OSB11g

Finally I got my first project on OSB11g into production, We had used OSB11g before, however primarily for service-virtualization, routing, light transformation, security etc. This project is special as OSB11g was the only platform for all service implementation as well as composition. It's kind of conflicting to build services on OSB11g using DBAdapters instead of using JEE components such as JPA or any other OR mapping product. I had a discussion on this here

Unfortunately I didn't get to code, however I tried a bit to do code-reviews, couple of findings on the IDE part here -

• If you want to only read OSB code - still you have to install OSB as the OSB IDE plugin for OEPE is bundled in the OSB install - hopefully 12c will remove this issue
• Proxy message flows are pretty unreadable at first sight, what helped was - use 'Collapse All' to see the highest level stages and then expand
• Overall Proxy message flows are divided with multiple stages (with multiple pipeline pairs) ending with a Route Node
• It's very important to understand Service callout, Publish and Route Node - also the related thread behavior - great article here 
• As we implemented a very complex orchestration in OSB - one proxy service had almost 100s of activities calling around 30 services - with error handling code - It is very important that the code is readable and maintainable - so it's important to use the Notes feature to add documentation 

There were many challenges in the design aspects as we were building all the application logic in OSB services -

• how to design the PS-LPS structure - in order to improve code modularity we tried using as many LPS, however there was a debate on how to expose these LPSs if there is a need to expose them as services (by using Operation branching in one PS or the LPS by having its own PS)
• How to design the CRUD operations - as separate DBAdapter services or having one service with routing to all the business services example here
• Handling transactions and concurrency - we needed to update multiple records in a database table. Though OSB supports transactions, handling concurrency was a big challenge. We wanted to implement  optimistic locking - however the nature of fine-grained services made the interfaces difficult to implement the feature 
• We decided to implement all the stateless business logic in Java, which was primarily to iterate through multiple hash-maps and do matching kind of logic. From OSB these Java methods were called using Java Callout. XML Beans was used for the data binding between OSB and Java. This worked very well, however there was one challenge to make this Java code compiled as part of OSB code - we end up using Jar files as part of OSB code
• As all developers were doing parallel development of the same service (each developer doing some LPS) - there were challenges in building the code without errors initially

Couple of other issues -

• One issue that I will remember always from this implementation was about File transport. OSB needs File/FTP transports to have the staging directory in a shared storage (or network file system) so that all nodes in cluster can access it. As the polling configuration in proxy service is active-passive however the actual processing is always active-active. So if you don't have NFS or SAN in your cluster environment - you cannot use this transport. more here. Similar requirement for using HAFileAdapter or HAFtpAdapter.
• Also when we were trying using SFTP transport - the requirement was to use public-key based authentication, for which we needed to create a Service Key provider - for which unfortunately we didn't get any clear steps to follow. Which was easier for SFTP Adapter where the private key is provided as part of the adapter configurations.
• Had a issue with MQ transport around setting the correct encoding - UTF-8 - multiple properties on mq connector, transport header, MQRFH2 header properties etc. following these 2 steps resolved the issue
• Set the Character Set to 1208 in Transport Header activity.
• Copy All headers property in the Transport header activity, here the outbound context will be populated to queue