WebLogic Integration (WLI) is a unified solution for integrating business systems within an enterprise. It provides a development and run-time framework that unifies all the components of business integration – business process management, data transformation, trading partner integration, connectivity, message brokering, application monitoring, and user interaction – in a flexible, easy-to-use environment. WLI reduces the cost of management and operations by providing reliable, stable, and scalable integration solutions.
WLI combines the divergent pieces of the business integration picture – ERP, CRM, legacy applications, business users, supply chains, and trading partners – by providing a development environment that supports rapid business integration with simplified production and management.
Unified Approach to Enterprise Integration
Modern businesses operate in a diverse environment. They interact with a wide variety of clients, both within and outside the enterprise, and rely on disparate systems and processes to power their business activities. Businesses seek to integrate and extend their internal systems and processes with the goals of maximizing utilization of resources, gaining operational efficiency, and increasing revenue. Gaps exist between the business integration needs and the tools available to fulfill these needs.
Integration becomes a challenge in this kind of environment.
Regardless of your starting point – business process integration, custom application development using robust web services and controls, or development of a portal to provide employees, partners, and customers an integrated view of applications and data – WLI provides a unified environment for building your integrated applications.
WLI provides rapid integration with WorkSpace Studio.
Figure 1-1 Rapid Integration with WorkSpace Studio
WLI equips IT staff with the means to quickly implement and bind business processes to IT resources without specialized knowledge of the deployment environment. It does this by providing access to enterprise resources such as messaging, integration controls coupled with business process modeling, human interaction workflow modeling, and data transformation.
Within the WorkSpace Studio framework, WLI supports a business process layer of abstraction and a common language for gathering requirements, validating implementation, and monitoring run-time execution. By bridging the gap between the development and integration environments, WLI helps organizations avoid accumulation of proprietary integration technologies, makes the integration effort easier, and saves money.
WLI optimizes enterprise integration by recognizing and reflecting the following design principles:
Loosely-coupled integrations are easier to maintain than traditional tight and rigid integrations.
Asynchronous communication is critical for conducting business operations and protecting information when the communication link becomes unavailable.
Synchronous communication is necessary for straight-through processes or steps within an asynchronous process, that require quick response time and no persistence.
WLI supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication with external systems.
Coarse-grained communication is the key to maximize the efficiency of typically high-cost communication between loosely coupled systems.
With a common environment that recognizes that applications require integration to communicate, WLI enables reuse of technical skills across the entire lifecycle of building, integrating, and deploying applications.
Benefits of a Common Application Framework
WLI provides a robust set of general purpose tools; but your integration solution may require some custom behavior. You may, for example, want to do the following:
Write application logic or expose processes to users for tasks such as business approvals.
Customize the user interface to support business approval workflows.
Build a web-based application on top of your integration application to provide access to end users.
The common application framework of WorkSpace Studio allows you to develop all of these components in a single environment. In the same IDE, you can do the following:
Define business processes.
Use web services.
Access the J2EE layer for specialized application logic.
Use NetUI and Portal resources to allow user interaction with the business process.
After you build your integration application, you can build your user interface within the IDE. You can use the JSP editor to create forms for data entry and use page groups to enable the flow of information across multiple web pages. You can host the UI on a portal and customize the user experience.
Table 1-1 summarizes the benefits of having a common application framework.
Table 1-1 Benefits of a Common Application Framework
Feature
Benefit
Industry-Standard IDE
Leverages the power of the extended Eclipse community for skills, ideas, discussion groups, and plug-ins.
Improves developer collaboration within and across projects.
Takes advantage of prevalent Eclipse familiarity to quickly bring new team members on board.
Unified programming model
Supports event-driven programming model based on procedural logic development.
Provides a control-based environment for defining processes and abstracting resources.
Abstracts the low-level technical details of the J2EE APIs and back-end resources.
Common look-and-feel
Provides a consistent developer experience across different BEA WebLogic products: WorkSpace Studio, WLI, and WebLogic Portal (WLP).
Annotated Java code model
Enables you to specify behavior and focus on handling events and calling methods, instead of writing complex code.
Provides metadata-driven application development.
Supports annotations based on the JSR 175 standard.
Web services
Supports natively built, extensible, and integrated web services at the enterprise level.
Exposes processes as web services and invokes internal and third-party web services from IDE components.
Enables implemented processes to be automatically accessible as web services.
Follows web services standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Supports access through XML messages.
Common project and deployment model
Provides application encapsulation through J2EE mechanisms – WAR and EAR files.
Controls
Simple visual components
Provides an easy-to-use interface.
Allows you to define the behavior of business processes through methods, events, and properties.
Extensible architecture
Ensures that application artifacts that are built in WorkSpace Studio become controls that can be reused anywhere within the environment.
Enables developers and ISVs to develop custom controls.
Consistent mechanism for representing resources
Abstracts resource-specific details; all resources look the same.
Reduces the learning curve for developers.
Composition
Supports invoking controls from other controls.
Java component with Java methods
Provides easy access to J2EE resources.
Complete access to J2EE API
Enables J2EE developers to build the logic at the J2EE layer, package it as a control, and make it available to the application developer or integration specialist.
Integration with WebLogic Platform
WLI is part of WebLogic Platform, which helps in streamlining business processes, developing new applications, creating web services, integrating them with existing systems, and extending e-business infrastructure through web portals.
WLI provides a single environment for:
Integrating business processes.
Developing custom applications by using robust web services and controls.
Developing a portal to provide employees, partners, and customers with an integrated view of applications and data.
Figure 1-2 shows the components of the WebLogic platform that you can use independently, or in combination, as required for your application.
Figure 1-2 WebLogic Platform
WebLogic Server (WLS) provides the critical infrastructure required for developing integrated solutions including security, transaction management, fault tolerance, persistence, and clustering.
WLI leverages WLS and uses web services to integrate distributed systems within and outside the organization. It uses WorkSpace Studio to simplify application development using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
WLI works seamlessly with WorkSpace Studio to provide a robust set of tools for developing and extending integration applications. It provides graphical tools for creating and changing business processes and user interaction task plans, as shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3 WLI Business Process in WorkSpace Studio
The next section outlines the key features of WLI.
WLI supports transformation of data for any combination of data formats – structured XML, non-XML, or Java – by using XQuery and XSLT. Transformation is supported for incoming data, outgoing data, as well as data within a process.
Data transformation can be implemented in a graphical design view. Developers can view and change the underlying code in the source view. They can also test the transformation in a test view.
Complex transformations such as joins, unions, typeswitch, if, and FLWOR (For, Let, Where, Order by, Return) operations can be designed quickly by a simple drag-and-drop mapping.
Interaction with External Systems
WLI provides the following features to help you design applications that can interact efficiently with external systems:
Message Broker: The message broker feature provides rules-based message routing by using a channels-based publish-subscribe broker to transport events in a loosely coupled manner. This enables high-performance, low-latency message routing between applications.
Event Generators: Event generators publish messages to Message Broker channels in response to system events.
Controls: Controls enable nonexperts to achieve rapid integration by dragging and dropping simple component interfaces that represent the resources being integrated. Over a dozen prebuilt controls are available out-of-the-box for access to database, file, HTTP, messaging, service broker resources, and for human interaction. The controls container is based on Apache Beehive.
WLI includes a full-featured worklist system to manage end-user interaction for process exceptions, approvals, and status tracking.
You can create a reusable sequence of end-user steps, which can be used with one or many processes by using a drag-and-drop design interface and out-of-the-box portlets; you can also generate automated forms. The worklist feature includes centralized user and group management, and user rules and authorization for secure participation within processes.
WLI includes a portlets-based administration console, which facilitates integration-focused lifecycle management of running processes, deployed applications, message broker traffic, trading partner activity and parameters, and worklists. It gives administrators full and secure visibility into the distributed integration environment. The UI is easy to use and enables users to navigate quickly across the modules of the console.
WorkSpace Studio contains an open source IDE framework, which follows the best practices of Eclipse 3.2.2 and works with Eclipse plug-ins. WLI uses Eclipse concepts such as Workspace, Workbench, Editors, Views, Resources, Projects, Perspectives, and Facets.
Integration of WLI and ALSB provides a cost-effective solution for building, connecting, and managing integrated process-driven services within and outside the enterprise, by combining the power and flexibility of WLI with the high-performance, stateless mediation of ALSB.
This integration provides the following benefits:
You can install WLI and ALSB in the same BEA_Home, and you can deploy WLI and ALSB applications in either a single domain (with a unified run time) or in separate domains.
Developers can navigate easily between ALSB and WLI design perspectives.
Security and transaction contexts are propagated seamlessly from ALSB to WLI and vice versa.
ALSB is part of the BEA AquaLogic family of service infrastructure products; it manages the routing and transformation of messages in an enterprise system. For more information, see the ALSB documentation at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13171_01/alsb/docs30/index.html.
WLI includes a repository browser using which you can connect to ALER, search for services stored in ALER, and use them in WLI. You can also store metadata about WLI artifacts in ALER.
Note:
ALER is a SOA repository that provides the tools to manage and govern the metadata for any type of software asset, from processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components, and data services. For more information, see Using ALER with WLI Applications.
Integration of WLI with ALES allows you to implement policy-driven security, providing increased security for application- and system-level resources.
Note:
ALES is a fine-grained entitlement management solution that combines centralized policy management with distributed policy decision-making and enforcement. This combination provides management and control of your critical applications and resources with uncompromised performance and reliability, allowing you to adapt to changing business requirements quickly and easily. For more information, see the ALES documentation at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13169_01/ales/docs30/index.html.
