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Oracle® Application Server Concepts
10g Release 2 (10.1.2) Part No. B13994-01 |
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Oracle® Application Server Concepts
10g Release 2 (10.1.2) Part No. B13994-01 |
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This chapter provides an overview of the two Oracle Application Server Integration components: Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect and Oracle Application Server Integration B2B.
This chapter contains these topics:
Introduction to Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect
Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect Architecture
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See Also: Oracle Application Server Integration B2B User's Guide and Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect User's Guide for detailed information on Oracle Application Server Integration |
Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect integrates Oracle applications with third-party applications or third-party messaging middleware. This integration can be deployed within an enterprise or across enterprise boundaries through the Internet. OracleAS Integration InterConnect is designed as a hub and spoke system, where OracleAS Integration InterConnect Adapters function as the spokes that access other applications and systems, and the InterConnect Repository Server serves as the hub. The InterConnect Repository Server is a standalone Java application, and the repository is a database that stores the design-time metadata definition.
OracleAS Integration InterConnect uses adapters to perform transformations between your application and the application with which it is communicating. OracleAS Integration InterConnect supports four messaging paradigms:
Implemented procedures (request-response service)
Publish (event service)
Subscribe (one-way request service)
Invoked procedure (InterConnect is the server and the EIS is the client making the request through the adapter)
Figure 6-1 illustrates the relationship between your application and partner applications through adapter transformations.
Figure 6-1 Oracle Application Server Integration InterConnect Architecture
There are four primary adapter types available with Oracle Application Server:
Technology adapters: OracleAS Integration technology adapters are available out of the box with every Oracle Application Server installation. They provide connectivity with data stores, messaging middleware, and various transport protocols. These adapters include OracleAS Integration Adapter for HTTP, OracleAS Integration Adapter for FTP, OracleAS Integration Adapter for Databases, and OracleAS Integration Adapter for Files.
B2B adapters: OracleAS Integration B2B adapters integrate with business applications used between trading partners, over the Internet in real time. These adapters include Oracle Adapters for Rosettanet, EDI, and ebXML.
Application adapters: OracleAS Integration application adapters integrate with packaged applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards.
Legacy adapters: OracleAS Integration legacy adapters integrate with legacy and mainframe systems such as CICS, IMS/TM, and Tuxedo.
When enterprises implement an enterprise information system (EIS) by integrating diverse applications that run on different platforms, they rely on a set of adapters to provide connectivity between these applications.
The various applications that enterprises use in their daily operations may include database, mainframe, and Web interface applications, all of which run on different operating systems and are developed by different vendors. Oracle provides a suite of integration adapters that implement bi-directional connectivity between applications and various back-end systems to enable fast, flexible, and efficient integration.
Key features of Oracle Application Server Integration Adapters include:
OracleAS Integration Adapters are written in Java and integrate with several back-end APIs.
OracleAS Integration Adapters perform translation between Oracle data, usually in XML format, and native back-end data formats.
GUI-based design-time tools available with OracleAS Integration Adapters provide a standard methodology for downloading, configuring, and storing the schemas that represent the EIS business objects and operations. These tools facilitate rapid change without additional coding effort.
Through its use of standards like Web services, JCA, and J2EE, OracleAS Integration Adapters provide high availability and scalability to the enterprise. OracleAS Integration Adapters can be deployed as JCA 1.0 adapters or as Web services servlets within the OC4J container.
OracleAS Integration Adapters can be deployed in Oracle Application Server clusters.
By supporting bi-directional connectivity, the OracleAS Integration Adapters enable request-response services to back-end applications, and can act as a client in event notifications.
Using OracleAS Integration Adapters to connect Oracle Application Server and other systems and applications ensures that the distributed system has the advantage of inheriting many other Oracle Application Server features. These features include system security, scalability, persistence, transaction support, portability, and NLS support.
Oracle Application Server Integration B2B (OracleAS Integration B2B) is an e-business integration product for the business-to-business (B2B) exchange of services, information, and products. If you know who you want to trade with (for example, a specific supplier), what you want to do (for example, send a purchase order), and how you want to do it (for example, over the Internet using a secure channel), then you have defined a basic B2B transaction.
Figure 6-2 illustrates the OracleAS Integration B2B architecture. Who you want to trade with is defined in the trading partner management component. What you do is defined in the business protocol (shown within the dotted lines). How you do the B2B transaction is defined in the transport and packaging components. OracleAS Integration B2B provides extensive connectivity to external trading partners through standard B2B protocols. Within the enterprise, OracleAS Integration B2B can interface with OracleAS Integration InterConnect, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, the E-Business Suite XML Gateway, and third party software applications through Oracle AQ and JMS. This figure also shows that the B2B core supports a number of standard protocols.
Figure 6-2 Oracle Application Server Integration B2B Architecture
OracleAS Integration B2B provides the features you need to design, deploy, monitor, and manage your integrations. These features include the following:
Comprehensive trading partner management: As you identify trading partners, you are also defining the basic B2B transaction. This task flow means that you associate business protocols and the communication details as you set up each partner.
Standard B2B protocols: You can work with trading partners who use various protocols, such as RosettaNet, EDI EDIFACT, EDI X12, AS2, or you can create custom document protocols.
Predefined business protocols: By defining combinations of a document protocol, an exchange protocol, and a process protocol, OracleAS Integration B2B provides protocols based on your purpose. Predefined business protocols also make it easy to set up multiple protocols for the same trading partner.
Integrated user experience: The user interface tool and wizards guide all aspects of your B2B transaction, no matter which business protocol you choose.
Reports: With the integrated reports feature, you can create business messages, wire messages, collaboration, and error status reports. You can also save report definitions for reuse.
Security: The security features of OracleAS Integration B2B include automatic encryption of the host trading partner's parameters using an obfuscated encryption key created during installation. OracleAS Integration B2B also leverages Oracle Application Server security features.
Integration with other Oracle integration products: OracleAS Integration B2B can interface with OracleAS Integration InterConnect, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, the Oracle E-Business Suite XML Gateway, and Oracle AQ and JMS.
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) provides enterprises with an industry standard for business process orchestration and execution. BPEL offers a standard language for defining how to send XML messages to remote services, manipulate XML data structures, receive XML messages asynchronously from remote services, manage events and descriptions, define parallel sequences of execution, and undo parts of processes when exceptions occur.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager enables organizations to model and deploy business processes based on the BPEL standard. Key features of Oracle BPEL Process Manager include:
The BPEL Designer provides a graphical interface for building BPEL processes.
The core BPEL engine provides a scalable and robust BPEL server that executes standard BPEL processes. It also uses a database to maintain the state of long-running processes, enabling clustering for failover and scalability.
The built-in integration services enable developers to leverage advanced connectivity and transformation capabilities from standard BPEL processes. These capabilities include support for XSLT and XQuery transformations, as well as bindings to legacy systems through JCA adapters and native protocols.
The extensive WSDL binding framework enables connectivity to protocols and message formats such as JMS, email, JCA, HTTP GET and POST, and many others.
The BPEL Console provides a Web-based interface for management, administration, and debugging of processes deployed to the BPEL server. Audit trails and process history/reporting information are automatically maintained and available both through the BPEL Console and through a Java API.
