SOA 11g

I finally got my first SOA11g project few months back, unfortunately I am not getting to do development as much I would like to, and that’s why my blogging frequency has also gone down. :-(

Anycase, here are some my experiences with SOA11g.

1) Customer had SOA11.1.1.2 (PS1), and now the latest version is 11.1.1.6(PS5). It's not too back that 11gPS1 was released but now there is no support for it. So first thing which bewilders me is the new versions that keep coming and customers not able to upgrade to them as quickly as we developers would like. Not to forget the exact version of JDev and the plugins.

2) We continued our work on PS1, and we hit a wall with one bug.

We were passing a custom variable in soap header along with wsse security header. Apparently there was a bug #13070260 - which was throwing java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException

As we could not get a back-port patch, we had to look for work-around and luckily there was one, as found here, to supress the wsa headers we used this flag oracle.soa.addressing.response.enabled=false in the composite.

3) We had used a Mediator-BPEL-Mediator pattern, which looked elegant but the repetitive transformations in Mediator and BPEL were bit of a pain, particularly when we could not see the payload information for mediator in enterprise manager (may be another bug). Also the interesting property passThroughHeader that has to be set in composite for the mediator to pass the soap headers forward.

4) We were using OWSM to secure the composites and that was having a few hick ups in setting up the jks keys, understanding the polices etc.

5)We used Business Rules in our composites, and that was quite a challenge to start using properly, as we had lot of bucketsets and everytime we re-imported the schemas, had to redo the decision tables. One interesting finding was, while rules execution in one of the rules it was always going to to default flow - so by using the conflict resoultion as Override instead of RunAfter or RunBefore solved the issue.

I also had my first OSB11g experience in this project - and that is for another blog.

more on AIA2.4/10g

Last week while deploying some integration flows on AIA2.4/SOA10g/Weblogic, had two interesting errors -

1) While deploying the ESB (EBS in AIA) got the error -

A Service or ServiceGroup of name "XXXEBSV1" already exists under parent AIASystem

Found a good blog on this here, which talks about an ESB bug - and the solution to that is
Either you delete the esb before redeploying, or if you are doing it from a script - we can deploy a esb project with no routing and having the same GUIDs for all the services. Deploying the ESB with No routing firth and they deploying the ESB with routing will resolve the issue.


2) The second issue was with correlation sets - we were running a huge loop across EBF -> ESBV1 -> Provider BPEL -> ResponseESBV1 -> EBF

And it was important that the correlation sets work properly for the loop to continue. So we had 3 points in the EBF where callbacks were to be received. We created 3 correlation sets in each scope invoke with yes and receive with no, associated with property with type normalized string, for property alias we picked the EBM_ID, It needs 2 entries in the wsdl one for requestEBM and one for Response EBM. On the Provider BPEL part also we created correlation set on the first received activity (with yes) and then at the invoke ResponseEBS (with no) one.

AIA2.4FP installation on SOA10.1.3.4/Weblogic9.2

After a long hiatus, I am back with a useful blog. I had to install AIA2.4 (AIA2.3 downloads were not available on edelivery) on SOA10.1.3.4 on the WebLogic9.2. I tried to avoid doing it as much as possible, given there were no documentation on this, other than a few OTN forum entries and few other useful links here and here , but finally after 3 days, it was successful.

this blog already pointed to issues with this install and the metalink note#822831.1

To start with - had to first set up SOA10.1.3.4 on Weblogic9.2. This is a pretty well established process, however I faced some challenges because of Windows7

First issue was the 10g installer would not even run complaining SWAP file size issues, I commented the SWAP size checks following this link

The second issue was a big issue, the installer kept failing at the OWSM step (Unable to locate a valid OC4J URI), the error was opmn would not stop properly, due to IP6 support in Windows7. Solution found from here and here

Basically I had to edit the opmn.xml file under opmn/config to change the stop-paramters as suggested in metalinknote#1206667.1. The other important step is to uncheck the IPv6 in the network properties.

After that, things were smooth barring a few "Error occurred during initialization of VM", "OPATCH_JAVA_ERROR=OPatch Exception while trying" errors. For VM issue, closing some applications helped. For opatch issues, running the patch inside opatch directory once resolved the issues.

So after installing
Oracle XE (increase process count)
irca.bat
SOA 10.1.3.1.0 with Advance option
Patch set 7272722 for 10.1.3.4
Weblogic9.2
Patch 7337034
Patch 7490612 For weblogic SOA Domain creation
MLR #9 p8589928_101340_GENERIC
No AIA patches required
AIA installer only Software Copy mode

(for all these ensure your directory names doesn't have spaces or else you might get "Unzip: No matching wildcard found for.." )

Now was the time for AIAFP2.4 AIA 2.4 Installer V17393-01

AIAFP install needs lot of prep work, I did the below
1)increased JTA time out to 300
2)setup AQJMS Startup class (getting the aqjms_v2.0.zip was a challenge, its no longer available on OTN, luckily I had it from a previous attempt)
here only create the startup class, no need to add as a weblogic startup class
3) setting up ADF libararies, downloaded adfinstaller10.1.3.4 and followed the instruction to copy the libararies to weblogic instance
run setupadf.cmd, copy the classpath and add to the weblogic startup classpath
4)copy the esbbootstrap.jar under the JVM_HOME/jre/lib/ext

After this was ready to run AIAFP, first thing was to setup the property files
1)set up the aiaenv.bat under AIA_HOME/bin
2)deploy.properties under AIA_HOME/config
3)FPwlInstall.proprties and server.properties under AIA_HOME/Infrastructure/install/wlscripts

Templates for these property files are available under AIA_HOME/install/templates

next was to run the install scripts under AIA_HOME/install/wlscripts

If you are lucky the following line should do it all...
ant -buildfile FPWLInstall.xml

But that doesn't happen often, so I had following error
Servlet: "AIAValidationSystemAPIServiceSoapHttpPort" failed to preload on startup in Web application

It turned out, this is a known bug AIA 2.4 INSTALLATION ERROR ON WEBLOGIC [ID 1059780.1], this patch didn't work easily, so I just modified the AIAApplicationWL.EAR to change the ValidationSystemAPIService.xml under ValidationSystemAPIService.war

So if your build fails in between, It's better to run the other sections separately, The ant scripts are well organized, you can run the DeployCAVS, DeployServices targets.

That's it, then you can see the beautiful screen of http://localhost:9700/AIA :-)

update26/July
update the weblogic start arguments with -Daia.home={your AIA Home}, this is required otherwise the aia core code will not work and you will see FileNotFound for AIAConfigurationProperties.xml

Random Thoughts -3

Last few months working on few pre-sales proposals, seeing couple of trends/patterns in many of them. Many of the projects customers are planning to start have a cloud piece. Many of the customers are using SFDC (Salesforce.com) or planning to move particularly in media, hospitality industries. Subscription based cost is driving a lot of technology choices. Customers are becoming very cost sensitive and want a very flexible costing model and execution models, where they can pay as they use in buy, build or cloud choices.

From solution perspective, It becomes new challenges around how to integrate with cloud, how to handle security, how to handle RASP (Performance in particular).

Other than the cloud trend, the other trend is the regular debate of orchestration vs choreography. So for every industry or cross-industry problem there are many packaged applications, now these applications also provide regular supporting peripheral/plumbing functionality. For example, an Order-Management App will have its own inbuilt workflow, will have OOB UI to manage the process flow or administration. Now the debate is whether to use the App's such in-built features or to use an esb/bpel layer to unify these functionalities centrally across applications. That's the choreography vs orchestration debate, ESB for stateless choreography and BPEL/BPM for stateful orchestration.

Either way positioning an ESB is easy, with all the security and visibility story around services. Positioning the BPM story is a challenge, customers in hurry resort to point-to-point integrations and some even don't go for commercial esbs. That's another trend I saw open-source ESBs the entire story around JBI, Mule, Fuse, Spring, OSGi etc.

Another trend I see is customers are more interested in data/dw, bi/reporting, mdm etc. And different compliance requirements are driving lot of strategic projects in this area.

My next interest is to find architecture patterns, how soa/bpm/e2.0 can be used both strategically and tactically, particularly oracle soa.

Random Thoughts - 2

My random thoughts series continues in the new year as well, good time to look at Middleware Tech in general and SOA11g in particular. One specific step in this regard was my SOA Certification 1Z0-451, I took this in a hurry to avoid the pain of reading endless pdfs. Luckily I passed the test with an average score of 73%. The test did throw many new things about SOA11g which I discovered after reviewing the questions in the test. Few of them are below, otherwise the test is a 'developer-certification' and very broadly spread across all the products (BPEL, Mediator, HWF, Rules, OWSM etc)

new features
1. Mediator now supports a new validation called schematron validation
2. Rules have the new feature of decision tables (bucketset is a new term)
3. Rules have lot of new features functions, links etc.
4. Fault-management framework has new features (at-least location of the files)
5. OWSM is complete new territory
6. SDO / Entity variable - brand new features
7. Mediator externalizing routing rules to Business rules
8. SpringContext integration support
9. Lot of new features in Mediator
10. EDN as configurable publish-subscribe infrastructure

My next focus area is to deep-dive SOA11g and find best-practices/integration patterns. Stay tuned.

Random Thoughts

Recently I joined a Vendor-neutral Indian Services Company, where Oracle SOA is just another Middleware among TIBCO, WebMethods, IBM, Microsoft and all the BPM vendors like Pega, Lombardi(now IBM), MetaStorm etc.

I had Couple of very interesting findings while interacting with people who have traditionally worked on EAI products like TIBCO, Webmethods and JCAPs etc.

One thing I noticed people tend to relate Service with WebService and hence synchronous or real-time. So they were more comfortable with terms like Messaging, JMS, near real-time etc. I was getting a feel that EAI is a much better term than SOA. To justify the whole SOA story, I researched more and found some discussions like wrapping asynchronous service by synchronous services pattern and so ESB, which can do that. So that reminded of an Article I had read in 2007 SOA = ESB + EAI, how true, I thought.

Moving away from SOA, I found strong discussions around BPM, I started goggling to understand what the BPM story is, and found that since 2009 BPM has gained more traction than SOA. Instead to put in other words BPM is front-ending SOA. Instead BPM and SOA are used in one breath like BPM/SOA. Also I found there are two types of BPM, pure-play BPM and the other BPM which is more like BPM/SOA. My understanding of BPM was, it’s an alternative to packaged applications and custom development. It can provide the rapid development benefits + it's centered on the human centric workflow tasks and SOA complementing with the system centric integration tasks.

Reading the book on Oracle BPM11g, It sounds perfect, unified platform, BPMN2.0 runtime in same server, my next quest is to find out what killer feature BPMN will do so that business folks will use it instead of Visio.

Migration to SOA11g

I had a sneak peek at SOA11g early this year, which I had blogged here and here. This time I wanted a migration-oriented approach to it, so I wanted to take a 10g bpel and migrate to 11g and check out. And what best 10g app to try other than SOA Order booking, and guess what, there is a tutorial on migrating SOA Orderbooking too. here it is. All this on 11gR1 PS1. Following the steps, I could migrate/deploy all the composites except the Customer Service which kept throwing

10:50:52 AM] [Deployer:149034]An exception occurred for task [Deployer:149026]deploy application CustomerService on soa_server1.: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: oracle.soa.workflow.wc, exact-match: false]..

However I could run the complete flow in 11g by keeping the webservices running in 10g.


So What I found was the migration efforts would depend on the components you have like bpel, esb, rules, tasks, java-webservices. Things are pretty straight-forward for bpel, esb, rules and tasks. However for webservices it’s somewhat tricky - based on the three kind of webservice implementations in Orderbooking the ways to migrate differed.

Other than the new files composite.xml, xxx.ComponentType files for each component, I noticed the wsdls for adapter services are now split between abstract wsdls and xx.jca files and xx.mplan for esbs. Good Intro here.
One problem with such migrations would be that bpel and esbs from 10g will migrate as new composites, while if one would redesign them - they might be designed as one composite with both components. So migrations would defeat a major design aspect of composites. That is pretty evident if you look at the 11g design of SOA Orderbooking here.

One complete wow factor is the rules editor - all integrated in JDev, and all migration of rules and tasks - worked just fine. However there was no task forms migrated as part of this demo. I could understand the services, components and references in the composite.xml, however didn't understand what wires are doing. One important point while migration was to keep all the partnerlinks up and running, so while migrating to 11g, the bpels should actually be working on a running 10g environment.

High-level steps for migration, would be -

1. Document all your external resource configurations like dbadapter, jmsadpater etc. And create them in 11g.
2. Keep 10g running and migrate the bpels/esbs using JDev
3. Make necessary changes for adapter configurations, partnerlink host:port information, esb to bpel routing endpoints.
4. Compile/Deploy one by one and Test
Additional effort will be required for webservices, rules, tasks and any other special case configurations.