Custom adapter article on OTN

A while ago someone asked me if you could create your own adapter and use it from Oracle SOA Suite. More specifically if you could create an inbound e-mail adapter (not available out-of-the-box in SOA Suite) that polls for new mail messages and use it as activation agent for starting a BPEL process or ESB flow.

I knew this was possible -at least the possibility was documented- and searched for a how-to. I couldn’t find one explaining all steps involved. However, I did find lots of questions on the OTN forums asking how to achieve this. I thought it would be nice to write an article about it after I got it working. It’s published on OTN.

The article includes a step-by-step tutorial for building the adapter and plugging it into Oracle SOA Suite components such as BPEL PM and ESB. The article also briefly discusses adapter support, offerings, and convergence in future Oracle Fusion Middleware releases that incorporate former BEA products.

Drop me a line if you’re interested in an example for using a outbound adapter instead of an inbound one. I’ll see if I can add such an example in the future.