Khanderao on Emerging And Integration Technologies

Friday, January 25, 2008

Migration of Oracle's ESB from 10.1.3x to 11

With the announcement of Oracle SOA Suite AS11 aka Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW), many folks asked about the future of ESB 10.1.3.

ESB typically provides an infrastructure for standards based integration between systems supporting different protocols. At the heart of a ESB is a routing engine and a bus. On the edges it would have adapters supporting various protocols. Such framework supports policies like securities and provides a runtime visibility via a console. The FMW AS11 does exactly same and much modular way as.

FMW AS11 does all of these and more! And it is based on emerging Service Component Architecture(SCA). SCA provides a much missing standard for ESB to assemble components- services interacting together.

In Oracle Middleware version 10.1.3, ESB and BPEL are separate runtime. With FMW AS11, BPEL and Routing Service of ESB are service engines in a much modular architecture architecture based on SCA. Mediator is a new incarnation of ESB's routing service with a lot many new functionalities. Since the basic UI of the routing service is same as 10.1.3, those who are using ESB 10.1.3 you would be instantly be able to use it.

In addition to ESB 10.1.3 functionalities, you would be pleasantly surprised to see many new features that I could get added while re-architecting ESB on a new SCA based architecture.

Here are few of them:
1. Supporting Events natively: FMW now supports both Service and Event paradigms. Mediator is a rendezvous of both service and events.
2. Mediator supports more MEP patterns including dearly missing Async Request Response.
3. Mediator supports multi-part messaging and rpc/doc style
4. Mediator provides Schematron based custom validation framework
5. Mediator provides a rules based dynamic routing framework
6. Mediator provides a better fault handling and fault policies
and more such functionalities.

Though mediator's model has been changed, you can migrate 10.1.3 project easily in AS11 by opening them in JDeveloper.

Essentially, ESB in FMW AS11 would be Mediator + SCA based service Infrastructure + Events + Policy Framework + Adapters along with common infrastructure components like MDS(Meta Data service) etc.

Following picture (presented during OOW'2007) is the best way to represent ESB and SOA suite in AS11.


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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Finally Oracle acquired BEA

You may have already heard it! Read it !

yes... Finally...Oracle acquired BEA.




"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Ellison. "Oracle Fusion middleware has an open "hot-pluggable" architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA's WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That's just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come."



"For Oracle, this deal is a very big step toward completing our vision of becoming a strategic enterprise software vendor of choice for our customers, with industry-leading products and a world-class technology solution at every level of the stack and across industry verticals," CEO Larry Ellison said in a conference call.

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Oracle SOA AS11 Preview: Starting /stopping Embedded server

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle AS11 suite's JDeveloper embeds a oc4j container having SOA suite runtime. This server can be started from Jdev or it can be automatically started when you try to run an application. But in some cases if you should need it to be started independent of JDev, you can do it by command line.

Go to
system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\bin

At this directory you would find startsoa and shutdownsoa scripts to start and stop a SOA server.

For some reason if you have memory issue (out of memory error etc) you can change the JVMs memory by editing MEM_ARGS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Xmn300m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Server Lifecycle Logs:
You can find startsoa.log at \system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log

However, for any diagnostics, you would need to look at diagnostic log at
system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log\soa

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Oracle SOA AS11 Preview: Config and logs

Oracle SOA AS11 Preview version has embedded oc4j Application Server hosting SOA suite.

Configuration:
You may need to change some of the configurations of the server e.g. jms, datasources, logging levels etc.

The config files are under
\system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\config
Typically you may need to change logging levels, datasource settings, or transaction timeout etc. These can be done using config files in this directory

Logging:
If you need to change the logging levels, you need to change j2ee-logging.xml from the config directory. You can increase the logging levels in this file from NOTIFICATION:1 to FINE to increase the logging.

Log Directory: diagnostic.log is under
userdir\system11.1.1.0.22.47.94\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\log\soa

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Oracle SOA 10.1.3.3 awarded as the Best ESB y Infoworld

Infoworld Awarded Oracle's SOA 10.1.3 as the best Enterprise Service Bus!!

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Thursday, January 03, 2008

Ready, Set and Go with Oracle SOA Suite AS11

We are all excited to announce preview of AS11. It comes with an easy to install and configure Jdeveloper that embeds the SOA Runtime server. With this you can immediately setup and try using the rich functionality of this suite. The SOA suite is based on SCA Assembly model. In addition to standard BPEL component type in SCA, we are introducing other key integration components like Mediator, Business Rule(Decision Service), and Human Task Service/ Workflow. Here is a presentation giving overview of SOA Suite AS11 that I co-delivered along with Demed Lher at Oracle Open World 2007 at San Francisco. Following slide from the presentation would give you an idea of various modules serving rich integration functionalities.



The SOA suite AS11 provides a complete integration of all the integration technologies with a single Design time, Single Metadata Repository, Single Runtime and Single Monitoring. You can use user-friendly graphical composite editor which would allow to drag and drop components like BPEL, mediator etc. Such composite can be deployed using JSR-88 based packaging and deployment framework. The deployed composites can be tested and monitored using a console. The console can be used for tracking a message hopping various components within the server, run & review unit tests, configure & enforce policies and monitor & administer faults.

Such consistent way to design, deploy, run and monitor integration projects is very important for reducing a cost of ownership. Moreover, all the runtime service engines e.g. BPEL, mediator etc converse with each other using optimized messaging. Well, the SOA suite is not just evolved into a fully integrated SCA based architecture, but each of the component has been enriched with very important and useful functionalities. Additionally, the SOA suite is a rendezvous of service oriented architecture and Event oriented/driven Architecture.

In next few days, whenever time permits, I would expose few important feature through this blog.

Meanwhile, Quickly download the preview version and install following the given install instructions .

After configuring SOA, you can quickly build a sample composite and test it. You can use the step by step instructions added in this sample for the same.

Have fun!

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