This guide is aimed at installations for developers and not for production machines. Unfortunately the installation of OSB is out of scope. I expect it to be upgraded to PS4 (11.1.1.5) soon. I could find any missing instructions while installing PS4 on a Windows7 VirtualBox.

This document looks very similar to the installation chapter in Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1.

Update

It was confirmed by Simone Geib, Product Manager in the Oracle SOA team, that both the OSB part and the PS4 update are coming soon.

Update September

The update for SOA Suite PS4 (11.1.1.5) including Oracle Service Bus is now available.

We could have learned all of the tips and tricks in a normal session or presentation. However by working this way there is a much stronger feel of how technologies and tools are used in a real world project. It was fun to watch and learn and I think the team had a great time as well!

At the en of the session the End-to-End flow worked really well. Great work in just a few hours time!

Fault Handling in SOA Suite

Ronald van Luttikhuizen en Guido Schmutz presented on Fault Handling in the SOA Suite. There is a clear need for another approach compared to say traditional systems. This is because SOA based systems differ from traditional system on the following aspects: level of heterogeneity, number of (different types of) consumers, asynchronous responses, and the way that transactions are handled.

Guido showed us around in the OSB with a focus on the following features: Result Caching, Service Throttling, Retry mechanism, Service pooling (talking to multiple endpoints) and Fault Message on callback (in async). Ronald gave a demo on how the Compensate and Fault Policy Framework work in BPEL.

This presentation on SOA Suite Fault Handling is also available on slideshare.

Using Oracle Apex as a replacement for BPEL Console

The company where this case was build has a high number of messages running through their BPEL 10g. This causes performance issues in the BPEL Console due to the high number of instances (millions on a daily basis) in the dehydration store (on which full table scans are performed). They created an own more lightweight console in Apex to manage both deployed BPELs as well as instances. Their solution uses the following ingredients:

• A BPEL api – which is included in a BPEL script. They import orabpel.jar for this.
• A BPEL script that exposes a part of the BPEL api as a web service. Embed Java in a BPEL and call the API.
• An Apex front end that calls the web service to perform maintenance tasks.

In my opinion this delivers value to this company, however are there better ways to expose Java as a web service. Besides that this adds additional BPEL instances to the bottleneck resource.

Tuning SOA Suite 11g for perfomance

This presentation was delivered by Vikas Anand. One of the best parts of his presentation was that he didn’t only address the tuning part but also the design part. This mainly focus on preventing the need for tuning afterwards. Some of the design considerations he mentioned were:

• Choose the right tool for the job.
• Design it right – Consider what parts of the integration have to be synchronous and what have to be asynchronous. To which he added the advise to be aware of transactional boundaries.
• Need a holistic view on sizing and capacity – Based on business requirements.
• Plan sizing of dehydration DB – make sure there is a retention strategy and implement dehydration strategy.
• Use the same JVM across (different) clusters.

Tools and Knowledge needed to develop SOA Suite 11g applications

Edwin, Torsten and Guido - Image by Markus Eisele

There are a lot of presentations at Kscope on ADF where it is mentioned that the level of Java knowledge to implement ADF based applications is very limited. The first presentation by Markus Eisele I saw on Monday was an introduction to Java. It was called “All the Java ADF beginners need to know”. In this hour a short history, Java’s characteristics, at a high level the differences between Java EE, Java SE and Java ME were covered as weel as the the basics of the Java language.

The second presentation on ADF this day was by Sten Vesterli. It was titled: “Enterprise Applications with Oracle ADF – Skills, People, and Tools”. Not only did he go into these three aspects he also spend a part of the presentation on the process of developing software applications using ADF. The skills that were mentioned to develop ADF applications:

• ADF Framework – Programming by exceptions
• Object Oriented programming
• Java programming
• Database programming (Datamodel, PL/SQL, Batch like things)
• XML – (Reading the Source View)
• Regular expression
• Graphical Design
• Usability

Business Rules

EuroTransplant is one of the SOA Suite customers that uses the Business Rules Engine that comes with it in a production environment. Wilfred van der Deijl showed us from a developers perspective how the tools is used. During the presentation was clear that business goals like “the business must be able to verify the implemented rules” were clearly met.

AIA

Edwin Biemond gave “An Introduction to Application Integration Architecture“. The demo in his presentation helped to demystify the implementation of an AIA integration flow.

ADF is the “Paint by the Numbers” for web front end development.

The most common application integration tools/solutions used are Post-it and a paper notepad.

However the real gem I discovered during this first day was:

User Experience Design Patterns

Madhuri Kolhatkar has delivered a great presentation on the effort Oracle has put into creating and implementing User Experience Design Patterns. Extended information is available on the Usable Apps pages of the Oracle website. Great insight on how this can help you in developing and delivering your applications can for example for OBIEE be found on Design Patterns and Guidelines for Oracle Applications. Take special note of the Pattern Selection Tool.

First download the installer from the JRockit download page. Make sure that the .bin file is executable. You can use chmod +x filename to make the file executable.

The installation guide for JRockit can be obtained from the JRockit Documentation page.

• Start the installer: ./jrockit-jdk1.6.0_24-R28.1.3-4.0.1-linux-x64.bin from the directory you download it or copied it to. Extracting can take some time.
• Click Next on the Welcome screen.
• Choose the product installation directory eg /oracle/jrockit-jdk1.6.0_24 and click Next
• Check optional components if you need them and click Next
• Watch the progress bar
• The installation is complete so press Done.

The screenshots of the installation process are in this gallery:

[Show as slideshow]

The AIA Service Constructor can be acquired using the menu Help | Check for updates, clicking Next, and selecting Oracle Fusion Middleware Products. SelectAIA Service Constructor and click next to start the download.





Verify the installation of the extension using the menu Help | About, and click on the tab Extensions:

Altering JDeveloper preferences

Now we have to make the aia.jar known to the SOA stuff. In order to do this we use the preferences, using the menu Tools | Preferences.... The is aia.jar in the ...\Middleware\jdeveloper\lib directory.

After these changes JDeveloper needs a restart.

SOA platform

Again after this session I came to the conclusion that in my opinion BAM is used too little.

During the session was raised whether people in the audience were using non-Oracle databases as dehydration store and Meta Data Store. The mainstream is using Oracle as dehydration store. And although it is certified, it is advised to use Oracle as the database for this purpose. On the Application Server, given the maturity of the J2EE platform, there is less discomfort in operations to deploy the SOA Suite on a non-Oracle App Server.

ADF

Only today I found out that there is an interesting JDeveloper 11g extension. The extension validates ADF code quality. Seems an interesting extension to check code quality besides the already available Java tools.

BPM

When comparing BPEL and BPM and looking into when to use what tool, the following was stated: For all things with human interaction BPM is the tool of choice. In integration driven appraoches BPEL is the tool of choice.

In Oracle point of view BPM includes:

• People
• Systems
• Documents

without the need for separate platforms.

Example of a custom Spring Java worklist application for Oracle BPM.