Oracle 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. WLI provides a single environment for developing custom applications by using robust web services and controls, and developing a portal to provide employees, partners, and customers with an integrated view of applications and data.
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.
Oracle WebLogic Server 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.
WLI provides rapid integration with Oracle WorkSpace Studio. WLI uses Oracle WorkSpace Studio to simplify application development using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). WLI works seamlessly with Oracle WorkSpace Studio to provide a robust set of tools for developing and extending integration applications.
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 Oracle 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.
Oracle WorkSpace Studio provides graphical tools for creating and changing business processes and user interaction task plans, as shown in Figure 3.
WLI optimizes enterprise integration by recognizing and reflecting the following design principles:
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.
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.
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:
The common application framework of Oracle WorkSpace Studio allows you to develop all of these components in a single environment. In the same IDE, you can do the following:
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 summarizes the benefits of having a common application framework.
Table 2 lists the 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.
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WLI provides the following features to help you design applications that can interact efficiently with external systems:
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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.
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WLI enables rapid and secure online connection with suppliers and customers through leading standards such as RosettaNet and ebXML.
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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 user interface is easy to use and enables users to navigate quickly across the modules of the console.
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Integration of WLI and Oracle Service Bus 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 Oracle Service Bus.
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WLI includes a repository browser using which you can connect to Oracle Enterprise Repository, search for services stored in the Oracle Enterprise Repository, and use them in WLI. You can also store metadata about WLI artifacts in Oracle Enterprise Repository.
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Integration of WLI with Oracle Entitlements Server allows administrators to implement policy-driven security, providing increased security for application- and system-level resources.
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Oracle WebLogic Integration provides connectivity to Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) like Oracle Applications E-Business Suite and Oracle Advanced Queueing using JCA compliant resource adapters. For more information see,
Oracle JCA Event Generator and Control User Guide.
Oracle WebLogic Integration also provides connectivity to SAP systems. For more information, see Oracle Application Adapter for SAP R/3 User's Guide.
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