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Oracle® Application Server 10g Concepts
10g (9.0.4) Part No. B10375-01 |
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Oracle® Application Server 10g Concepts
10g (9.0.4) Part No. B10375-01 |
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This chapter provides an overview of Oracle Application Server Integration features and benefits.
This chapter contains these topics:
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See Also: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect User’s Guide and Oracle Application Server InterConnect User’s Guide for detailed information on Oracle Application Server Integration |
Enterprise Integration solutions are designed to allow customers to address two primary issues: data consistency between systems and automating business processes spanning multiple systems. The need for Enterprise Integration has traditionally been driven by three factors:
Corporate mergers and acquisitions that lead organizations to have a variety of different information technology (IT) systems that need to be rationalized
Use of packaged applications in various lines of business that need to be connected to support organization-wide business processes
Business process re-engineering efforts that need processes to be streamlined and optimized for greater efficiency
The shift to e-business further accelerated these trends and also created new business needs that have driven additional requirements for organization-wide integration, such as the following:
Virtual supply chains require organizations to connect their supply chains with those of their trading partners to get better visibility and optimizations across the supply chain.
Customer relationship management requires organizations to knit their customer-facing systems with those of their distribution channel partners in order to better serve customer needs.
Corporate self-service requires organizations to streamline their own organization-wide business processes for greater efficiency.
Driven by these different factors, organizations want Enterprise Integration solutions that address the two primary integration issues: data consistency and automating business processes. Data consistency solutions essentially allow organizations to synthesize a consistent view of information from the fragmented data they have stored in fragmented data stores. For instance, a financial institution may have customer information in many different databases, but want its customer service representatives to have a single view of the customer across all the different financial products and services the customer purchases. A data consistency solution not only allows an organization to synthesize such information from the different data stores, but also provides the ability to synchronize data across these different systems for consistency.
Business process automation solutions essentially allow organizations to design, monitor, and optimize business processes that span multiple systems and applications within an organization and with trading partners. For instance, a manufacturing company may want to optimize how quickly and efficiently orders taken through its e-commerce storefront are passed into the following:
Financial systems (to track orders and bill customers)
Supply chain planning systems (to generate a bill of materials)
Suppliers (to procure the necessary parts cost effectively and just-in-time)
A business process automation solution not only allows an organization to design a business process and automate it across different systems, it also allows an organization to monitor the events that drive the business process and optimize the business process.
Oracle Application Server offers two integration solutions: Oracle Application Server InterConnect and Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect.
Oracle Application Server InterConnect is a fast message broker that is useful for integrating data between endpoints such as databases, applications, and trading partners. It provides integration both within an enterprise and between enterprises. However, logging and monitoring capabilities are limited to keep speed maximized.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is a standards-based solution designed to integrate processes within and between enterprises. It offers process monitoring, activity monitoring, and process optimization, and allows you to see a common view of all your events and processes.
This chapter discusses Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect in further detail. For more information about Oracle Application Server InterConnect, see the E-Business Integration section in the Oracle Application Server 10g Documentation Library.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is a single, standards-based, event-driven business process automation solution that is designed to integrate data, applications, and business processes within the enterprise (enterprise application integration or EAI) and between companies (business-to-business or B2B integration). It is built as a fundamental component of the Oracle Application Server and uses a number of standards to integrate systems with each other, including:
Java 2 Environment, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
Java Messaging Services (JMS)
J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA)
Web services
RosettaNet
EDIX12
EDIFACT
A fundamental element of its design is the ability to integrate systems with each other using a common data format (or syntax) and common semantics associated with the business process that spans the systems being integrated. Further, this common syntax and semantics is defined to be independent of the data and process semantics of any system (or end point) being integrated. By isolating the design of the business process from the syntax and semantics of any system being integrated, organizations have the ability to integrate existing applications and trading partners together into corporate business processes while retaining the flexibility to easily extend these processes as more applications, trading partners, and B2B protocols become available for integration.
A second fundamental element of the Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect design is that it uses a model-based approach to integration as compared to a programmatic approach. Analysts use a set of integration concepts to model the integration. This enables analysts to focus on what needs to be done without needing to specify how to do it. Specifically, analysts use three design concepts to model the different elements associated with an integration:
Events
Roles and processes
Agreements
Analysts use a single visual tool to do the following tasks:
Model events, roles and processes, and agreements
Add the necessary data translations, transformations, and correlations to complete the definition of the business process
Save the design in a design-time repository
Validate the complete business process design
Deploy valid designs to a runtime repository
The designs created using the visual tool are captured in a single design-time repository schema, making it easy to back up and reuse integrations that have been designed. A sophisticated set of validation rules allows analysts to validate a design prior to deployment, avoiding many runtime errors.
The integration manager (or runtime) of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect receives valid business process definitions and executes them by invoking a number of services to do the following:
Manage events
Carry out translations and transformations
Validate and route information flowing through the system
Correlate events
The integration manager writes all state data associated with existing business processes into a runtime repository. By querying this runtime repository, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides sophisticated facilities to monitor events and business processes and to optimize business processes. Further, all data and events in the system are translated (syntactically converted) and transformed (semantically converted) into a common representation that is independent of the format of any system. This enables organizations to have a much more efficient way to find enterprise-wide business process intelligence.
Finally, Oracle Application Server makes integration design more efficient and productive by delivering integration solutions that can be efficiently deployed and customized. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is also built to leverage the enterprise capabilities of the Oracle9i Database and Oracle Application Server to support both limited scope integration projects within organizations and corporate-wide integration projects that have sophisticated scalability, availability, and security requirements.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect supports the enterprise integration needs of e-business by providing the following features:
A single, comprehensive visual design toolset
Design-time and runtime repositories
A runtime integration manager
Data management facilities for translation, transformation, and validation
A standards-based adapter framework and a comprehensive set of adapters
Business process monitoring and business activity monitoring facilities
Systems monitoring and management facilities
The various components of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect are illustrated in Figure 6-1. This section discusses each of the features in greater detail.
Figure 6-1 Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Components
Before discussing the specific features of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect, it is important to understand the three concepts that provide the foundation of the model and methodology of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect:
Parties
Events
Roles and processes
A party is the abstraction defining the sources and targets that need to be integrated. A trading partner or an enterprise application (such as Oracle e-Business Suite or SAP) are two examples of a parties.
Events are caused by or consumed by parties and are managed within Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect. Events are indications of state changes within parties that require a reaction from other parties. For example, creating a purchase order is a state change and expresses a specific intent, namely to purchase a product.
Processes define how events are executed, for example sending an event from a trading partner to a back-end application, and requiring user approval along the way. Events are often referred to as business activities. These three concepts and the other elements associated with specifying an integration are defined using a single, HTML-based visual toolset.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a single, HTML-based visual toolset for modeling, monitoring, and administration. Specifically, the modelling facilities enable analysts to do the following:
Design or model all the elements associated with defining an integration (or business process) from a single user interface
Add profiles that define the way in which the designed integration communicates with the parties being connected
The monitoring facilities enable analysts to monitor the state of events (business activities), integrations (business processes), and agreements in the system. The administration facilities enable analysts to configure various facilities within the design-time environment and the runtime environment. The specific feature provided by the visual toolset include:
Modeling events and business processes: The modeling facilities allow analysts to define data types, events, roles and business processes, translation maps (or syntactic conversion of data types and events), and transformation maps (or semantic conversion of data types and events). It also provides facilities to model additional constructs such as correlations, namespaces, and interactions. All elements that are modeled using the visual toolset are captured as metadata in the design-time repository.
Modeling profiles and agreements: Profiles are used to model the way in which parties being integrated such as trading partners, packaged applications, or legacy systems communicated with the business process or integration. Each party that is being integrated is modeled using the concept of an agreement: a single business process has specific agreements with each of the parties with which it communicates. A party may itself have multiple agreements, different agreements being used for different business processes in which it participates. A business process coupled with a set of agreements constitutes a configuration. The integration manager receives valid configurations and executes them.
Deploying to the runtime environment: Once an integration is designed, analysts use a set of deployment screens to deploy the design to the runtime repository. Two steps are involved in deploying an integration:
Validation invokes a set of rules to determine whether the integration that has been modeled is valid both syntactically and semantically. Validation occurs prior to deployment and Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect uses a number of sophisticated validation rules to allow analysts to correct their designs before deployment.
Once validated, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect creates the necessary metadata and objects in the runtime repository that are then interpreted by the integration manager to execute the integration.
Monitoring business activities and processes using reports: When accepting events and executing business processes, the Integration Manager writes all state information associated with processing these events and processes to a runtime repository. By querying this repository, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides facilities to monitor the state of events, business processes, and agreements. These facilities are described in greater detail later in this section.
Configuring the system for administration: Finally, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is also integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager for systems monitoring and administration purposes. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides facilities to configure the runtime environment, communication protocols, adapters, and logging facilities. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect can also be used to start, stop, and restart instances of the Integration Manager and to monitor the system for status, faults, performance, and resource consumption.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect captures the integration modeled using the visual modeling toolset as metadata in a design-time repository. The design-time repository allows analysts to easily modify and reuse designs, making them more productive. Once an integration has been designed and validated, the act of deployment results in the creation of the necessary metadata in the runtime repository for the runtime engine or Integration Manager to execute the integration. Separating the design-time and runtime repositories allows analysts to modify business process definitions without affecting the runtime behavior until a new business process definition is actually deployed. Additionally, it also allows the runtime system to work against a repository that has been designed for optimal performance and scalability. Following are the major facilities provided by the design-time and runtime repositories:
Design-time repository: The design-time repository consists of metadata that captures the definition of an entire integration including events, roles and business processes, parties and agreements, translations and transformation maps, event validation rules, and communication protocols and semantics. All modeling data is captured in the design-time repository in a single normalized relational schema providing two important benefits: versioning and life cycle management. The design-time repository allows the user to do the following:
Reuse existing designs in new integrations
Negotiate agreements with parties
Validate and check the integration prior to deployment
Once the design has been validated, it is deployed. The act of deploying a business process signifies the end of design and modeling an integration configuration. The versions of the metadata in the configuration are frozen after successful deployment. Any change to this metadata in the configuration are frozen after successful deployment. Any change to this metadata will create a new version, enforcing model consistency.
Runtime repository: The deployment of a business process results in the creation of the necessary metadata in the runtime repository for the Integration Manager to execute the integration. The runtime repository consists of a complete set of metadata necessary for a given integration. Any change to the business process configuration must be made at design time and then re-deployed. This approach ensures runtime consistency because every runtime change by definition has an equivalent design-time change. Once deployed, the Integration Manager captures all runtime state including instance data (associated with event instances and process instances) and execution state in the runtime repository. The runtime repository can then be queried using reporting facilities described below for the purposes of business activity monitoring and business process monitoring.
The integration manager or runtime environment provides the technology stack with the different integration components required to execute the modeled integration.
The integration manager coordinates the execution of business processes that span parties. When a party sends an event to another party, the information is received from the adapter framework within Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect in the form of an Oracle Record.
After receiving an Oracle Record from the adapter framework, the coordination described in TABLE occurs:
Table 6-1 Integration Manager Coordination
| Key | Description |
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| 1 | The event map manager is invoked to determine the correct event type. |
| 2 | The event manager creates a representation of the event in the runtime repository. |
| 3 | Validation is invoked before the event instance is created to prevent the processing of invalid events. If the event instance is invalid, it is rejected within the same synchronous invocation of the adapter. If the native event instance is valid, it is stored in the runtime repository for further processing (at the same time, providing auditing). |
| 4 | The integration manager detects a new event instance in the runtime repository and informs the role manager. The role manager must either initiate a new role (or process) or continue with an existing one. |
| 5 | The correlation manager is invoked to determine if this event instance is correlated to an event instance used in any of the already-initiated roles. If this is the case, the event is passed to the existing instance for processing. If not, a new role or process is initiated to process this new event. |
| 6 | In the translation binding role, a translation step translates the syntax of the event into the common syntax defined for the business process. |
| 7 | In the transformation binding role, a transformation step processes the event further to transform its semantics into the common semantics associated with the business process. After transformation, the role manager completes processing the event. |
| 8 | The business process manager is then invoked to process the business process. After processing the business process, the same architectural behavior applies in the outbound direction. |
| 9, 10 | The party manager and agreement manager look up which party and which role to use in order to apply the necessary transformation and translation when passing the event to the receiving party. |
Adapters provide the facilities to connect the integration manager or runtime with the parties that are being integrated. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides an adapter framework and a comprehensive set of adapters to access a variety of different kinds of systems.
The interfaces provided by all the parties involved in an integration vary considerably. Parties can expose many different interfaces, such as synchronous APIs, asynchronous APIs, databases, screen scraping, transactional behavior, and JCA. Adapters know about one or more interfaces that belong to one or more specific parties. There are three types of adapters:
Application adapters know how to connect to a specific application and exchange wire messages with it. Examples of application adapters are an SAP adapter or a Siebel adapter.
Technology adapters know how to connect to a specific technology. Examples of technology adapters are a database adapter and an Advanced Queuing (AQ) adapter.
B2B protocol adapters are general-purpose adapters that can connect to a trading partner using standard B2B protocols, such as RosettaNet and EDI. Figure 6-2 shows the adapter framework and several adapters. In the inbound case, an adapter is responsible for receiving the wire message and using the JCA to pass information in a standard format called an Oracle Record to the adapter framework. In the outbound case, the opposite must be accomplished.
Figure 6-2 Adapter Framework, Adapters, and Integration Manager (Runtime)
The adapter framework is the process that manages the adapters and is responsible for getting information (in the form of Oracle Records) into and out of the integration manager. The key benefit of this architecture is that the integration manager receives every Oracle Record in exactly the same way, while the adapters deal with the specific differences associated with different kinds of parties (such as different protocols, synchronous and asynchronous communication, and so on). The adapter framework is completely stateless, which enables recovery after fail over. Multiple adapter framework instances can also run in parallel to provide scalability. Figure 6-2 shows the adapter framework in detail.
The integration manager invokes a set of data management services to translate datatypes and event instances, transform them, and validate the structure and semantics of datatypes and events. The data translation and data transformation facilities provide the following capabilities:
Translation or syntactic conversion: Data translation services convert datatypes and events from their native representation in the format of the party being integrated into an XML representation that is specific to the integration platform. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides translators to translate XML datatypes represented as XML schemas. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect also provides a scripting language called the data definition description language (D3L) for defining translators to translate any other binary datatype including ASCII and EBCDIC.
Transformation or semantic conversion: Data transformation services convert the semantics of the datatypes and events from the semantics of the party being integrated into a common semantic format that can be defined by the user. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides several prebuilt transformation functions, including both simple functions (such as copy, concatenate, split, substr, and replace operations) and complex functions (such as nested objects, arrays, iterators, and multiple rollups). Boolean conditions determine which transformation map to apply. Domain value mapping facilities and extensibility through facilities to call out to custom coded rules in Java and ASL-T all combine to provide a sophisticated transformation service to convert datatypes and events into a common semantic model. By combining the translation and transformation facilities, datatypes and events can be syntactically and semantically converted from their representation in a specific party’s format into a common model chosen by the user.
Validation of events and datatypes: While designing a business process and prior to deployment, analysts can use the validation facilities of the integration manager to validate the structure and semantics of both datatypes and events. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a variety of prebuilt validation functions, such as range checking and lookup patterns, and extensibility through custom-coded rules in Java or XPath. Validation rules can be applied when agreements are imported, business process definitions are exported, and business processes are deployed to the integration manager.
The integration manager writes all state information, including event instances and business process state, into a runtime repository. The runtime repository has an optimized schema design for better performance. You can use a single set of business process and activity monitoring screens to design a set of reports that query the runtime repository for information about the state of specific events, alerts, processes, collaborations, and agreements. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides three types of reports:
Status reports that provide the status of an event or process
Historical reports that combine the statues of a number of events and business processes over a period of time
Aggregate reports that provide aggregate conditions (such as average, sum, greater than, and less than) across a set of events or business processes
To summarize, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides three types of monitoring facilities:
Event reports: Event reports enable analysts to monitor business activities. This enables analysts to determine the state of one or more events based on the type of event, the originating and terminating parties, the business process integrating these parties, the content of the events, and the time period during which the event may have occurred. For instance, this enables an analyst to track the state of all purchase orders greater than $50,000 sent from an Oracle11i order management application to an SAP general ledger during the previous five days.
Business process reports: Business process reports similarly enable analysts to monitor business processes to determine the state of one or more business processes based on the parties being connected (the profiles), the specific agreements that govern how the business process communicates with these parties, and the time period during which the business process may have originated.
Agreement reports: Agreement reports enable analysts to determine which trading partners or applications have valid agreements and which business processes can communicate using these valid agreements.
Both the event and business process monitoring facilities provide the ability for users to track domain alerts and to define specific business processes to process these alerts. For instance in enable analysts to do the following:
Define an alert if there are more than ten purchase order over $50,000 waiting to be processed
Alert an administrator if such a condition occurs
Define a specific business process that can be invoked to expedite the processing of these purchase orders
While Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides business activity and business process monitoring facilities targeted at business analysts, it also provides systems level monitoring and management facilities targeted to systems administrators. The components of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect are all monitored from a systems management and monitoring point of view using Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a number of important facilities, including:
Systems monitoring facilities: Oracle Enterprise Manager provides facilities to monitor all components of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect, including the following:
Runtime and all its services
Adapter framework and adapters
Runtime repository for status (up/down), faults, performance, and resource usage (CPU and memory consumption)
In addition to raising domain alerts, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect also provides facilities to raise system alerts. System alerts such as a notification that an adapter has failed can be raised to Oracle Enterprise Manager or passed to a pager or e-mail system to alert system administrators. Configurable error logging enables administrators to configure only specific components to generate error logs and to browse these logs efficiently.
System management and administration: Oracle Enterprise Manager also provides administrators with a complete set of facilities to create one or more instances of the integration manager, to configure them, to start and stop one or more instances and their components (such as stopping just a specific adapter), and to optimize the instances for overall latency and throughput of events through the system.
A specific type of adapter provided by Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is the B2B connectivity facility (or B2B adapter). The B2B adapter is designed with an extensible and layered architecture that manages several functions:
Transport: The B2B adapter can use a variety of different wire protocols to transport documents between trading partners. With RosettaNet, Oracle provides facilities to communicate using RosettaNet over HTTP.
Packaging and signing: Packaging and signing facilities can package a B2B message with different envelope formats and security surrounding the document payload. With RosettaNet, Oracle provides facilities to add secure multipurpose Internet mail extensions (S/MIME) packaging to the message.
Document exchange: Document exchange services can format the payload into an appropriate B2B format such as RosettaNet business object documents (BODs).
Collaboration: Facilities to represent collaborations are provided where a sequence of activities and events, such as messages sent and acknowledgements received can be modeled. For instance, these collaboration facilities represent the publics processes between two trading partners communicating using RosettaNet partner interface processes (PIPs).
Further, the Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect model-driven facilities also enable analysts to develop prepackaged integrations or business flows that can then be easily customized. For instance, analysts or consultants can design a business process that automates the flow of a purchase order from an Oracle order management application to an SAP general ledger. The predefined business process involved the definition of the business process and the associated translation and transformation maps. these prebuilt definitions can be efficiently captured as models in the design-time repository. The models can be easily exported and transferred to a customer site where they can be efficiently customized. For instance, Oracle prepackages three business processes to process purchase orders (for RosettaNet PIPs 0A1, 3A4, and 3A6) with Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect. These involve the business process definitions and the associated transformation and translation maps to map both the public process and private process (for Oracle Applications 11.5.8) and the necessary translation and transformation maps to map RosettaNet BODs to open applications group (OAG) definitions.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a components-based, scalable, and reliable transactional architecture that implements the facilities introduced in the "Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Features" section. The architecture follows the traditional layered approach of a user interface layer, a logic layer, and a data storage layer.
Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is designed to support a variety of different deployment topologies to integrate parties with each other, including the following:
Point-to-point integration, where only two parties are being integrated
Hub-and-spoke model integration, where several different parties can be integrated with each other
Hosted model integration, where multiple parties are connected with a hosted facility that serves as an integration hub between these parties
By providing a single model-driven facility to define integrations and a methodology independent of the syntax and semantics of any party being integrated, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables an integration to be defined once and deployed in a variety of architectures, independent of the deployment topology being used.
Further, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect also leverages the facilities provided by Oracle Application Server for scalability. The integration manager is a Java process that is stateless (all state being written to the runtime repository). Multiple instances of the integration manager can be started and used to increase event throughput through the system. these instances can be clustered together for load balancing, scalability, and fail over (for high availability). In addition, the adapter framework is designed for scalability. The adapters are multithreaded, and one or more instances of both the adapter framework and the adapters can be started with appropriate facilities for load balancing and fail over. Finally, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect leverages the security facilities of Oracle Application Server for encryption, secure packaging and signing, and auditing and nonrepudiation.
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See Also: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect User’s Guide for additional information on these Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect facilities |
To summarize, organizations need business process automation solutions to design, monitor, and optimize business processes spanning multiple systems and applications within an organization and with trading partners. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a single, standards-based, event-driven business process automation solution that is designed to integrate data, applications, and business processes within the enterprise (EAI) and between companies (B2B integration). Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect is built as a fundamental component of Oracle Application Server and uses a number of standards to integrate systems with each other. A fundamental Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect design element is the ability to integrate systems using a common data format and syntax, and common semantics that are associated with the business process and are independent of the data and process semantics of any party being integrated. A second fundamental element of the Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect design is that it uses a model-based approach to integration as compared to a programmatic approach. Analysts use three concepts to model the different elements associated with an integration:
Events
Roles and processes
Agreements
Analysts use a single visual design tool to do the following:
Model these three elements
Add the necessary data translations, transformations, and correlations to complete the definition of the business process
Save the design in a design-time repository
Validate the complete business process design
Deploy valid designs to a runtime repository
The integration manager (or runtime) receives valid business process definitions and executes them by invoking a number of services to do the following:
Manage events
Carry out translations and transformations
Validate and route information flowing through the system
Correlate events
The integration manager writes all state data associated with existing business processes into a runtime repository. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a number of sophisticated monitoring tools to monitor events (or business activities) and business processes. Finally, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides users with four important benefits:
A single integrated product for integration within the enterprise and with trading partners
A model-driven approach that enhances the productivity of analysts integrating systems
The ability to maintain and upgrade integrations easily
The facilities to comprehensively monitor business processes and business activity
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