Thursday 13 December 2012

Moving Oracle BPM Human Workflow Data from One Environment to Another

I was hunting to find out how to migrate runtim rules and routing policies from one Oracle BPM work flow environment to Another for example from Test to Dev and found this document from Oracle web site.

<Snapshot from the document>
You can migrate Human Workflow user metadata, such as views, mapped attribute (previously known as flex field) mappings, and vacation rules, from a test environment to a production environment using the Human Workflow User Config Data Migrator. The Data Migrator is available as an ant target that can be executed at the command line.

To know more read from the document itself:

Oracle® Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)


Section: 21.6 Moving Human Workflow Data from a Test to a Production Environment

Hope fully it was worth a read.

Monday 3 December 2012

SOA Thinker

Today found this interesting SOA blogs by one of the Oracle Rep Jeff Davies

Very informative.

SOA Thinker A site for SOA thought and discussion.

Very interesting and very informative.

Regards,
Arun.

Tuesday 14 August 2012

How To Configure Role based Access for OSB Console

I have been asked This questions multiple Times.

Can we limit / restrict the access of an user for OSB Console?

The answer is YES.

Please refer to Oracle Documentation:

Document NAme: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Service Bus 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)
Part Number E15866-03
Section: 48 Configuring Administrative Security
Link to Document: admin_security.htm

Oracle provides some predefined Integration roles which we can use. Also there are options to create customized roles.

If you are keen in learning more about creating users  and customizing roles read further in this section 48.3 Configuring Administrative Security: Main Steps

Have a good one. :)

Monday 21 May 2012

When to use Oracle BPEL and OSB?

Often for the newbies of (Oracle) SOA Technologies, this question pops in mind stating when to use BPEL and OSB.

Fundamentally if you read the docs, you will see that both the now Oracle products have similar orchestration capabilities. This blog is written in the intention to clarify the question.

I will cover the one line answer and provide some references I found in the web.

One Liner:

Use of BPEL: State-full, high involvement of Data Manipulation.
Use of OSB: Stateless, Low involvement of Data Manipulation.

For a briefer differentiation, I found another blog in the web space which made my job easier. I have copied the content across to this blog.

Note: the copyright of the below content belongs to the author of the blog page.

Use OSB for:

  • Endpoint routing (providing location transparency) so that we do not care about the physical location of the endpoint.
  • Endpoint abstraction (interface transparency) so that we do not care about the exact data formats required by the endpoint because the OSB will take care of transformations.
  • Load balancing so that we do not care about which of multiple service implementations will actually service a request. 
  • Throttling so that we do not care about how use of services is restricted.  
  • Enrichment so that we do not care about how additional data is provided to the request to match the expected request and response formats.
  • Simple synchronous composition so that we do not care if our abstract service call is actually made up of two or more physical service calls.
  • Protocol conversion so that we do not care what physical transports are being used.
  • Sync/async abstraction so that we can treat services as fire and forget or query response according to the needs of the client.

Use BPEL for:
  • Complex composition of parallel flows that involve more than a couple of services.
  • Long running compositions that may run for minutes, hours or days.
  • Asynchronous compositions that require correlation of requests and responses.
  • Process abstraction that enables us to track processes and their interactions with multiple services.
  • Human workflow

Thursday 17 May 2012

Enterprise Integration EAI vs SOA vs ESB

Hi All,

Had some time to browse the net and to brush up on the basics. Came across this interesting paper presentation in the site

ggatz Consulting

Though the site was basic with not much information, I continued reading the paper presented by an author: Anurag Goel.I could not find out the age of the paper as could not find the Source location or date of the article.

I found the article from this link:

I have also made the paper available here.

Note: The copyright of the article belongs to the Author.

This paper takes us through the comparison of EAI, SOA and ESB and their current/future role in the IT integration Industry. Also explains the relevance between EAI Patterns and current so called SOA Integration Patterns.
 

I like the summary section, as follows (on page 6):

6 TAKEAWAYS SUMMARY
1. SOA brings cost effective, reusable and low lead time solutions to an organization
but EAI and SOA are both going to coexist.
2. SOA is more then web services, in fact web services alone can not handle the
complex, secure and SLA based applications of an enterprise.
3. Enterprise service bus would enable low cost integration and would be used by
companies with limited IT resources
4. Packaged EAI solutions in future would have SOA as basic tenet and would continue
to be the prime choice for large scale integration.
 


Happy Reading.

Monday 9 April 2012

How to achieve dynamic binding by manipulating endpoint references at runtime - BPEL

Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) allow business processes to be easily extended through interaction with other business processes and applications. BPEL processes define this interaction through partner links, which define the interface (messages and operations), transport protocol, and most important, the location of each service to be used.
In most basic process designs, partner links are static; they refer to a single external process selected by the developer at design time. This approach is appropriate for highly targeted or constrained systems. However, in larger systems business processes are more complex. They interact with multiple external services and define multiple partner links, and some of these partner links might not be known at design time. As a result, all potential callouts and logic for deciding which partner links to use must be built inside the business process itself—unnecessarily complicating that process. Furthermore, as additional partner links are added, the resulting process grows more and more unwieldy, as any changes to the partner links require modification of the entire business process.
Fortunately, the BPEL language supports the concept of dynamic binding of partner links

To read more on this topic and to know how: please read further in  SOA Best Practices: The BPEL Cookbook Making BPEL Processes Dynamic