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While doing some research on the web I came across a Service Component Architecture Diagram Generator. The script generates diagrams for applications based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) model. This can be a great aid to understand the relations between components in large BPEL or SOA applications.

Download the tool here. The readme is over here. The script runs on Linux/Unix and has primarily been tested with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g applications but should work with other BPEL or SOA frameworks.

After installing Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) we experience some memory issues. Besides the messages in the log files, we also couldn’t use the console and em as we did before (when we were just running SOA Suite). It turned out the installation of OER in the same Weblogic domain resulted in some unexpected things.

The WebLogic Server and SOA Suite are started using the startWebLogic script (for windows .cmd and on Linux/Unix .sh). This script uses the setDomainEnv script to set the environment variable for the domain. The setDomainEnv script in turn calls the setSOADomainEnv that actually sets the USER_MEM_ARGS. That in the end are used in the startWebLogic script.

After the installation of OER the setDomainEnv not only calls the setSOADomainEnv. It also calls a script that sets the USER_MEM_ARGS for the oer_server in the domain. Apparently the memory required for OER is less than needed for the SOA Suite. Since the script for OER is executed last, memory setting remain low. As shown in the smippet taken from the setDomainEnv.cmd:

call "%WL_HOME%\common\bin\commEnv.cmd"
call "%DOMAIN_HOME%\bin\setSOADomainEnv.cmd"
call "%DOMAIN_HOME%\bin\setOERDomainEnv.cmd"

To solve the memory issue when starting the WebLogic Server using the startWebLogic script we alter the sequence so the setOERDomainEnv.cmd goes before the setSOADomainEnv.cmd.

If the installer put a second call to setSOADomainEnv.cmd in the setDomainEnv.cmd. That doesn’t work because the setSOADomainEnv.cmd contains the following check:

REM Skip running this script again if it was run once
if "%XENGINE_DIR%" == "" goto set_env
echo *********************************************************
echo ** SOA specific environment is already set. Skipping ...
goto end_set_env

.

This blog post will show you how to install Oracle Enterprise Repository, or OER in short. The assumptions is that you have a running WebLogic Server (with SOA Suite on top of it) and a database.

Prepare – database

The most important part of the preparation for the installation of Oracle Enterprise Repository is the creation of tablespaces and the user that will hold the database objects.
Create the required tablespaces
You can change the names of the tablespaces and alter the path and names of the data files according to your needs. The example is based on an installation on the Windows OS. If your on Linux/Unix you probably know what to do to make it work on your platform…

CREATE TABLESPACE OER_DATA
    DATAFILE 'D:\oracle\oraclexe\oradata\XE\oer_data.dbf' SIZE 300M
 AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10240K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED
    EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL AUTOALLOCATE
    LOGGING
    ONLINE
    SEGMENT SPACE MANAGEMENT AUTO;
 
CREATE TABLESPACE OER_LOB
    DATAFILE 'D:\oracle\oraclexe\oradata\XE\oer_lob.dbf' SIZE 300M
 AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10240K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED
    EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL AUTOALLOCATE
    LOGGING
    ONLINE
    SEGMENT SPACE MANAGEMENT AUTO;
 
CREATE TABLESPACE OER_INDEX
    DATAFILE 'D:\oracle\oraclexe\oradata\XE\oer_index.dbf' SIZE 300M
 AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 5120K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED
    EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL AUTOALLOCATE
    LOGGING
    ONLINE
    SEGMENT SPACE MANAGEMENT AUTO;

Create the user
Change the user name and password (both OER in this case) to cater your needs.

CREATE USER OER IDENTIFIED BY OER
DEFAULT TABLESPACE OER_DATA
    TEMPORARY TABLESPACE TEMP;
 
GRANT CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW TO OER;
GRANT CREATE SEQUENCE TO OER;
GRANT CREATE SESSION TO OER;
GRANT CREATE SYNONYM TO OER;
GRANT CREATE TABLE TO OER;
GRANT CREATE TRIGGER TO OER;
GRANT CREATE VIEW TO OER;
GRANT UNLIMITED TABLESPACE TO OER;

Install OER

Us the follwing command from a dos prompt to start the OER installation. By default it will start in graphical mode. You can use the -mode option to start it in console or silent mode.

java -jar OER111150_generic.jar -log=C:\installSOA\logs\OER_install.log

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Run WebLogic Server Domain Configuration Wizard

To run the Domain Configuration Wizard on Windows you can click: Start > Programs > Oracle Products > Tools > Configuration Wizard. On any platform you can run the config script in the /common/bin/config.cmd. For example:

> cd oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\common\bin
> config.cmd

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Post Install actions

To use all options in the Repository you need to install Java Web Start. To check whether Java Web Start is installed correctly use the test Java link.

In case the JNLP stuff (needed for java Web Start) doesn’t work. This Firefox JNLP fix might help you (via Andreas).

Just found out that there is a new site for SOA Suite 11g sample code. It is availble on Java.Net. Check it out for great examples.

There are always quite some blog posts on installing SOA Suite on several platforms. Recently I discovered that Oracle publishes a Quick Start Guide on the SOA Suite (PDF!) that mainly deals with the installation process (and de-installation should you need it).

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.

During the Kscope Thursday Thunder a team of highly skilled ADF (including JHeadstart) and SOA Suite experts is building an application based on these technologies. Although this session – like any real world project – seemed chaotic at times, there were a lot of best practices to learn for all who attended.

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!

Like the previous days at Kscope my focus has been on the Fusion Middleware track. In this post I’ll share some of the highlight and summaries of some of the talks over here.

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

Today I presented at ODTUG Kaleidoscope. The presentation is aimed at supporting architects and especially developers to choose the right integration infrastructure for a job.

ADF

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.

Sharing some highlights from Symposium Sunday of Kscope 2011. The two most remarkable quotes of the day are:

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.