Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite Components

Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite Components

Oracle SOA Suite provides a comprehensive suite of components for developing, securing, and monitoring service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Service components (BPEL process, business rule, human task, spring, and mediator) are the building blocks that you use to construct a SOA composite application. The Service Infrastructure provides the internal message transport infrastructure capabilities for connecting service components and enabling data flow. Service engines for the components process the message information received from the Service Infrastructure. See SOA Composite Application Architecture for more information about service components.
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring consumes data transported over the Service Infrastructure, providing powerful business insight capabilities.
The following components comprise an Oracle SOA Suite installation:

• Service Infrastructure
• Oracle Mediator
• Oracle Adapters
• Business Events and Events Delivery Network
• Oracle Metadata Repository
• Oracle Business Rules
• Oracle WSM Policy Manager
• Oracle BPEL Process Manager
• Spring Context
• Human Workflow
• Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
• Oracle User Messaging Service
• Oracle B2B
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Oracle Enterprise Manager

The following components are included with Oracle SOA Suite, but available as a separate download:

• Oracle Service Bus
• Oracle Complex Event Processing

Both the Oracle Service Bus and the Service Infrastructure share common components, including Oracle Adapters, Oracle Metadata Repository, and the UDDI registry. The UDDI registry is available with the Oracle Service Registry, which is a separately licensable component. See Oracle Service Registry for more information.

In addition, several separately licensable products interoperate with Oracle SOA Suite components. See Interoperability with Other Oracle Products for more information.

Service Infrastructure

The Service Infrastructure provides the internal message routing infrastructure capabilities for connecting components and enabling data flow:

• Receives messages from the service providers or external partners through SOAP binding components, adapters, or the delivery API in the form of XML.
• Routes messages based on the composite definition to the appropriate service engine.

Oracle Mediator and the Service Infrastructure provide the following combined capabilities:

• Routing services to provide data movement
• Routing rules to specify routing, document transformation, and filtering
• Subscriptions to business eve

Oracle Mediator

Analogous to a load balancer routing HTTP traffic, the Oracle Mediator routes data from service providers to external partners. In addition, it can subscribe to and publish business events.

Using Oracle Mediator, you create routing services and rules for them. A routing service is the key component for moving a message across the enterprise service bus – from its entry point to its exit point. The rules determine how a message instance processed by the routing service gets to its next destination. Using the rules, Oracle Mediator can perform the following actions:

• Route: Determines the service component (BPEL process, business rule, human task, and mediator) to which to send the messages.
• Validate: Provides support for validating the incoming message payload by using a schematron or an XSD file.
• Filter: If specified in the rules, applies a filter expression that specifies the contents (payload) of a message be analyzed before any service is invoked.
• Transformation: If specified in the rules, transforms document data from one XML schema to another, thus enabling data interchange among applications using different schemas.

During runtime, Oracle Mediator evaluates routing rules, performs transformations, applies optional time delays, and either invokes another service or raises another business event. A routing service can handle returned responses, callbacks, faults, and time-outs. Oracle Mediator can also be used to implement a variety of integration patterns, such as service virtualization, service aggregation, publish and subscribe, fan-in, and fan-out.
About Oracle Service Bus with Oracle Mediator

Oracle Service Bus provides standalone service bus capabilities, enabling separation between application developers and target systems or services. The main users of the Oracle Service Bus are integration developers and operations personnel. Their mission is to shield application developers from changes in the endpoint services or systems and to prevent those systems from being overloaded with requests from upstream applications.

Whereas Oracle Service Bus provides service virtualization and protocol transformations for an Oracle SOA Suite application containing multiple composites, Oracle Mediator is an intra-composite mediation component that is deployed within an application.

 

Oracle Service Bus

Oracle Service Bus, available as a separate download with an Oracle SOA Suite license, is an intermediary that processes incoming service request messages, determines routing logic, and transforms these messages for compatibility with other service consumers. It receives messages through a transport protocol such as HTTP(S), JMS, File, and
FTP, and sends messages through the same or a different transport protocol. Service response
messages follow the inverse path.
Oracle Service Bus connects, mediates, and manages interactions between heterogeneous services, not just Web services, but also Java and .Net, messaging services and legacy endpoints. It uniquely delivers the integration capabilities of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with operational service management in a single product with an efficient, seamless user experience. With its flexible deployment options and automated integration with Oracle SOA Governance Suite, Oracle Service Bus handles the deployment, management and governance challenges of implementing SOA from department to enterprise scale.
Specifically, Oracle Service provides the following functional areas:

• Management: Provides embedded service management capabilities that provide optimized governance of all messaging. Its preemptive support ensures that mission-critical business processes continue to serve customer needs, even as business demands, requirements, and workloads change.
• Mediation: Provides a rich environment for content-based routing, message transformations, and lightweight orchestrations.
• Adaptive Messaging: Reliably connects any service by leveraging standards Web service transports, traditional messaging protocols and configuration of enterprise-specific custom transports.
• Security: Provides a rapid service configuration and integration environment that abstracts policies associated with routing rules, security, and service end-point access.

Comparing Oracle Mediator with Oracle Service Bus
Oracle Mediator is an intra-composite mediation component that is deployed within a composite, keeping the composite on a canonical model. Its primary function is to provide the transformation of legacy formats to a common format. It is responsible for brokering communications between components that make up a composite, enabling transformation, routing, event delivery, and payload validation inside the composite.

 

Oracle Adapters

Oracle Adapters use JCA technology to connect external systems to the Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle SOA Suite provides the following technology adapters to integrate with transport protocols, data stores, and messaging middleware:

• BAM
• FTP
• Java Messaging Service (JMS)
• Advanced Queuing (AQ)
• Files
• Message Queuing (MQ) Series

Oracle also provides support for third-party adapters. See Other Adapters for additional information.

 

Business Events and Event Delivery Network

You can raise business events when a situation of interest occurs. Business events are messages sent as the result of an occurrence or situation, such as a new order or completion of an order. In Oracle SOA Suite, the mediator service component subscribes or publishes events. When an event is published, other applications can subscribe to it.

Definitions for business events, as well as other artifacts of a composite, are stored in the Oracle Metadata Repository (MDS), and then published in the Event Delivery Network (EDN

Oracle Metadata Repository

The Oracle Metadata Repository (MDS) stores business events, rulesets for use by Oracle Business Rules, XSLT files for Oracle Service Bus and Oracle Mediator, XSD XML schema files for Oracle BPEL Process Manager, WSDL files, and metadata files for Complex Event Processing.

To publish the MDS services to the outside world, use the Oracle Enterprise Repository provided with the Oracle SOA Governance Suite.

Oracle Business Rules

Oracle Business Rules, initiated by a BPEL process service component, enable dynamic decisions at runtime allowing you to automate policies, constraints, computations, and reasoning while separating rule logic from underlying application code. In addition, the human task and mediator service components can make use of rules for dynamic routing. A mediator service component can use a business rule for routing messages, and a human task can use a business rule for routing assignments. The Oracle Metadata Repository (MDS) stores the rulesets for Oracle Business Rules.
Oracle Business Rules provide more agile rule maintenance and empowers business analysts with the ability to modify rule logic without programmer assistance and without interrupting business processes.

 

Oracle WSM Policy Manager

Oracle WSM Policy Manager provides the infrastructure for enforcing global security and auditing policies in the Service Infrastructure. By securing various endpoints and setting and propagating identity, it secures applications. Oracle WSM Policy Manager provides a standard mechanism for signing messages, performing encryption, performing authentication, and providing role-based access control. You also can change a policy without having to change the endpoints or clients for this endpoints, providing greater flexibility and security monitoring for your enterprise.
In addition, Oracle WSM Policy Manager collects monitoring statistics with information about the quality, uptime, and security threats and displays them in a Web dashboard. As a result, Oracle WSM Policy Manager provides better control and visibility over Web services.

 

Oracle BPEL Process Manager

Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides the standard for assembling a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow, radically reducing the cost and complexity of process integration initiatives. Oracle BPEL Process Manager enables you to orchestrate synchronous and asynchronous services into end-to-end BPEL process flows.

You integrate BPEL processes with external services (known as partner links). You also integrate technology adapters and services, such as human tasks, transformations, notifications, and business rules within the process.

 

Spring Context

Oracle SOA Suite provides support for the spring framework functionality of the WebLogic Service Component Architecture (SCA) of Oracle WebLogic Server. Spring is a popular application framework that enables developers to quickly and easily create high quality applications for deployment into high-end application servers. The spring framework provides a lightweight container that makes it easy to use different types of services. Lightweight containers can accept any JavaBean, instead of specific types of components.

You can use the spring framework to create Java applications using plain old Java objects (POJOs) and expose components as SCA services and references. In SCA terms, a WebLogic spring framework SCA application is a collection of POJOs plus a spring SCA context file that wires the classes together with SCA services and references.

Oracle SOA Suite provides a spring context service component that enables you to use Java interfaces instead of WSDL files in SOA composite applications. You can also integrate components that use Java interfaces with components that use WSDL files in the same SOA composite application. For example, you can have a spring context service component invoke an Oracle BPEL Process Manager service component or an Oracle Mediator service component invoke a spring context service component or Enterprise JavaBean.

 

Human Workflow

Many end-to-end business processes require human interactions with the process. For example, humans may be needed for approvals, exception management, or performing activities required to advance the business process. The human workflow component provides the following features:

• Human interactions with processes, including assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups
• Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task (human task activity)
• Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a worklist application (Oracle BPM Worklist)
• Organization, filtering, prioritization, and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks
• Reports, reassignments, load balancing, and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks

The graphic shows an overview of human workflow:

1. A BPEL process invokes a human task activity when it needs a human to perform a task. A human task activity creates a task in the human task service component.
2. The human task service component uses workflow services to perform a variety of operations in the life cycle of a task, such as querying tasks for a user, retrieving metadata information related to a task, and so on.
3. The human task service component presents tasks to users through a variety of channels, such as Oracle BPM Worklist, email, portals, or custom applications. Oracle BPM Worklist, a role-based application that supports the concept of supervisors and process owners, and provides functionality for finding, organizing, managing, and performing tasks.

 

Oracle Business Activity Monitoring

Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM) is a complete solution for building real-time operational dashboards and monitoring and alerting applications over the Web. Using this technology, business user gain the ability to build interactive, real-time dashboards and proactive alerts to monitor their business services and processes. More specifically, Oracle BAM enables business operation workers and managers to:

• Monitor business processes and services in real-time
• Analyze events as they occur by correlating events, identifying trends as they emerge, and alerting users to bottlenecks, exceptions, and solutions to business problems
• Act on current conditions with event-driven alerts, real-time dashboards, BPEL processes, and Web services integration, enabling quick changes or corrective action to business processes

The graphic depicts the Oracle Business Activity Monitoring active data architecture for dynamically moving real-time data to end users through every step of the process. It shows various mechanisms to feed data into Oracle BAM. Oracle BAM processes incoming data and analyzes events. Oracle BAM Web Applications, including Active Viewer, Active Studio, Architect, Administrator, enable users to build Oracle BAM schema, dashboards, and alerts. BAM Data Control enables developers to create ADF pages with active data content. Oracle BAM and its applications then provide output to users.

Oracle SOA Suite makes it easy to expose SOA events, such as BPEL processes, to the BAM engine. Because many of the events are not SOA events, you need to consider all of the different disparate events and how you want to correlate and aggregate that information together and display in real-time dashboards.

Oracle Complex Event Processing

Databases are best equipped to run queries over finite stored data sets. However, many modern applications require long-running queries over continuous unbounded sets of data. By design, a stored data set is appropriate when significant portions of the data are queried repeatedly and updates are relatively infrequent. In contrast, data streams represent data that is changing constantly, often exclusively through insertions of new elements. It is either unnecessary or impractical to operate on large portions of the data multiple times. Many types of applications generate data streams as opposed to data sets, including sensor data applications, financial tickers, network performance measuring tools, network monitoring and traffic management applications, and clickstream analysis tools. Managing and processing data for these types of applications involves building data management and querying capabilities with a strong temporal focus.

To address this requirement, Oracle SOA Suite provides Oracle Complex Event Processing (Oracle CEP), a data management infrastructure that supports the notion of streams of structured data records together with stored relations. Oracle CEP is included with Oracle SOA Suite, but available as a separate download. It is optimized to handle very large volumes of events, such as those found in bank transactions, that cannot be managed by Oracle BAM. In addition, Oracle Complex Event Processing can perform complex correlations and pattern matching.
For a composite application to use Oracle CEP, an Oracle Mediator publishes business events to the Event Delivery Network (EDN). At runtime, the Oracle CEP Service Engine subscribes to these events. The Oracle CEP Service Engine executes a Continuous Query Language (Oracle CQL) query and searches for patterns in event streams. Oracle CQL is a query language based on SQL with added constructs that support streaming data. Using Oracle CQL, you can express queries on data streams to perform complex event processing. The Oracle CEP Service Engine listens on these streams, caches all the necessary individual, seemingly unrelated events and tries to correlate them into specific patterns. The data provided from complex event processing queries can then be used in Oracle BAM.
The potential applications of Oracle CEP are numerous, from electronic trading and risk management to intrusion detection and compliance monitoring.
Specifically, Oracle CEP provides the following functional areas:

• Data and Event Sources: An Oracle CEP event source identifies a producer of data that your Oracle CQL queries operate on. Event sources include data feeds such as wire services and stock tickers, sensors such as temperature, motion, or radio frequency identification (RFID) detectors, and other devices. Oracle CEP provides a variety of adapters that connect such real-world event sources to your Oracle CQL queries. Oracle CEP adapters support the following event sources: JMS, HTTP publisher/subscriber, and file.
• Context Creation: Oracle CEP offers a variety of sliding window operators and views (subqueries) that allow you to define the temporal or semantic context in which filtering, correlation and aggregation, and pattern matching takes place. Using windows and views, you can define contexts such as events in the last 5 minutes or events for a particular customer, and so on. Oracle CQL provides a variety of sliding windows, including: range-based (time or constant value), tuple-based, and partitioned. In addition, you can easily define custom window operators.
• Filtering: Using Oracle CQL, you can specify queries that select on any of the attributes of the events offered by event sources. You use such queries to filter the event sources to obtain events of interest. Oracle CQL provides a rich set of operators, expressions, conditions, and statements for this purpose.
• Correlation and Aggregation: Using Oracle CQL, you can perform advanced statistical and arithmetic operations on the attributes of the events offered by event sources. Oracle CQL provides: single-row functions that return a single result row for every row of a queried stream or view; aggregate functions that return a single aggregate result based on a group of tuples, rather than on a single tuple; statistical and advanced arithmetic operations based on the Colt open source libraries for high performance scientific and technical computing; and statistical and advanced arithmetic operations based on the java.lang.Math class. In addition, you can easily define custom single-row and aggregate functions.
• Pattern Matching: Using the Oracle CQL MATCH_RECOGNIZE condition, you can succinctly express complex pattern matching operations for a wide variety of tasks such as algorithmic trading, double-bottom detection, non-event detection, and so on. The following example detects if perishable food is exposed to temperatures of 25 C or higher for more than 5 minutes.

 <query id="detectPerish"><![CDATA[
    select its.itemId from ItemTempStream
    MATCH_RECOGNIZE (
        PARTITION BY
            itemId
        MEASURES
            A.itemId as itemId
        PATTERN (A B* C)
        DEFINE
            A  AS  (A.temp >= 25) and ,
            B  AS  ((B.temp >= 25) and
                    (B.element_time - A.element_time < INTERVAL "0 00:00:05:00" DAY TO SECOND)),
            C  AS  ((C.temp >= 25) and 
                    C.element_time - A.element_time >= INTERVAL "0 00:00:05:00" DAY TO SECOND)
    )) as its
]]></query>

• Complex Event Sinks: An Oracle CQL event sink identifies a consumer of Oracle CQL query results. That is, a consumer of notable events that Oracle CQL queries have extracted from event sources by executing filtering, correlation and aggregation, and pattern matching within various contexts. Typically, notable events are fewer in number (and much higher in value) than the events offered by event sources. Oracle CEP adapters support the following event sinks: JMS, HTTP publisher/subscriber, file, and event beans. Event beans are Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) that contain the business logic you want executed when certain notable events occur.

Oracle User Messaging Service

Oracle User Messaging Service provides a common service responsible for sending out messages from applications to devices. It also routes incoming messages from devices to applications.
You can easily send outgoing notifications from a BPEL process flow or invoke outgoing and incoming messages for tasks assigned to users from a human task.

 

Oracle B2B

Oracle B2B is an eCommerce gateway that enables the secure and reliable exchange of messages between an enterprise and its trading partners. It is a binding component of the Oracle SOA Suite and this platform enables the implementation of complete end-to-end eCommerce business processes.

What Is eCommerce?

Electronic commerce, eCommerce, is the buying and selling of products or services electronically and can take many forms, for example, machine-to-application, customer-to-application, application-to-application and business-to-business (B2B). In any form, eCommerce, is an integral component of any enterprise integration strategy and the focus must be the business process. You must address process orchestration, error mitigation, data (translation, transformation, and outing), security, compliance, visibility, and management.

What Does Oracle B2B Provide?

Oracle B2B addresses the documents, packaging, transports, messaging services, Trading Partner profiles, and agreements with the following features:

• Document Management: Provides multiple document standards, such as definitions, validation, translation, identification, correlation, batching, routing, code lists, and envelope generation.
• Trading Partner Management: Provides capabilities to manage trading partner profiles and agreements.
• Profiles: Provides trading partners details, such as identifications, contacts, users, delivery channels, supported documents, and security.
• Agreements: Enables agreement between trading partners for a specific interaction.
• System Management: Provides features to monitor and manage the environment.

The graphic demonstrates a typical eCommerce use case:

1. The application initiates the purchase order.
2. A mediator service component receives the purchase order. It validates, performs code conversion, transforms the purchase order to a canonical, and routes the document. (Canonical refers to a canonical data model that is used to transition between different document standards.)
3. A BPEL process service component receives the purchase order, orchestrates any required business process, and can invoke a human task, business rule, and error handling as required.
4. A mediator service component receives the purchase order, validates, performs code conversion, transforms the canonical to the target purchase order, and routes the document.
5. Oracle B2B receives the purchase order, identifies the partner, identifies the agreement, validates the purchase order, translates the purchase order to EDI, generates the EDI envelope, generates acknowledgments, and manages the secure exchange of the purchase order with the external trading partner.
    

 

Oracle JDeveloper

Oracle JDeveloper is the development component of Oracle SOA Suite. It forms a comprehensive Integrated Service Environment (ISE) for creating and deploying composite applications and managing the composite.

Oracle JDeveloper enables developers to model, create, discover, assemble, orchestrate, test, deploy, and maintain composite applications based on services.

The SOA Composite Editor enables you to create, edit, and deploy services, and also to assemble them in a composite application, all from a single location. These components are integrated together into one application and communicate with the outside world through binding components such as Web services and JCA adapters.

The SOA Composite Editor enables you to use either of two approaches for designing SOA composite applications:

• The top-down approach of building a composite application puts interfaces first and implementation next. For example, you first add BPEL processes, human tasks, business rules, and Oracle Mediator routing services components to an application, and later define the specific content of these service components.
• The bottom-up approach takes existing implementations of service components and wraps them with Web service interfaces for assembly into a composite application. For example, you first create and define the specific content of BPEL processes, human tasks, business rules, and Oracle Mediator routing services components, and later create a SOA composite application to which you add these service components.

Oracle JDeveloper provides the following additional editors to design service components:

• Oracle BPEL Designer: You can create a BPEL process service component in the SOA composite application of Oracle JDeveloper and then design it by using the BPEL Designer, which is displayed, when you double-click a BPEL process in the SOA Composite Editor.
• Oracle Mediator Editor: You can create a mediator service component in the SOA composite application of Oracle JDeveloper, and then design it by using the Mediator Editor, which is displayed when you double-click a Mediator in SOA Composite Editor.
• Human Task Editor: You can create a human task service component in the SOA composite application of Oracle JDeveloper and then design it by using the Human Task Editor, which is displayed when you double-click a human task in the SOA Composite Editor.
• Business Rules Designer: You can create a business rules service component in the SOA composite application of Oracle JDeveloper and then design it by using the Business Rules Designer, which is displayed when you double-click a business rule in the SOA Composite Editor.

 

Oracle Enterprise Manager

You can configure, monitor, and manage your SOA composite application during run time from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control Console. Fusion Middleware Control is a Web browser-based, graphical user interface that you can use to monitor and administer a farm.
A farm is a collection of components managed by Fusion Middleware Control. It can contain Oracle WebLogic Server domains, one Administration Server, one or more Managed Servers, clusters, and the Oracle Fusion Middleware components that are installed, configured, and running in the domain.
Fusion Middleware Control organizes a wide variety of performance data and administrative functions into distinct, Web-based home pages for the farm, domain, servers, components, and applications. The Fusion Middleware Control home pages make it easy to locate the most important monitoring data and the most commonly used administrative functions from your Web browser.
You deploy SOA composite applications designed in Oracle JDeveloper to the SOA Infrastructure. The SOA Infrastructure is a Java EE-compliant application running in Oracle WebLogic Server. The application manages composites and their life cycle, service engines, and binding components.
From Fusion Middleware Control, you select a farm and select the SOA Infrastructure for that farm to begin administration. You can navigate to Oracle SOA Suite administration tasks through the SOA Infrastructure home page and menu. The SOA Infrastructure provides you with access to all deployed SOA composite applications, service engines, service components, business events, and other elements.

Fusion Middleware Control provides a wide variety of administrative and performance data for the SOA components, composite applications, and composite instances within the SOA infrastructure, enabling you to administer and pinpoint issues.

Life Cycle of a SOA Composite Application

The basic life cycle of a SOA composite application is as follows:

1. Use Oracle JDeveloper to design a SOA composite application with various SOA components.
2. Package the composite application for deployment.
3. Deploy the SOA composite application to the SOA Infrastructure. The SOA Infrastructure is a Java EE-compliant application running in Oracle WebLogic Server. The application manages composites and their life cycle, service engines, and binding components.
4. Use Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control to monitor and manage the composite application for a farm's SOA infrastructure.

A SOA composite is an assembly of services, service components, and references designed and deployed together in a single application. Wiring between the service, service component, and reference enable message communication. The composite processes the information described in the messages.

The graphic provides an example of a composite that includes a mediator service component and a BPEL service component, an inbound service binding component, and an outbound reference binding component.

Service Components
Service components are the building blocks of a SOA composite application. Each service component is hosted in its own service engine container. Messages sent to the service engine are targeted at specific service components. For example, a message targeted for a BPEL process is sent to the BPEL service engine. Service engines process the message information received from the .
The following service components are available. There is a corresponding service engine of the same name for each service component. All service engines can interact together in a single composite.

• BPEL processes provide process orchestration and storage of synchronous or asynchronous process. You design a business process that integrates a series of business activities and services into an end-to-end process flow
• Business rules enable you to design a business decision based on rules.
• Human tasks provide workflow modeling that describes the tasks for users or groups to perform as part of an end-to-end business process flow.
• Mediators route events (messages) between different components.

Services
Services provide the outside world with an entry point to the SOA composite application. The WSDL file of the service advertises its capabilities to external applications. These capabilities are used for contacting the SOA composite application components. The binding connectivity of the service describes the protocols that can communicate with the service, for example, SOAP/HTTP or a JCA adapter.
References
References enable messages to be sent from the SOA composite application to external services in the outside world.
Wires
Wires enable you to graphically connect the following components in a single SOA composite application for message communication:

• Services to service components
• Service components to other service components
• Service components to reference