SOA Black Belt Workshop, Day 4: Solution Areas

Sadly, Friday was the last day of the black belt training. The topic of today was Solution areas. The architecture of OSB was explained by Simone and Rajesh talked about Cloud integration.

OSB Architecture: transports inside out

We have used both OSB and SOA Suite in our projects. Technically, the OSB is part of the SOA Suite. However, the use cases for both are very different. The OSB is a layer to virtualize your services. It offers validation, enrichment, transformation, routing and operation (VETRO) functionality. As Simone emphasized a couple of times, you are not supposed to program business logic in the OSB. You do that in SOA Suite. We discussed what a proper name is for the part of SOA Suite without OSB so you can point to that in your design guidelines. Unfortunately, we did not come up with a satisfying solution.
The presentation discussed the high level architecture briefly, and the core components. This was a bit boring if you had any experience with OSB. I was very pleased when the presentation continued and the architecture of OSB was discussed in depth. The architecture of transports was explained as well as some functional differences between some transports and adapters. This was exactly the kind of information I would expect from a training like this :)  Icing on the cake would have been if the lab would have included creating your own transport or something that showed the MDB that is deployed when you create a JMS transport. Unfortunately the lab was fairly basic and focussed on creating a message flow. It showed all the steps in detail, like many of the hands-on labs that I have attended at Oracle OpenWorld.  Fortunately the other labs during this training were formulated as a specific problem to solve, with little or no hints for the solution. This way you really think about it, instead of just following the steps.
Apart from the architecture of the transports, I took a few new things out of this session: local transports for proxies calling proxies and jejb transports that use POJOs instead of XML.

Cloud integration: fine grained APIs are ruling

The presentation about cloud integration focussed on the challenges one encounters when integrating with cloud solutions.  The example of RightNow, FusionApps and Salesforce.com were used to discuss API styles, lack of a consistent set of standards, governance, security and scalability. Interestingly patterns you might want to use internally for performance reasons (synchronous communication) can be a bad idea in cloud situations because of the unreliability of internet connections. So in cloud integration you might apply asynchronous solutions much more often to cater for that. The content of the presentation was good, but even better was the experience that Rajesh brought in while explaining it. We discussed why packaged apps offer APIs instead of coarse grained services. Therefore it is important that you encapsulate these services in your enterprise and offer coarse grained services to the other service consumers. You can use Oracle SOA Suite to accomplish this.

The day ended with another performance lab, showing the difference between latency and throughput and the effect asynchronous communication has on latency.

And so it ended

This concludes the last blog about the SOA Black Belt training. For me it was definitely worthwhile: I learned a lot, practiced some of that and met great new people.

If anybody is interested in participating, they should contact Juergen Kress. I definitely recommend this training!

SOA Black Belt Workshop, Day 3: Architecture Internals

The topic of today was architecture internals.

Adapters: added value 

We were supposed to start with Fault handling, but the adapter session by Niall was preponed. He is a very good presenter, but unfortunately part of the slide deck was the usual marketing mumbo jumbo about how easy it is to integrate to any system. Since this day was "architecture essentials", I would have enjoyed a discussion on whether you want to use an adapter or build a 'proper' web service in Java more. The lab that accompanied this session was fun: we needed to fix the adapters that were configured beforehand. It was very much like what happens in real life.

Fault handling: expect the unexpected

The session on fault handling did not cover anything new as far as I am concerned. There is a lot of material out there that covers this topic. A lot of emphasis was placed on transaction management. This makes sense in the context of Fault handling, but it made the whole thing a bit repetitive. I would have preferred a shorter presentation about the different fault types and then a lab where we would actually build complicated fault handling scenario's (catchAll, fault policies, rolling back transactions). 

Security: we all have our role

Flavius explained the OPSS framework, virtual directory and how you can manage application roles in Enterprise Manager. This is particularly relevant in a human task service. A lot of people I know use groups in LDAP for that which makes the groups way to fine grained to be manageable. The other feature I was not aware of was using a light weight OVD by turning on 'virtual' in the WebLogic console.

Performance tuning essentials: a journey through the database 

Niall then traced all the database inserts and updates for a simple BPM process. It was interesting, but the title was misleading. The important part to remember is that every design decision you make in your composite as a developer will result in a write to the database. Performance is not always the key requirement, but it is something to take into account, of course.

Fusion apps: oer is the new irep

Niall showed us the Oracle Enterprise Repository for Fusion apps. It contains all the business objects, Web Services and other artefacts that you need to integrate with Fusion Apps. A lot of the integration is still based on an API model, rather than services. From a product vendor perspective it makes sense, but as an implementer you need to make sure that you don't expose all these fine grained services on your Enterprise Service Bus. 

Anti patterns are the new patterns

Ravi Sankaran did the last session over the phone. He presented a number of anti patterns, reasons why they occur and recommendations to follow to avoid them or only apply them if needed. The content was interesting but listening to somebody over the phone in a hot room (27 degrees and humid outside) after three days of training is not the best condition for knowledge transfer. I will have to take a look at the slides as soon as they are available.

The evening

Jürgen organized a boat tour and a really really nice dinner at a very interesting restaurant and handed everyone their blackbelt. It was a great way to talk to some new people and to see something of the city at the same time. 

Tomorrow is the last day, then it is back to reality again...