FMW 12c: In-depth look into Oracle API Catalog (OAC)

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on November 14th, 2014]

With the release of Oracle Enterprise Repository 12c another product was released. Oracle API Catalog 12c (OAC) allows you to build a catalog of your organization APIs. OAC provides a layer of visibility to those APIs so application development knows what and which one to use.  OAC includes a simple metamodel for an API asset, automation to populate OAC, and the ability for users to search OAC for APIs and understand the details of the APIs to assess their fit in the user’s application.

Installation

I’m not going to bore you with the details about the installation by giving a installation guide. It took me about 40 minutes from scratch (excluding downlOERoad time). The steps are describes in the installation guide Oracle provides. OAC is part of the OER 12c installation jar, but can be licensed and installed, as an own managed domain, without licensing and installing OER.

The steps to take on high level (from scratch):

1. Download and install Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware Infrastructure 12c, Oracle Enterprise Repository 12c, RCU patch 18791727 and Weblogic patch 18718889 (these last two are important, else you can’t install OAC).
2. Run RCU (oracle_common/bin/rcu.sh|bat) and create the OAC repository
3. Run Weblogic Domain creation (weblogic/bin/config.sh|bat) and create a new which includes OAC.
4. After installation and startup of weblogic and managed service you can find the OAC console at url: http://serverhost:8111/oac

Note: if you harvesting from another weblogic server (like SOA Suite 12c), the weblogic patch should also be installed there.

Taking the first steps

When taking my first steps the official getting started guide can help you a lot. OAC has four high-level features. OAC collects services, it has a harvester which creates API assets in OAC. After harvesting you can add metadata to the API assets like description, tags and documentation. After harvesting and editing an API asset it can be published so it is visible for application development. Published APIs can be discovered and used  through the API Catalog console and via the Oracle JDeveloper Oracle Enterprise Repository plug-in.

SOA Suite 12c: New visual editor for creating Fault Policies

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on July 8th, 2014]

in 11g Fault Policies were added so that you could easy intervene when a (SOAP/BPEL) fault was thrown. But you could only create them in source mode, there was no graphical editor. With the release of SOA Suite 12c a new visual editor for creating Fault Policies is added to JDeveloper. With the Fault Policy Editor you can now Design and Edit Fault Policies. Besides the already existed functionality a lot of new features are added.

Editor Overview

To start open/add a existing SOA project (as part of SOA application) and create a new Fault Policy document. Right-click on the SOA project and select option New -> From Gallery. From the gallery select SOA-Tier -> Faults -> Fault Policy Document to create new policy file.

The editor will open with a clean policy document. A policy document can have more then one policy, so faults can be grouped i.g. a policy for system faults and a policy for service faults. For every type of fault you can create a fault handler and for each handler you can select one or more actions. When adding more the one actions you can use a XPath expression to select a filter. With the editor you can also create alerts, property sets and new (custom) actions. Shortly, we will look into the details of the editor.

SOA Suite 12c: First look at Service Bus features

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on June 26, 2014]

Oracle released SOA Suite 12c (12.1.3) bringing a further integration between components and a bunch of new features. This blog is one in a series of new features summaries about SOA Suite 12c to view them all check this blog.

This blog will summaries the features specific to Service Bus and the Enterprise Manager Dashboards. The features are summarised, but most will get an own blog that tells about the full details. Oracle renamed the product from OSB (Oracle Service Bus) to SB (Service Bus), apparently it also stands for Oracle Secure Backup.

Integrated with JDeveloper

Service Bus is now integrated in JDeveloper, so no Eclipse anymore as default IDE. Since I mentioned the integration in the Developer Productivity blog of this series I won’t go into the details again, but there are still some things to mention. The development of a Service Bus application uses its own Application workspace and it is not possible to combine SOA and Service Bus projects in one application workspace. When creating a SB project you can create it together with a Service Bus Application or on its own.

SOA Suite 12c: First look at SCA Composite features

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on June 26, 2014]

Oracle released SOA Suite 12c (12.1.3) bringing a further integration between components and a bunch of new features. This blog is one in a series of new features summaries about SOA Suite 12c to view them all check this blog.

This blog will summaries the features specific to SCA Composites / BPEL and the Enterprise Manager Dashboards. The features are summarised, but most will get an own blog that tells about the full details.

This blog will talk about the following topics:
• Changed project / directory structure • Project / Component en Scope Templates • Updates to the composite editor • Updates to the mediator • Updates to the BPEL component / activities • Fault Policy Editor • SOA Composer refresh in 12c • SOA Suite Debugger •

Changed project / directory structure

The structure of the project has changes drastically. All components are now placed in there own sub folder.


• Adapters – Collection of JCA adapter resources

• BPEL – Collection of BPEL en SBPEL components

• DVM – Collection of Domain Value Maps

• Mediators – Collection of Mediator components

• Schemas – Collection of XML Schemas (XSD)

• Testsuites – Collection of Composite tests

• Transformations – Collection of XSLT transformations

• WSDLS – Collection of service contracts

The composite.xml carries the same name as in 11.1.1.7, the name of the SOA project.

SOA Suite 12c: All about Developer Productivity and Performance

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on June 26, 2014]

Oracle released SOA Suite 12c (12.1.3) bringing a further integration between components and a bunch of new features. This blog is one in a series of new features summaries about SOA Suite 12c to view them all check this blog.

This blog will summaries the features specific to the Developer Productivity and Integration in JDeveloper and in the Enterprise Manager. The features are summarised, but most will get an own blog that tells about the full details.

Developer installer with integrated server

To kick-start developing with 12c, ’30 minutes to Hello World’, Oracle created a single download for JDeveloper and Database, Weblogic and  SOA Suite. It’s one single package which include JDeveloper, a integrated Weblogic service with SOA Suite (including Service Bus), JavaDB (for it’s Database) and the Enterprise Manager.

All software is installed into a single middleware home directory as specified at install time. In JDeveloper, the WebLogic Integrated Server is pre-configured with above SOA Suite components runtime and JavaDB. JavaDB is a development database that allows one to start development with SOA Suite without the need to run RCU.

30 minutes to Hello World
This release advertises that the install, configuration, and startup time for the integrated server such a development environment takes less than 30 minutes. I can say that it took me less time on my laptop (Quadcore, 16GB).

Upgrading Production
A production environment can be upgraded if it runs 11.1.1.6 (PS5) or 11.1.1.7 (PS6). The end result is a full 12c installation, but there is no rollback scenario, so backup database and Weblogic domain first before upgrading.

SOA Suite 12c: New Features summary

[repost of article at AMIS Technology Blog on June 26, 2014]

Oracle released SOA Suite 12c (12.1.3) bringing a further integration between components and a bunch of new features. Most of them are quite spectacular, but at the same time all are useful. A release to persuade potential buyers and a lot more to please users of the product.

This blog will go through the most important new features in summary and will reference the blogs that will go through the new features per technology. This blog will list the most game changing feature(s) per technology/tooling; Jdeveloper, SOA Suite (SCA Composites), Service Bus (SB), Enterprise Manager, OEP, Managed File Transfer (MFT), etc.

Developer Productivity & Integration

Developer installer with integrated server 

To kick-start developing with 12c, ’30 minutes to Hello World’, Oracle created a single download for JDeveloper and Database, Weblogic and  SOA Suite. It’s one single package which include JDeveloper, a integrated Weblogic service with SOA Suite (including Service Bus), JavaDB (for it’s Database) and the Enterprise Manager.

Functional boundary testing of a service-based environment using MockServer

In the bigger projects I've worked on, testing the components of the system is a key point. When multiple teams are working on a project and each create services in there functional domain, you want the place the responsibility of these services with that software development team (SDT). Let's talk in terms of a assembly line. If one team needs to integrate with a service of another team it should not have to wait for the other team to finish implementing the service. Also you don't want that the team that needs to integrate with a service more down the assembly line is responsible for the correct delivery at the end of the assembly line. Each team should only be responsible for there functional boundary.

This scenario also played at my current project. The project grew and grew and also more teams were added. The integration team had taken the responsibility for testing the whole assembly line and with the growth this responsibility and quality could not be guaranteed. The solution architects then decided to lay the responsibility of testing the services at the team that created them and that a smoke test would be done later on a integration environment. Each team from now on is only responsible for testing the chain of services they create(d) and mock all other services.

The integration SDT took the responsibility to come up with a way to accomplice this. The SDT was giving the following requirements.

• Functional testing of the boundaries of the domain of a SDT.
• Implementation should be transparent to all environments, one size fits all.
• Tooling should be useful for both Unit Testing and Integration Testing.
• Tooling should be easy to use and should not be unnecessarily time consuming to set up.
• It should be possible to run tests through a build server (e.g. Hudson)

After researching available tools, SoapUI, WireMock, JAX-WS (Java), MockServer and Moco, showed that MockServer most satisfies the requirements for boundary testing.

Recap of the Oracle Partner Community Forum XIV

This year the 14th edition of the Oracle Partner Community Forum was held on the island of Malta from 17th till 21st of Februari at the Hilton Hotel. I went there together with three other colleagues and this is my recap of the week.

 

This event took 4 days and was split in two parts. The first two days were spent on the conference itself and the last two days were spent on bootcamps.

On the first day (Tuesday) there was a fixed agenda. After a nice welcome by mister @soacommunity Jürgen Kress the day immediately started with interesting topics. First an overview about what's coming in Fusion Middleware 12c in general and the results of Oracle's H1 FY 2014 and partner summary. But after the lunch we got a in-depth presentation about SOA Suite 12c and BPM 12c. Not much new for me, because I'm participating in the SOA Suite 12c beta, but still some nice discussions and I liked the first reactions of the other developers.