Posts Tagged ‘SOA Suite11g’

Some tips & tricks on migrating SOA Suite 10g to 11g – Part 2

This blog contains some experiences taken from our migration from SOA Suite 10g to SOA Suite 11g. The previous one was about custom XSLT functions, sensors, composite instance tracking, and Domain Value Maps (DVM). This entry is about using Oracle Internet Directory (OID) 10g as identity provider for SOA Suite 11g.

Integrating OID 10g with SOA Suite 11g
Using OID 10g as identity- and access provider in SOA Suite 10g wasn’t entirely trivial. After applying the steps as documented in Oracle BPEL Process Manager Administrator’s Guide 10g you needed to perform some additional configuration steps that could be somewhat tricky at first. Jaap Poot has some great blogs on this.

Best practices 4 – Security and Identity Management

This is the fourth blog in a series of BPM and SOA best-practices. The previous blog in this series was on Oracle ESB and Mediator. This blog will discuss security and identity management in an SOA-environment.

Oracle Open World 2009 highlights

Sitting in my hotel room after the keynote by Larry Ellison that had my ‘all time favorite action Hero and now governor’ Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest, I was thinking about the highlights of this conference. One of them, obviously, was seeing ‘Arnie’ on stage.

But, on a serious note, there were several highlights as well. Let’s look at them in no particular order.

Some tips and tricks on migrating SOA Suite 10g to 11g

Just a few things I noticed last week when migrating BPEL and ESB projects from SOA Suite 10g to SCA composites and components in SOA Suite 11g.

Best practices 3 – Oracle ESB and Mediator

This is the third post in our SOA and BPM best practices series. This blog provides best practices for Oracle ESB (Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g) and its successor (when it concerns routing and transformation): the mediator component in SCA (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g). The previous blog in this series is about Web Services best practices.

Behind the scenes of OBUG, literally!

This week I attended the OBUG Benelux Connect 2009 user conference. OBUG stands for the Oracle BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) User Group. The conference was held at the Metropolis Cinema Complex in Antwerp. One of the sessions I planned to attend was the “Report from the R&D Lab – Analyzing the upcoming 11g Release of Fusion Middleware” session by Lonneke Dikmans and Lucas Jellema. The presentation was held on behalf of WAAI, a collaboration of four Dutch companies in which Lucas, Lonneke, and I participate. Goal of the WAAI collaboration is to share, bundle, and expand knowledge on the upcoming Fusion Middleware 11g release. In this presentation, the initial findings and research of WAAI would be made available to the audience, including real world examples and demonstrations. At least, that was the plan…

From Kuassi Mensah from Oracle -who had an earlier presentation on Database Web Services and SOA- we heard that you couldn’t hook up your laptop. That meant no demo’s! And nobody had informed the speakers about this! Even stranger since Javapolis is held at the same venue and tons of demo’s are given there each year. While Lonneke, Lucas, and I chatted about this we got the idea that I could do the demo backstage while they did the presentation. We asked the Metropolis crew, who was more than willing to help out. Thanks a lot for that guys!

Time was running out while Lonneke and Lucas showed me what to demo and virtual machines, SOA composites, schema’s, and other stuff quickly moved from one laptop to another. Lonneke and Lucas stayed remarkably calm given the situation. Just a few minutes before the presentation we crawled through a secret hatch in the back of the cinema. While I “installed” myself right next to the digital projectors, professional sound systems, buttons, wires, and tons of popcorn Lonneke and Lucas went back to do the presentation. Guided by their instructions during the presentation -while we couldn’t see each other- we still managed to show Fusion Middleware 11g stuff to the audience It turned out to be a great presentation after all, despite the organization or lack of it. Also quite educational when it comes to the inner workings of cinemas and good for the friday afternoon talks with colleagues

Oracle SOA Suite best practices guide

Justin Kestelyn blogged a little while ago about the release of the Oracle® SOA Suite Best Practices Guide 10g Release 3 (10.1.3.3.0). I did not find the time to read the entire guide yet (it has 272 pages in total), but you can easily use the guide as a reference to lookup information about transactions in ESB, file size limits, XML debatching with the File adapter, to name a few of the topics I did read.
The guide consists of two parts:

• Part 1. SOA Suite components. This part is not really about best practices, but explains the ins and outs of different SOA suite components. The term SOA Suite is not completely clear to me: in this case it is not what you download when you click on the link download SOA Suite. Maybe it refers to the concept SOA Suite. It covers Oracle BPEL process Manager, Oracle ESB, Oracle BPM Human Workflow (what a weird name is that???), Oracle Technology Adapters, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle B2B, but not Oracle rules, Webservices Manager or Oracle BPA Suite.
• Part 2. SOA Suite performance best practices. This is the part that really talks about best practices. It contains configurations and examples from real use cases. Both the problematic configuration and the solution are described. This is really helpful when you are designing your system, or when you are troubleshooting performance. It covers JMS to database adapters, Oracle BPEL process manager, and Oracle Human Workflow.

This guide is not a best practices guide for designing or managing your SOA, but it is definitely the source of information when you are working with Oracle SOA Suite 10g. If the answer is not in there, there usually is a link to documentation that already exists. So apart from the title, I am very happy with this document. It might be a good idea to print it, 272 pages is a lot to read from a screen…

Eliminating paperwork by combining digital imaging tools, content management systems and SOA

It was once said that the advance of ICT technologies such as e-mail would reduce the cost of handling documents and be beneficial for the environment. It would result in less printed paper, right? Everything would be done digitally, right? Well, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Even while technology exists to store most information digitally, lots of organizations still have an archive filled with all kinds of printed documents (invoices, orders, etc.). This is costly (you have to build, rent and/or buy archive space) and not really ‘CO2-neutral’. Especially in case documents are delivered electronically.

One of the related problems is that the process of electronically storing documents has to be compliant with a growing number of standards and laws. ‘Just’ storing documents manually on a file system won’t do.

In a customer case the following technologies are/will be combined to accomplish certified electronic storage of documents:

• Scanners with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software
• Process orchestration using services
• CMS (Content Management System)

How are these technologies combined?
Once documents arrive they are scanned. The OCR software outputs an image of the document and extracts metadata into an XML file. An automated process picks up the XML file, transforms its contents to a canonical data model and invokes a custom SOAP service, also passing the file location of the associated image. The invoked service then uses a Web Service API to store the image into a CMS database and uses the XML data to create and store metadata/attributes for the document.

Why are these technologies complementary?
While a CMS provides reliable and robust storage of electronic documents and provides multiple interfaces (both programmatic and UI-based), process orchestration and SOA implement traceable, auditable and robust processes governing the retrieval and storage of electronic documents. This in turn enables official certification in which stored documents are also ‘legal’ documents.

In this particular case Oracle products are used: the SOA Suite and Content Services (part of Oracle Collaboration Suite). But the same principal can of course be implemented using other technologies available on the market.