Monday, February 27, 2012

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.

update25/Apr: If the schemas for rules has changed, instead of re-importing everything, re-importing only the changed element helps.


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

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