcessSalesOrderFulfillmentEBM message received in the

Process Sales Order Fulfillment business flow into a

ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingEBM message and places it in a

JMS queue. The store-and-forward mechanism pushes the

message to the AIA_CRTBO_OUT_JMSQ messaging queue.

1. ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingOSMCFSCommsJMSConsumer :

• picks up the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingEBM message from AIA_CRTBO_OUT_JMSQ

messaging queue

• Routes message to the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingBRMCommsProvABCSImpl service.

2. ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingBRMCommsProvABCSImpl :

• uses the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingEBM message to create in BRM a.o.:

• billing artifacts,

• service instances with balance group information,

• purchased products

• purchased discounts

• construct the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingResponseEBM message

• sends it back to the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingResponseOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer

service.

3.ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingResponseOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer:

• forwards the ProcessFulfillmentOrderBillingResponseEBM message in the

AIA_UPDBO_IN_JMSQ queue

Store-and-forward mechanism forwards message from AIA weblogic to the OSM WebLogic server.


SOA Magazine IV 76

O2C - Provision Order and Update Fulfilment Order

Send Order from OSM COM (Fulfilment) to OSM SOM

(Provisioning) to talk to the OSS Network Layer. Whenever

a new order is created in Provisioning, a

ProcessProvisioningOrderEBM message is created by OSM

COM. The message is enqueued in the

AIA_CRTFO_OUT_JMSQ queue using the store-and-

forward mechanism

1.ProcessProvisioningOrderOSMCFSCommsJMSConsumer:

• monitors the queue and dequeues the message from

AIA_CRTFO_OUT_JMSQ viaa JMS adapter

• routed to ProcessProvisioningOrderOSMPROVJMSProducer.

2. ProcessProvisioningOrderOSMPROVJMSProducer:

• Place message into AIA_FOPROV_IN_JMSQ queue.

Store-and-forward mechanism places the message towards OSM SOM, so it can dequeue it for further

processing.

During provisioning update messages are enqueued by OSM SOM into OSM WebLogic and moved to the

AIA_FOPROV_OUT_JMSQ queue using store-and-forward.

3. ProcessFulfillmentOrderUpdateOSMPROVCommsJMSConsumer

• dequeue the ProcessFulfillmentOrderUpdateEBM message

• route to ProcessFulfillmentOrderUpdateOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer

4. ProcessFulfillmentOrderUpdateOSMCFSCommsJMSProducer

• enqueuesProcessFufillmentOrderUpdateEBM message in the AIA_FOCFS_IN_JMSQ queue

using store-and-forward.

OSM SOM picks up the message, initiates the necessary actions in the OSS Provisioning Systems and

updates the status of the order.


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O2C - Update Sales Order

Update Order Status from OSM COM (Fulfilment) back to

Siebel. OS M creates an UpdateSalesOrderEBM message and

enqueues it in the AIA_UPDSO_OUT_JMSQ queue using a

store-and-forward mechanism.

1.UpdateSalesOrderOSMCFSCommsJMSConsumer:

• consumes this message

• routes it to the

UpdateSalesOrderSiebelCommsProvABCSImpl service.

UpdateSalesOrderOSMCFSCommsJMSConsumer works

with a sequencer. If an update causes system or business error,

further updates to the account are locked in the sequencer

table. A business error must be removed from the

sequencer table to unlock the account. In case of a System error, the message must be resubmitted.

2.UpdateSalesOrderSiebelCommsProvABCSImpl:

• convert the UpdateSalesOrderEBM message into a Siebel application business message (ABM)

• invokes the Siebel Web service to update the order

Order Status field in the Siebel user interface represents the overarching status throughout order

capture and order fulfillment. Fulfillment Status is a sub-status to a Status of Open in Siebel.

Benedikt Herudek

As an Integration and Telecommunications Expert Benedikt works at

Accenture, the Netherlands. His area of expertise spans from different

Oracle Applications (eBusiness Suite, Siebel) over the Database to Oracle

SOA & AIA Middleware Technologies. He is part of Accenture's RODOD

expert pool and implemented the Solutions in different European Countries

in different Roles as Analyst, Technical Architect & Teamlead. Benedikt is a

Certified Oracle & SOA Implementation Specialist as well as a Certified

Siebel Specialist and tries in his work to understand complex Solutions

consisting of different Technologies from an E2E perspective. Benedikt is also a Specialist in Oracle

Enterprise Manager and how to use the tool to monitor the Oracle Infrastructure and Application Stack.

Contact LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benediktherudekLinkedin


SOA Magazine IV 78

Next Generation SOA: A Concise Introduction to Service Technology & Service-

Orientation About this Book

Innovative service technologies are becoming valuable

assets for businesses that need to stay competitive in the

face of increasing globalization and market complexity.

While computer processing power is becoming faster and

cheaper, search engines, instant messaging, and social

media channels are generating floods of information that

escalate demands for consumable and accessible data.

As the world's economies engage one another through offshoring, outsourcing, and supply chaining, localization is required to accommodate different currencies and languages. Globalization, recession, invention, and communication are some of the driving forces behind a next generation of technologies and practices that revolve around software programs designed in accordance with the paradigm of service-orientation. Such programs, referred to as "services," are expected to do more for less with greater efficiency in order to meet business challenges head-on. We have reached a stage in the evolution of service-oriented computing where modern service technology innovation is building upon mature service platforms at the same time that proven delivery techniques and design patterns are building upon an established service-orientation paradigm. These developments have made it possible to create service-oriented solutions of unprecedented sophistication. Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: An Overview of SOA & Service-Orientation Chapter 3: A Look at How Services are Defined and Composed Chapter 4: An Exploration of Service-Orientation with the

SOA Manifesto Chapter 5: An Overview of Service Technology Chapter 6: A Look at Service-Driven Industry Models Chapter 7: A Case Study Appendices Appendix A: Additional Reading for Applying Service-Orientation Appendix B: Additional Reading for Planning & Governing

Service-Orientation Appendix C: Additional Reading for Cloud Computing

For more information please visit http://servicetechbooks.com/nextgen For additional books please visit https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/soa-books/

http://servicetechbooks.com/nextgen

https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/soa-books/


SOA Magazine IV 79

BPM 12c Gateways

Oracle BPM provides us with various components to control the flow of a process such as gateways,

timer events, errors, message events, send and receive tasks, loop markers and multi-instance markers.

In this article I will be elaborating the gateway control flow components and how we can use them to

define the flow of our process. Gateways are very similar to a flowchart decision element. Using a

gateway you can define the control points within your process by splitting and merging paths. At

runtime a gateway will determine based on the control points defined at design time the path that a

token will take through a process. There are five gateway types; Exclusive Gateway (XOR), Inclusive

Gateway (OR), Parallel Gateway, Event Based Gateway and Complex Gateway.

Exclusive Gateway

Exclusive and Inclusive gateways consist of two outbound sequence flows; a default sequence flow

representing the normal path between two objects and a conditional sequence flow to control the

process flow based on the evaluation of an expression.

The "Exclusive Gateway" is one of the most commonly used gateways where you can split your process

into two or more paths. When a token reaches an exclusive gateway each of the conditional outbound

sequence flows is evaluated in the order that you specified during design time when configuring the

exclusive gateway and the first conditional flow that is evaluated to true is taken. If none of the

conditional outbound sequence flows evaluates to true then the token moves down the default

sequence flow. Please note that if you do not specify a default outbound sequence flow on an "Exclusive

Gateway" you will get an error at design time and will not be able to compile and deploy your process.

So let's see how you use an "Exclusive Gateway" to control the flow of a process. I have created a new

BPM application using the "BPM Application" JDeveloper template and in the "Project SOA Settings"

step i have selected "Composite with BPMN Process".


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This will bring up the "BPMN 2.0 Process Wizard" where you are prompted to specify a process name

and the service type. In this demo I have selected "Asynchronous Service".


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In the arguments step I have created two input arguments, OrderId of type int and OrderAmount of type

decimal, and an output argument, Status of type string.


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When you click finish it will open the process. Using the structure window I have created three process

data objects to store the input arguments I have created above and hold the output argument value

(orderId of type int, orderTotal of type decimal and status of type string).

Next I assigned the two input arguments (OrderId and OrderTotal) to the process data objects (orderId,

orderTotal) by double-clicking on the "Start" activity, going to the "Implementation" tab and selecting

"Data Associations".


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Please note that i did the same thing for the "End" activity but this time i have mapped the status

process data object to the Status output argument.

Just for demo purpose I came up with a very simple scenario where I will use an exclusive gateway to

auto approve an order if the order total is less than 100 and to set the status to pending if the order

total is greater than 100. I would like to stress that this is just for demo purposes as I would highly

recommend that you use a business rules component to store the order total threshold rather than

hard-coding it in the process.


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Furthermore I dropped two script tasks, one between the exclusive gateway and the end activity and

one just above the first script task and mapped the two status values (auto approved and pending)

respectively using the "Data Associations" on each of the script tasks.

When you dropped the exclusive gateway between the start and end activity it automatically joined the

exclusive gateway with the end activity using a default outbound sequence flow. Next I have created a

conditional outbound sequence flow from the exclusive gateway to the "Set Order Status to Pending"

script task and defined an XPath expression to check whether the orderTotal is greater than 100.


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I finally provided some labels on the two outbound flow to make them better readable and joined the

second script task with the end activity as follows.


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Deploy your process on the integrated Weblogic server and run a test using a small order (having an

order total of less than 100). The process should follow the default outbound flow and the order should

be auto-approved.

Now run another test with an order having an order total of greater than 100. The process should follow

the conditional outbound flow and the order should be flagged as pending.


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An exclusive gateway can also be used to define a loop to check for conditions and re-executing previous

steps. So to define a loop using an exclusive gateway just connect a sequence flow to a previous object.

Download sample application: Exclusive Gateway

Inclusive Gateway

The inclusive gateway, just like the exclusive gateway, enables you to split your process into two or

more paths. The intrinsic difference between an exclusive gateway and an inclusive gateway is that in an

exclusive gateway, the process only continues down one of several paths (if multiple outgoing sequence

flows are present) while in an inclusive gateway a process will follow all conditional paths whose

expressions are evaluated to true.

Furthermore, in an inclusive gateway a process will only follow the default path only if no conditional

expressions evaluate to true. Because of this particular characteristic the notation of an inclusive

gateway consist of a split and a merge inclusive gateway.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62-7A9Xi4iIR3kzc3Q5LTV1ZDA/edit?usp=sharing


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An inclusive gateway can consist multiple outgoing conditional sequence flows for an inclusive gateway

split. However, an inclusive gateway must define a default sequence flow. All conditional expressions

that evaluate to true are executed; otherwise the default sequence flow is executed.

At run time, the BPM engine generates a token for each conditional sequence that evaluates to true. If

none of the conditional sequence flows evaluate to true then a token gets generated for the default

sequence flow. The process will pause and will resume only when all tokens have reached the merge

So let's see how you can use an inclusive gateway in a process. I have created a new BPM application

using the "BPM Application" JDeveloper template and in the "Project SOA Settings" step i have selected

"Composite with BPMN Process".


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and the service type. In this demo I have selected "Asynchronous Service".

In this demo I will be simulating a Banking Supervision process where a specific department of a Central

Bank is responsible for over-sighting it's financial institutions and based on certain decision points

various documents are required to be generated.

Therefore I will create two input arguments, NonComplianceLetter and LetterToCentralBank, both of

type boolean to denote whether these two type of documents are required to be generated and an

output string argument, DocumentsGenerated, to act as a confirmation of which documents where

generated.


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When you click finish it will open the process. Using the structure window I have created three process

data objects to store the input arguments I have created above and hold the output argument value

(nonComplianceLetter and letterToCentralBank both of type boolean and documentsGenerated of type

string).


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Next I assigned the two input arguments (NonComplianceLetter and LetterToCentralBank) to the

process data objects (nonComplianceLetter, letterToCentralBank) by double-clicking on the "Start"

activity, going to the "Implementation" tab and selecting "Data Associations".

Please note that i did the same thing for the "End" activity but this time i have mapped the

documentsGenerated process data object to the DocumentsGenerated output argument.

As already mentioned I will be simulating a Banking Supervision process where based on the two

boolean input arguments I will generate either both documents (Non-Compliance Letter and Letter to

Central Bank), one of the documents (Non-Compliance Letter or Letter to Central Bank) or will not

generated any documents at all. And to implement such a scenario I will use an inclusive gateway.

Please pay attention how JDeveloper automatically adds an inclusive merge gateway with every

inclusive split gateway.


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Furthermore I dropped three script tasks, one between the inclusive split and merge gateway, one

above the inclusive gateway and one below the inclusive gateway.

On each script task, using the "Data Associations" provided some static text to the documentsGenerated

process data object to display whether a document is generated (please note that in the second script

task I used the concat function to concatenate the string value from the first script task).


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Because I want to have the third script task (Do not Generate Any Letters) marked as the default

sequence flow I will delete the default sequence flow from the second script task (Generate Letter to

Central Bank) and redefine the sequence flows.


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For the first two conditional outbound sequence flows I have defined an XPath expression to check

whether its marching document is selected. For the "Generate Non-Compliance Letter" conditional flow

you should have an XPath condition similar to

"xp20:matches(string(bpmn:getDataObject('nonComplianceLetter')), '\s*(?i:true|1)\s*')". For the

"Generate Letter to Central Bank" conditional outbound sequence flow your XPath should be similar to

"xp20:matches(string(bpmn:getDataObject('letterToCentralBank')), '\s*(?i:true|1)\s*')".


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Deploy your process on the integrated Weblogic server and run a test with just one of the documents

selected (let's say LetterToCentralBank set to true). The second conditional sequence flow is evaluated

to true and if you inspect the "End" message DocumentsGenerated output element you should see that

the Letter to Central Bank document has been generated.


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Switch to graphical view to see the execution path highlighted.

Now test your process without selecting any of the two documents. The process should have followed

the default sequence flow. You can confirm this by inspecting the "End" message DocumentsGenerated

output element; it should read "No documents generated".


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If you switch to graphical view you will see that the process followed the default outbound sequence

flow.

Download sample application: Inclusive Gateway

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62-7A9Xi4iIT3lZRVI3T0ZtWDg


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Parallel Gateway

The parallel gateway enables you to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, allowing your process to

follow several unconditional paths in parallel. When your process token reaches a parallel gateway

activity, the parallel gateway will create a token for each outgoing parallel sequence flow. Your process

will wait until all tokens have arrived at the parallel gateway merge activity before resuming with the

rest of the activities.

You should be very careful with the parallel gateway activity because if one of the tokens that have been

created by the parallel gateway doesn't arrive at the parallel gateway merge activity, then your process

will freeze.

So let's see how you can use the parallel gateway in a process. Let's assume that you are implementing

an order process and that at some point in your process you want to request for quotations from two

different suppliers. Once you have received both quotations your process should resume (ideally pick

the lowest quotation but I will not be implementing this part).

I created a BPM application with a default BPM project (named both application and project

"ParallelGatewayDemo") having an empty composite.

Next I created an asynchronous BPMN process and named it OrderProcess without any arguments.


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As already stated above in this demo I will be simulating an order process where I need to send two

supplier quotation. So I will use the parallel gateway. Please note how JDeveloper automatically adds a

parallel gateway merge activity when you drop a parallel activity on your process.


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To simulate a supplier's request for quotation I used a human task component. I created a single human

task for both suppliers accepting all the defaults and just changing the human task title for each case.

For simplicity reasons I changed the human task assignment type from "Lane Participants" to "Names

and expressions" and assigned the "weblogic" user as a new user participant.


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So let's test our process. Since we didn't specify any arguments you can directly invoke your process. If

you open the flow trace you will see that two human tasks have been created and are pending.


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Go to the BPM workspace, login using the weblogic user and if you followed my exact steps and you

should see two tasks. Approve one of them.

If you go back to the flow trace you should see that there process is waiting for the second human task.


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Approve the second human task (from the BPM workspace) and go back to the flow trace; you process

should be completed.


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Both tokens from both outgoing parallel sequence flow have reached the parallel gateway merge

activity which signaled to the process that all parallel activities have been completed.

Download sample application: Parallel Gateway

Complex Gateway

In this fourth article of a five-part series we will go through the complex gateway, a gateway that is

similar to an inclusive gateway but at the same time allows you to define a voting pattern to determine

whether your instance should continue execution even if not all outgoing sequence flows have been

completed.

As with all the other gateways that we've seen till now, the complex gateway involves a split activity

which can be either an inclusive gateway (see "Inclusive and Complex" pattern) or an exclusive gateway

and a complex merge gateway (see "Parallel and Complex" pattern).

Similar to an inclusive gateway, a process implementing the "Inclusive and Complex" pattern will follow

all conditional paths whose expressions are evaluated to true. All conditional expressions that evaluate

to true are executed; otherwise the default sequence flow is executed.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62-7A9Xi4iIaG12QlFuRnFNZkE/view?usp=sharing


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A process implementing the "Parallel and Complex" pattern will follow all unconditional paths defined at

design time.

What is really interesting with the complex gateway is that it allows you to define a condition on the

complex gateway merge activity to control whether the instance should continue even if not all of the

complex gateway paths have been completed.

When a process reaches a complex gateway activity it will create a token for each outgoing sequence

flow that evaluates to true. You can configure the complex gateway merge activity to continue

execution even if not all of the tokens have arrived at the complex gateway merge activity. For example,

if you have three parallel sequence flows executed you can configure the complex gateway to continue

after two or more tokens have arrived at the merge activity. This is really handy when you want to

implement a voting based pattern on process activities.

Let's see how you can use the complex activity in a demo process. I will base my demo on the process I

created in part three of my five-part series, Oracle BPM 12c Gateways (Part 3 of 5): Parallel Gateway.

Let's assume that you are implementing an order process and that at some point in your process you

want to request for quotations from three different suppliers. Your process shouldn't wait for a

response from all three suppliers; it is sufficient that you receive quotations from just two suppliers.

Once you have received quotations from any two out of the three suppliers your process should

continue (ideally pick the lowest quotation but I will not be implementing this part).

http://antonis-antoniou.blogspot.com/2014/12/oracle-bpm-12c-gateways-part-3-of-5.html


SOA Magazine IV 106

So let's start with creating a BPM application with a default BPM project (named both application and

project "ComplexGatewayDemo") having an empty composite.

I created next an asynchronous BPMN process and named it OrderProcess (without any arguments).


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As already mentioned, in this demo I will be simulating an order process where I need to send three

supplier quotations. The process shouldn't wait for all three quotations but just any two. So I will use the

complex gateway and please notice how JDeveloper will automatically use the "Inclusive and Complex"

pattern, adding an inclusive gateway split activity and a complex gateway merge activity.

Since I want to send a request to all three suppliers I will change the complex gateway pattern to

"Parallel and Complex". You can do so by right-clicking on the inclusive split activity and choosing from

the context menu "Change Gateway configuration to -> Parallel and Complex".

To simulate a supplier's request for quotation I used a human task component. I created a single human

task for all three suppliers accepting all the defaults and just changing the human task title for each case.

I created three user tasks on the process creating default sequence flows from the parallel split activity

to all three user tasks and from each user task a default activity to the complex gateway merge activity.

You should notice that there is a warning on the complex gateway merge activity that the expression

from node is empty. If you go to the implementation details of the complex gateway activity you will see

that you can define either a simple or an xpath expression to control, by selecting the "Abort pending


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flows" check box when the process should continue even if not all tokens have reached the complex

gateway.

There is a special predefined variable in a complex gateway called "activationCount" that will return you

the number of tokens that have arrived to the merge gateway. You can use this with other custom data

objects to form complex expressions.

In my demo, I only care for any two quotations so I will just use the activationCount variable to count

the number of tokens that have reached the complex gateway. If two or more tokens have reached the

complex gateway merge activity then my process shouldn't wait for the third token but instead continue

with its execution.

For simplicity reasons I changed the human task assignment type from "Lane Participants" to "Names

and expressions" and assigned the "weblogic" user as the new user participant.


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Let's test our process. Since we didn't specify any arguments you can directly invoke your process. If you

open the flow trace you will see that three human tasks have been created and are pending.


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Go to the BPM workspace, login as weblogic (assuming that you have assigned the tasks to weblogic)

and you should see three tasks. Submit one of them and go back to the flow trace. You should see that

one human task has been completed and the other two are still pending.


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Go back to the BPM workspace, submit one of the remaining two tasks and once the task is submitted

click on the refresh icon. You should see that the third task get removed from your inbox. This is because

of the expression we have defined on the complex gateway (to abort all pending flows if that expression

was evaluated to true).

If you go back to the flow trace you should see that all three human tasks have been completed and the

process ended.


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Even though only two tokens reached the complex gateway, it was enough to signal the process to

continue with its execution.

Download sample application: Complex Gateway

Event-based Gateway

My last article on gateways is on the event-based gateway, another type of gateway supported by

Oracle BPM 12c to provide divergence in processes.

The event-based gateway is very similar, conceptual wise, to the exclusive gateway in the sense that we

can have various outgoing sequence flows but only one branch is followed. The operational difference

though is that, as its name suggests, the event-based gateway uses events for defining the branching

conditions and decisions rather than data-specific conditions.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62-7A9Xi4iIeG5ONGxkUU1SQzg/view?usp=sharing


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An event-based gateway can consist of multiple events; however the first event that occurs will

determine the execution path that will be followed.

Using the order process as an example, once an order is received and validated it needs to be processed.

Assuming that we have multiple warehouses, the order will be processed by the warehouse that can

process all inventory items ordered and responds first. The process will wait until one of the warehouses

responds to the request for processing the order. However, the process cannot wait indefinitely.

So let's see how we can implement the above scenario using the event-based gateway.

Let's start with creating the basic BPM application and BPM project (named both application and project

"EventBasedGatewayDemo") and selecting "Composite with BPMN Process" in step 3.


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and the service type. Give your process a name, for example OrderProcess and select "Asynchronous

Service" as the service type.


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In step 3 of the BPMN 2.0 Process Wizard you are prompted to specify the input and output process

arguments. A typical order definition would consist of an order id, a collection of order items, the order

total, customer details and bill and ship address details. For simplicity reasons my demo process will only

consist of the order id (of type int) and the order total (of type decimal) as input arguments and a status

argument of type string as output.


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The event-based gateway is composed of the event-based split gateway and two or more target events.

These events can be either message catch events, timer catch events or receive tasks. Please note that

you cannot mix message catch events and receive tasks within the same event-based gateway.

Select and drop the "Event Based" gateway on the default sequence flow between the "Start" and "End"

activities. You should notice that JDeveloper automatically has added three activities; an event based

split gateway activity, a catch message activity and a timer catch activity.


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There is an error on the Timer activity because it doesn't have an outgoing default sequence flow. Give

the event based gateway split activity and the catch message activity some meaningful names and add a

new catch message activity just below the default created catch message activity and define default

sequence flows for all activities.

Next set the timer activity to wait for 30 seconds for a reply from the warehouses and define an

implementation on the two catch message activities. Again for simplicity and demo reasons I have used

the "Define Interface" message exchange type and created only a single argument, order id of type int.

The implementation of both catch message activities are exactly the same, the only difference is the

operation name.


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So we have a process that expects some events to arrive from the two warehouses while its being

executed. This means that the main process, which in our case its the order process needs to find a way

to correlate these intermediate events with the itself. To do that we need to create a correlation

property (an attribute to correlate the main process with the intermediate events) and a correlation key

(which defines the properties to use in the correlation which consists of one or more correlation

properties).

I will use the order id to correlate the events that will be flowing from the warehouses into the main

order process, therefore I have created a correlation property named "orderId" and of type int and a

correlation key named "ck_orderId" with the orderId correlation property selected.


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We now need to instruct the process and intermediary events to use the orderId correlation property

we created. The main process will be responsible for initiating the correlation and matching events that

will be coming in from the warehouses with the main process. Therefore on the message start activity

select under "Implementation" select "Correlations" and select the orderId correlation property and

map it to the orderId process input argument. Ensure that you have selected the "Initiates" option to

instruct the process to correlate an instance of the order process with the supplied order id.


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The same correlation definitions need to be applied on the two catch message activities. Please ensure

that the "Initiates" option is not selected since this will be done upon the instantiation of the process.


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Deploy your process and run a test instance using the "start" operation. If you inspect the audit trail you

should see that the instance is waiting at the event-based split gateway activity.


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Run a new test instance of your order process but this time use one of the warehouse operations (for

example, use the "warehouseB" operation). If you inspect the audit trail you should notice that the

order is now completed and that the process followed the second branch.

Download sample application: Event-based Gateway

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B62-7A9Xi4iIRVpXVElrYVVMNDg/view?usp=sharing


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Summery BPM Suite Gateways

There are various ways to control the flow of a process. In this five-part series we’ve focused on

gateways and explored the five different gateways offered by Oracle BPM to define the control points

within your processes. We have seen how you can deviate from the default process path using a split-

merge gateway (parallel gateway, inclusive gateway and complex gateway) and tried to shed some light

on the more complex gateway types by demystifying the event-based and complex gateways.

The biggest challenge in modeling and implementing processes is knowledge of the components set. I

hope that by the end of this five-part series you have a clearer view on gateways and how to use each

gateway to define your control and deviation points within your processes.

Antonis Antoniou

Antonis Antoniou is a Technical Director working for Oracle Platinum Partner

eProseed. He is a Fusion Middleware Expert, a specialist in the areas of

Enterprise 2.0, Business Process Management and Service Oriented

Architecture and a certified professional on Oracle Application Grid, Oracle

WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, ADF, Oracle BPM and Oracle

SOA. Antonis has long-time experience as developer, coach, trainer and

architect and has leaded multiple complex projects on Oracle Fusion

Middleware across Europe and Middle-East and across various industries

(telecom, financial services, public sector). Antonis started his professional

career at Deloitte where he worked for 8 years, reaching the level of senior manager in charge of the

technology integration service line before joining eProseed. Antonis is an avid technology evangelist and

a regular speaker at various Oracle conferences and events.


http://antonis-antoniou.blogspot.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonisantoniou

https://twitter.com/AntoniouAntonis


SOA Magazine IV 124

Call for content SOA Magazine & Service Technology Magazine & OTN

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SOA Magazine IV 125

Top 10 Things You Should Know About BPM 11g/12c

With the help of my A-Team colleagues (Sushil Shukla, Siming Mu, John Featherly, Pete Farkas), and

based on collective experiences visiting numerous BPM customers worldwide, I have put together my

“Top 10″ list of things everyone should know when embarking on a BPM project.

You might agree, you might disagree, most of all, feel free to comment.

1. Auditing

BPM provides the business with extremely detailed visibility of runtime instances through its powerful

auditing capabilities.

HOWEVER… This comes at a cost: detailed auditing requires frequent inserts into the SOAINFRA

database increasing the likelihood of contention and causing significant database growth. As volume

increases it is almost always the case that the consequences of Auditing produce the first bottleneck.

BUT… Auditing can be tuned down where appropriate and purge scripts can remediate database growth

SEE… Auditing Demystified

2. Payload Size

It can often be simpler at the time of BPM process design to have one large payload schema that

includes all elements for every possible interaction within the lifetime of an instance, and pass this

everywhere within the instance, including to human tasks and their UIs.

HOWEVER… The cost of this, both at runtime and in terms of the number and size of database rows, can

be large. The whole payload must be written to SOAINFRA database at dehydration points within the

lifetime of a process instance & in-between these dehydration points, data objects associated with this

payload are held in memory.

BUT… Appropriate design of the payload schema (flatter & simpler) can reduce the size considerably.

The optimal solution would be to pass only key-values in the payload and retrieve detail values as-and-

when needed inside the process, however this can lead to over-complicating the process design with

technical services. A sensible balance is always the best approach.

SEE… XML_DOCUMENT Table Growth

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-auditing-demystified/

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-11g-xml_document-table-growth/


SOA Magazine IV 126

3. Partitioning / Purging

BPM audits heavily, this can be extremely useful for business insight

HOWEVER… The SOAINFRA database growth can be larger than expected

BUT… Partitioning & purging are critical to limiting database growth. Test purging thoroughly as part of a

normal stress/load test cycle. Determine whether “loop purge” outside of the online window is

sufficient, if not consider also using “parallel purge” during quiet periods during the online day.

Partitioning is a good option in most cases, in 11g SOAINFRA must be partitioned post-installation but in

12c it is an installation option.

SEE… SOA 11g Database Growth Management Strategy Paper & SOA Partitioning

4. Negative Testing

SOA Suite provides a comprehensive fault policy framework & BPM has inbuilt fault-handling

constructs, allowing the vast majority of technical and business exceptions to be handled gracefully.

HOWEVER… Failure to properly negative test potential exceptions, individually & in bulk, can lead to

inadequate operational guidelines & faults occurring in production which can be hard to recover.

BUT… Ensure that thorough negative testing happens in a like-live pre-production environment. Use this

testing as a basis for building a robust fault-policy framework. Involve operations staff in this testing

process in order to build an appropriate “Operations Guide”

SEE… Fault Policy Framework

5. Faults & Recovery

Thorough negative testing and a comprehensive fault policy will allow the vast majority of exceptions

to be gracefully handled

HOWEVER… Unexpected exceptions can still occur… exception conditions that were not tested prior to

production and even issues in the BPM engine itself.

BUT… All is not lost in situations like this. BPM process instances will roll-back to a prior dehydration

point and can be recovered individually and in bulk from either the Enterprise Manager or via the API.

12c has the new Error Hospital features which make exception monitoring & recovery even simpler

SEE… BPM Process Instances – Faults, Rollback & Recovery & Error Hospital (12c)

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/soa11gstrategy-1508335.pdf

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/integration.1111/e10226/soaadmin_partition.htm#CJHFJDII

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/fault-management-framework-by-example/

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-process-instances-faults-rollback-recovery-part-1/

https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/soasuite/administer/soa-error-hospital-faults.htm#SOAAG98030


SOA Magazine IV 127

6. Performance / Load Testing

BPM running as part of SOA Suite can handle very high throughput and concurrent users.

HOWEVER… The BPM Engine, together with the other SOA Suite engines, the associated Weblogic

servers and the underlying databases and JVMs are not tuned out-of-the-box for specific loads or usage

patterns.

BUT… Appropriate performance testing (load, stress, soak etc….) in a like-live pre-production

environment allows for a highly tuned environment which can be used as a template for production.

SEE… Oracle BPM 11g Performance Tuning Guide

7. LDAP & Active Directory

BPM is highly flexible in where its users & groups are stored. They can be in LDAP providers such as

Active Directory or Oracle Internet Directory, they can be in other LDAP providers, they can even be in

a database or a combination of any or all of them.

HOWEVER… The interaction between BPM and its users & groups can often be a bottleneck in

production systems if the LDAP structure is not fully understood and/or the area has not been

appropriately tested in a like-live pre-production environment. Active Directory can be a specific

problem area since the settings for this inside Weblogic server are not tuned out-of-the-box for BPM.

BUT… Appropriate testing will help to tune the properties and the caching at the level of the Weblogic

provider and, if necessary, libOVD, OVD and the LDAP provider itself.

SEE… Active Directory and BPM & BPM, libOVD and LDAP

8.Process Versioning

BPM is highly flexible in the management of process versions and the in-flight instances that run on

them. Old and new revisions can run in parallel in a co-existence strategy. Small fixes to a revision can

have the associated in-flight instances patched automatically. New revisions of a process can have

some or all in-flight instances migrated from an older revision.

HOWEVER… Not all changes to the design of a process will allow automatic patching or migration of in-

flight instances.

BUT… It is possible to design around these limitations, and also possible in some case to force

deployment and/or use “Alter Flow” post deployment to massage in-flight instances to the appropriate

activity with the correct instance data.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/bpm11gperftuning-1912340.pdf

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=724&get_params=streamId:22,p_searchWords:sushil,p_pageNumber:1

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-workspace-login-with-libovd-and-ldap-part-1-configuration-and-startup/


SOA Magazine IV 128

SEE… Restrictions on patching of in-flight instances (11g) & Restrictions on migration of in-flight

instances (11g) & Alter Flow (11g) & Instance Patching & Instance Patching Revisited

9. When to Use BPEL

The benefits of BPM being part of a larger SOA Suite offering are huge, the appropriate product (BPEL,

Mediator etc… ) can be used to solve the problem at hand.

HOWEVER… When to use BPEL instead of BPM can be a problem. It can be overly simplistic to assume

that; if all that is required is service orchestration, if the process has no human interaction and the need

for a business view of the running instances is not needed then BPEL should be chosen. BPEL has less

database overhead and has been shown to be marginally more performant in terms of throughput but

there are drawbacks, mainly in terms of instance patching (it is not possible) and instance migration

(only sync processes, i.e. with no durable activities)

BUT… A correct choice between BPM & BPEL (and other products such as mediator) should be made at

design time in the full knowledge of the benefits and limitations of each. A safe rule of thumb is never to

mix BPM processes and durable BPEL processes in the same composite.

SEE… Modifying Running Process Instances (11g)

10. Flex Fields & Composite Sensors

Flex fields provide an ability to customize the BPM Workspace tasklist with business data, allowing

business users to optimize how they prioritize and work on tasks. Composite sensors provide a similar

ability within Enterprise Manager, i.e. give operational staff the ability to find running instances based

on business data.

HOWEVER… It can be difficult to understand which of public or protected flex fields to use, there is a

limit to the overall number of flex fields available & flex fields often cause performance problems as

they are not indexed by default in the SOAINFRA database.

BUT… Correct usage & indexing of flex fields can be invaluable to business users. Composite sensors

likewise for operational users.

SEE… Flex Fields with Oracle BPM & Composite Sensors

Summary

They are my Top 10… what are yours ?

All site content is the property of Oracle Corp. Redistribution not allowed without written permission

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/user.1111/e15175/bpmug_alt_flw_mig.htm#BPMUG87383




http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-11g-deployment-instance-migration/

http://www.ateam-oracle.com/bpm-11g-instance-patching-revisited-inability-to-create-new-instances/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoLWDcz4Vrk&feature=em-upload_owner

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/dev.1111/e10224/sca_compsensors.htm#SOASE20703


SOA Magazine IV 129

Mark Foster

Mark Foster is a Consulting Solution Architect in the FMW Architects

Team. He is focused on BPM & ACM and is widely acknowledged as

one of the go-to experts in these products having helped customers

worldwide, from architecture reviews to escalations. He has over 25

years experience in the IT industry and over 10 years as an Integration

& Solutions Architect. Prior to Oracle, Mark worked for Sun

Microsystems & SeeBeyond in very similar roles, and before this Mark

worked as an Integration Architect at Royal Bank of Scotland /

NatWest Bank. Outside of work Mark is a keen runner & triathlete

having competed at distances up to IronMan. Mark lives in France,

just south of Strasbourg at the foot of the Vosges mountains.


http://www.ateam-oracle.com/author/mark-foster/

http://fr.linkedin.com/in/markprestonfoster


SOA Magazine IV 130

Thriving On Adaptability: Best Practices for Knowledge Workers by Keith Swenson

Adaptive Case Management is ultimately about allowing knowledge workers to work the way that they

want to work and to provide them with the tools and information they

need to do so effectively.

As Surendra Reddy points out in his foreword:

“Imagine a fully integrated ACM system layered into the value stream of

an enterprise. The customer support team is able to focus on customer

needs, with easy access to the entire company’s repertoire of

knowledge, similar cases, information, and expertise, as if it were a

service. To truly accommodate customers, companies must vest real

power and authority in the people and systems that interact directly

with customers, at the edge of the organization and beyond. ACM

augments business processes to deliver true data-driven process

infrastructure entering enterprises into the age of intelligent machines

and intelligent processes. ACM empowers the knowledge worker to collaborate, derive new insights,

and fine tune the way of doing business by placing customers right in the left where they belong, to

drive innovation and organizational efficiencies across the global enterprise.

“ACM also helps organizations focus on improving or optimizing the line of interaction where our people

and systems come into direct contact with customers. It’s a whole different thing; a new way of doing

business that enables organizations to literally become one living-breathing entity via collaboration and

adaptive data-driven biological-like operating systems. ACM is not just another acronym or business fad.

ACM is the process, strategy, framework, and set of tools that enables this evolution and maturity.

“ACM, in my opinion, is the future blueprint for the way of doing business.”

Thriving on Adaptability describes the work of managers, decision makers, executives, doctors, lawyers,

campaign managers, emergency responders, strategists, and many others who have to think for a living.

These are people who figure out what needs to be done, at the same time that they do it.

In award-winning case studies covering industries as a diverse as law enforcement, transportation,

insurance, banking, state services, and healthcare, you will find instructive examples for how to

transform your own organization.

This important book follows the ground-breaking best-sellers, Empowering Knowledge Workers, Taming

the Unpredictable, How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done, and Mastering the Unpredictable and

provides important papers by thought-leaders in this field, together with practical examples, detailed

ACM case studies and product reviews. Get the book here.

http://store.futstrat.com/servlet/-strse-116/Thriving-On-Adaptability/Detail

http://futstrat.com/books/EmpoweringKnowledgeWorkers.php

http://store.futstrat.com/servlet/Detail?no=93

http://store.futstrat.com/servlet/Detail?no=93

http://www.futstrat.com/books/HowKnowledgeWorkers.php

http://store.futstrat.com/servlet/-strse-116/Thriving-On-Adaptability/Detail


SOA Magazine IV 131

Cloud Service Brokers – the integration story of your cloud

Content Cloud service broker definition Cloud service broker role & services Cloud service broker market opportunity Challenges cloud service broker Examining the cloud broker market opportunity & role of IP Cloud broker IaaS In the SOA Magazine III “Cloud Computing Definition & Architecture for Cloud Service Brokers” we introduced the cloud computing definition, concepts and the idea of Cloud Service Broker. In this article we discuss the Cloud Service Brokers in details including their roles, services, market opportunity and challenges. Cloud service broker definition The paper “Defining Cloud Services Brokerage: Taking Intermediation to the Next Level” written by Daryl C. Plummer, Benoit J. Lheureux, Frances Karamouzis and published by Gartner in October 2010, defines cloud services brokerage (CSB) as "A cloud services brokerage is a business model in which a company or other entity adds value to one or more (generally public or hybrid, but possibly private) cloud services on behalf of one or more consumers of those services." The authors do not define cloud brokers in categories like the NIST definition in 2011 (Service Intermediation & Service Aggregation & Service Arbitration). Instead the paper highlights the types of CSBs by backup & recovery, integration, customer development, governance or service marketplace. In recent papers Gartner follows the NIST cloud broker categories. Cloud service broker examples:

Category Cloud Service Intermediation Cloud Service Aggregation Cloud Service Arbitration

Example Salesforce Identity Dell Boomi Zimory

Cloud service broker role & services CSB’s reduce the complexity between cloud providers and cloud consumer. In an internal private cloud scenario, the internal IT organization takes on the role of broker. For a cloud consumer a CSB’s can handle security, governance, portability & interoperability, regional regulatory and legal issues. Also a CSB can add value adding services to a cloud solution. Therefore a CSB might increase the business continuity. On the other hands a cloud broker adds an additional single point of failure between several cloud providers and a cloud consumer. In the case the cloud consumer decides to work with several CSB’s this increases again the complexity. Cloud service broker market opportunity Gartner highlights the market potential of CSB. In 2010 Gartner conducted a survey, in which users plan to use CSB’s for

57% backup & recovery

52,8% integration

48% custom development


SOA Magazine IV 132

40% governance

36% service marketplace Gartner concludes “By 2015, CSBs will represent the single-largest category of growth in cloud computing, moving from a sub-$1 billion market in 2010 to a composite market counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars”. Currently SAAS and IAAS are the largest categories in cloud computing. AS the market potential is huge more and more leading cloud providers offer a complete platform. For example Salesfore.com stated with CRM services, added force a PaaS platform and offers Salesforce Identity a cloud service intermediation. When a market opportunity becomes interested and large enough these large providers like Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM or Oracle will offer services. These providers do have the market power to offer complete and proprietary cloud economies. An interesting development are the joint partnerships between leading cloud vendors. Oracle and Microsoft announced a partnership in June 2013. As part of this partnership cloud consumers and deploy Oracle databases and Oracle WebLogic middleware on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Salesforce and Oracle plan to standardize and integrate their SAAS cloud services. Salesforce CRM should be integrated with Oracle HCM and Financials. This new partnerships will reduce the need for CSBs. The cloud consumers might profit from better integrated solutions and better interoperability between cloud providers. Or in the other case these large vendors might enable cloud brokerage between their cloud solutions out of the box. Additional more and more IT companies offers Cloud Service Brokers out of the box. For example Oracle launched the Cloud Adapters like pre-build cloud service intermediation brokers between solutions like Salesfore.com, RightNow and on-premises applications like SAP R3. Eventually this integration services will also become available in the Oracle Cloud Integration Service planed for mid 2015. Challenges cloud service broker Potential challenges between several cloud providers might increase the overall SLA’s. For example a CSB brokers two credit check services from different cloud providers. If one provider fails, the other cloud provider might be still available. The CSB brokers of this service and the cloud consumer can still get credit check results. On the other hand if the CSB fails all cloud services are not available for the cloud consumer, therefore the CSB might be a single point of failure. The cloud consumer might decrease this risk by using several CSBs for the same cloud services. This might increase the complexity significant. Imagine the use of several CRM solutions integrated with several e-mail solutions and be synchronized and managed by several CBS. Examining the cloud broker market opportunity & role of IP Cloud brokers need to offer their consumer an added value. IP is the foundation for CSB. In todays model integration between systems is delivered often on a project base by a system integrator. These SI can leverage this knowledge and re-use it to build and become a CSB. Based on the Cloud Provider SIs will be supported with a marketing platform to promote the CSBs. For example Oracle gives it’s partners to promote re-usable assets like CSBs within the Cloud Marketplace. Cloud broker IaaS An emerging area of CBS is the brokerage of IaaS. Solutions deployed on a defined stack like Red Hat

OpenStack can be shifted between private and or different public clouds. Red Hat offers a technology

call Cloud Forms to manage the stack and broker the workload. Other vendors like Oracle offer similar

technology e.g. Nimbula. Cloud consumers get the freedom to choose the IaaS provider.


SOA Magazine IV 133

References

Source Defining Cloud Services Brokerage: Taking Intermediation to the Next Level

Source Defining Cloud Services Brokerage: Taking Intermediation to the Next Level

Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1964592

Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1964798

Jürgen Kress

As a middleware expert Jürgen works at Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels, responsible for Oracle's EMEA fusion middleware partner business. He is the founder of the Oracle SOA & BPM and the WebLogic Partner Communities and the global Oracle Partner Advisory Councils. With more than 5000 members from all over the world the Middleware Partner Community is the most successful and active community at Oracle. Jürgen manages the community with monthly newsletters, webcasts and conferences. He hosts his annual Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forums and the Fusion Middleware Summer Camps, where more than 200 partners get product updates, roadmap insights and hands-on trainings. Supplemented by many web 2.0 tools like twitter, discussion forums, online communities, blogs and wikis. For the SOA & Cloud Symposium by Thomas Erl, Jürgen is a member of the steering board. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences like the SOA & BPM Integration Days, JAX, UKOUG, OUGN, or OOP


http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1964592

http://soacommunity.wordpress.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kress

http://www.twitter.com/soacommunity


SOA Magazine IV 134

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For the latest upcoming events please visit our SOA Community Website. Add you SOA event to the SOA

Community calendar simply by sending a google calendar invite to [email protected]

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