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.