Monday 11 May 2009

Oracle Service Bus Explained

There's a lot of confusion towards the positioning of the Oracle Service Bus. In this post I'll try to clear up the issue as best as I can.

First of all, Oracle has already shown a convergence of BEA and Oracle FMW. This will continue even stronger in the upcoming releases, 11g in particular. The strategic platform as it will be introduced with 11g will consist of two main components: Mediator and Oracle Service Bus.

The mediator is an intra-composite mediation component within an application. It is responsible for brokering communications between components that make up a composite (conform Service Component Architecture - SCA). It will enable transformation, routing, event delivery and payload validation. The mediator is almost exclusively based on Oracle ESB (yes, the old Oracle Enterprise Service Bus).

The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) provides service bus capabilities for the entire company, again including standard functionality as transformation, routing, event delivery and payload validation. It's main function is to decouple intra-application communication from inter-application. Endpoint changes will not affect the internals of composite applications. The OSB is based on the Aqualogic Service Bus, augmented with key features from the Oracle ESB, especially JCA adapters, DVM, X-ref and JDev based design-time.

In the long run, I expect the distinction between these implementations to disappear, but I do like the current setup, as it differs between development of application and integration. I wouldn't be surprised to see this pattern appear more.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Mike,
    To what aspects/components are you referring when stating that "Oracle has already shown a convergence of BEA and Oracle FMW"?

    Thanks in advance,
    Peter Paul

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  2. Hi Peter Paul! If you look at the BEA - Oracle integration that has been going on since last years summer, you will notice that WLS is now the new preferred platform in the Oracle SOA Suite. Furthermore the integration with JRockit JVM, Enterprise Repository and Oracle BPM (previously Fuego). Need I say more?

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  3. As far as I know Oracle SOA Suite does not run on Weblogic 10g.

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  4. Hi Mike,
    I agree that some people overthere are probably working overtime to get "this" working. And "this" will probably be based on your specific needs. One of mine/ours is that we want BPEL, OSB, WSM to run on the preffered (WLS) app server. And there is (still) no supported version of the SOA Suite running on WebLogic 10(g):( (altough 9 is supported, but that is so yesterday ;-) ), as SOA guru pointed out. Certification matrixes are quite a puzzle if you want to run WebLogic Server, BPEL, OSB, WSM certified on the latest and greatest ;-) To reduce migration effort we're looking at running both an OC4J and a WLS as app server.
    This is supposed to change with 10.1.3.5 of 11g. Which ever comes first...

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  5. Yea, the certification matrix is quite hard to fathom. However, as you pointed out, SOA Suite runs on WLS 9, and will soon be available on WLS 10.1 as well.
    10.1.3.5 will be based on WLS. It's ETA is still not confirmed, but believed to be mid-summer.

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  6. When I started writing this sequence of articles on sending email from Oracle Service Bus I only expected to write 2 parts but following a number of requests asking how to send emails with attachments I wrote Part 3. Now, following a number of people having problems sending email with binary attachments, I’m writing Part 4 hopefully this will be the last one.

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