Business Rules, WebDAV

I am working on a weblogic portal integration with workflow/rules (SOA10.1.3.4 on weblogic9.2) project, so good opportunity to deep-dive into workflow/rules in bpel engine. The first candidate was rules. Oracle business rules has two important parts 1)rule author 2)decisionservice. More details about rules here in the Userguide.

I faced 2 distinct challenges

1) to use WebDAV repository, as using files repository was not the solution for production/clusters. To set up WebDAV on Apache2.2.15, here is a link to how to install. Take special care to enable all the six modules webDAV needs (./configure --prefix /app/soadev/apache --enable-dav=shared --enable-dav-fs=shared --enable-setenvif=shared --enable-alias=shared --enable-auth-digest=shared --enable-authn-file=shared). here is a good link to test WebDAV. Make sure you assign the user.group properly for /var and /uploads folders. In my case it was 'daemon'. I used auth type digest, and no SSL.

Once WebDav was set up, you can test it from browser (open with web folder option) to be able to write or not, From ruleauthor as well it connects, and you can create/import dictionaries.

2)The other challenge is to deploy the decision services after proper changes, for weblogic9.2 there are special instructions here. Also need to make sure to correct the context-root in application.xml, as I had multiple rules in multiple rule-sets, one decisionservice for rule-set was deployed and the context-root has to be modified to be specific for that ear.


After making sure some of these challenges, it worked just perfect. Next would be to look at workflow integration with rules.

update:Apr27
good article on migarting between file based and Webdav based repositories

SOA Projects

I could have named this post as SOA entry points, basically I wanted to list down the different flavors of SOA projects, which also indicate the different SOA Entry points.

SOA Entry points and the product line -

1.Process Automation - BPA / BPM / BPEL / ESB / Rules / Workflow
2.EAI - BPEL / ESB / AIA
3.B2B - B2B / BPEL / ESB
4.Process Portal - Portal / BPEL / ESB / Rules / Workflow
5.MDM - BPEL / ESB / MDM
6.BAM - BAM / BPEL
7.GOV - OER / OSR / BPEL / AIA
8.Data Services - ODI / OSB / BPEL
9.Appgrid/XTP - Weblogic / Coherence / BPEL


Looks like BPEL is the common thread, however with the other product mix the Solution Offering gets very unique and different. The other product OSB can be used in many of these projects. So while doing SOA projects, one should keep cognizance of the kind-of SOA project it is.