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.

After creating a SB project you will notice the new overview.xml. The overview of a SB project is similar to a SCA Composite, but is not, it is just a placeholder file to open the Project overview edit.

Splitting Proxy from Pipeline

Because a SB project is more like a SCA Composite (same overview) the Proxy is split from the Pipeline. This means that the Proxy and the Pipeline are two individual things. With this concept multiple Proxies can be wired to one Pipeline. Say you have a “Any XML” Pipeline, you can process the data from both Proxies (i.g. File adapter and JMS Queue). It is also possible in the IDE to wire a pipeline to a pipeline directly or create a business service from a proxy.

Create a REST service based on a Pipeline

One of SOA Suite 12c’s pillar is Mobile Enablement. You can expose a Pipeline as a REST service. When doing it creates a REST binding just like in a SCA Composite. In the wizard you can assign specific Resource Paths and Operation for the operations of the Pipeline. Downside is that you can only expose Pipelines that have a WSDL interface.

Kick-start an Service Bus (SB) project using templates

Just like SOA Suite’s SCA Composites the SB also supports the use of templates. But it works a little different. Templates are Pipeline-based, this means that you can select a template when creating a new Pipeline. There are two types of templates; Unlinked, which is a copy of the template, and Linked, Pipeline stays connected to template. In the template you can use Placeholders so permit changes to that part of the Pipeline. If the Pipeline is linked to a template and the template is changed the linked Pipeline will inherent these changes. You create a template pipeline, instead of a normal Pipeline and place it in a centralized project or in the MDS for re-use.

 

Read full article on the AMIS Technology Blog.