Oracle® Fusion Applications Concepts Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.2) Part Number E15525-02 |
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The applications for a product family are deployed to an Oracle WebLogic Server domain in the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack. This chapter describes the Oracle Fusion Middleware components that support that deployment.
This chapter contains the following topics:
Oracle WebLogic Server is an enterprise-ready Java application server that supports the deployment of many types of distributed applications in a robust, secure, highly available, and scalable environment. Oracle WebLogic Server is an ideal foundation for building and deploying enterprise Java EE applications based on service-oriented architecture (SOA).
For more information, see the "Oracle WebLogic Server" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Concepts and Oracle Fusion Middleware Introduction to Oracle WebLogic Server.
Oracle WebLogic Communication Services provides click-to-dial functionality for applications primarily through contextual actions. Contextual actions provide related information and actions to users within the immediate context of the object instances upon which they act.
For more information, see the "Managing Oracle WebLogic Communication Services for Click-to-Dial Functionality" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.
Oracle Identity Management is an enterprise identity management system that automatically manages user access privileges across all resources in an enterprise. It provides a shared infrastructure for all applications and management throughout the entire identity management lifecycle: from initial creation of access privileges to dynamically adapting to changes in enterprise business requirements. It also provides services and interfaces that facilitate third-party enterprise application development. These interfaces are useful for application developers who must incorporate identity management into applications.
Oracle Identity Management includes the following components:
Oracle Access Manager provides an identity management and access control system that is shared by all your applications. The result is a centralized and automated Oracle Single Sign-on (SSO) solution for managing who has access to what information across your entire IT infrastructure.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Access Manager with Oracle Security Token Service.
Oracle Authorization Policy Manager is a GUI tool for managing the authorization policy for applications based on Oracle Platform Security Services.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle Authorization Policy Manager Administrator's Guide (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).
Oracle Identity Manager is a user provisioning and administration solution that automates the process of adding, updating, and deleting user accounts from applications and directories. It improves regulatory compliance by providing detailed reports that identify which users have access to which applications.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Identity Manager.
Oracle Internet Directory serves as the central user repository for Oracle Identity Management, simplifying user administration in the Oracle environment and providing a standards-based general purpose directory for the diverse enterprise.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Internet Directory.
Oracle Virtual Directory is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service that provides a single, abstracted view of enterprise directory servers and databases from a variety of vendors. Oracle Virtual Directory can serve as a single source of facts in an environment with multiple data sources.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Virtual Directory.
For more information about Oracle Identity Management, see the Oracle Identity Management Integration Guide.
Oracle WebCenter contains an integrated set of components for building social applications, enterprise portals, collaborative communities or social sites, and composite applications. Built on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture, Oracle WebCenter combines dynamic user interface technologies with which to develop rich internet applications, the flexibility and power of an integrated, multichannel portal framework, and a set of horizontal Enterprise 2.0 capabilities delivered as services that provide content, collaboration, presence, and social networking capabilities.
Oracle WebCenter comprises four components:
Oracle WebCenter Framework, an Oracle JDeveloper design time extension that enables you to embed portlets, Oracle Applications Development Framework (Oracle ADF) taskflows, content, and customizable components in your applications.
Oracle WebCenter Services, a set of independently deployable collaboration services, that incorporates Web 2.0 components such as content, collaboration, and communication services. Oracle WebCenter Services includes task flows or portlets that can be embedded directly into Oracle ADF applications. In addition, you can use APIs to create custom UIs and to integrate some of these services into non-Oracle ADF applications.
Oracle WebCenter Spaces, a closed source application built on Oracle WebCenter Framework and Oracle WebCenter Services that offers a configurable work environment that enables individuals and groups to work and collaborate more effectively.
Oracle Composer, a tool that enables any application or portal to be customized or personalized after it has been deployed and is in use. Integrated with Oracle WebCenter Framework and Oracle WebCenter Services, it is used extensively inside WebCenter Spaces to enable you to customize and personalize group and personal spaces.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter.
Oracle Business Intelligence (Oracle BI) offers a complete, integrated solution that generates and delivers analyses for Oracle Fusion Applications.
The Oracle Business Intelligence platform is an enterprise-class platform for all modes of analysis and information delivery, including dashboards, ad hoc analysis, online analytical processing (OLAP), predictive analytics, and enterprise reporting. You can access information through multiple channels, such as web-based user interfaces, industry standard portals, mobile devices, and the Microsoft Office Suite of applications. You can push information to users through notifications, or embed it within business process workflows. Oracle Business Intelligence simplifies systems deployment and management through integrated systems management capabilities.
Oracle Business Intelligence products integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications include:
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive set of enterprise business intelligence tools and infrastructure that includes a scalable and efficient query and analysis server, an ad hoc query and analysis tool, interactive dashboards, proactive intelligence and alerts, and an enterprise reporting engine.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications is a complete, prebuilt solutions that delivers intuitive, role-based intelligence throughout an organization. This solution enables organizations to gain more insight and greater value from a range of data sources and applications. After running the Oracle Fusion applications, you can configure Oracle Business Intelligence Applications to analyze the history and trends of transactional data.
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications reporting uses Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse, a unified data repository for all customer-centric data, used to support the analytical requirements of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications supplies the warehouse database schema and the logic that extracts data from the Oracle Fusion Applications transactional database and loads it to the warehouse. Oracle Fusion Applications end users interact with the information in Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse using Oracle BI Enterprise Edition components (such as Answers and Dashboards).
For information about configuring Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, see the "Roadmap for Functional Configuration" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications.
Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence is an ad hoc query and self-service analysis solution offered to all Oracle Fusion Applications customers. It uses Oracle BI Enterprise Edition to provide an easy-to-use interface for business users to perform current state analysis of their business applications. Constructed queries and reports are executed in real time against the transactional schema supported by a layer of view objects. Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence enables you to use object data sources in addition to SQL data sources. SQL for the object is coded by the developer, which improves performance and efficiency.
For more information about configuring Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Installation Guide.
Oracle Essbase is an online analytical processing (OLAP) server that provides an environment for deploying prepackaged applications or developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications.
For more information, see the Oracle Essbase Database Administrator's Guide at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17236_01/nav/portal_3.htm
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Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing, and delivering reports from multiple data sources in multiple formats through multiple channels.
For more information, see the "Managing Report Delivery Servers" chapter of the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.
Oracle Real-Time Decisions is a platform that combines both rules and predictive analytics to apply real-time business intelligence at the point of contact to optimize every single interaction with your customers by infusing analytical decisions into each transaction at the point of interaction.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Platform Developer's Guide for Oracle Real-Time Decisions.
Oracle SOA Suite is a single process platform for human-centric, system-centric, and document-centric business processes. It is also a complete and integrated process foundation that connects IT, business users, customers, and partners with the applications and processes that drive business. Oracle SOA Suite offers developers drag and drop composition and revision of business processes, resulting in reuse, faster application development, assembly, and solution delivery. The event delivery network of Oracle SOA Suite unifies business events and services in a single declarative environment.
Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, hot-pluggable software suite for building, deploying, and managing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The components of the suite benefit from common capabilities that include consistent tooling, a single deployment and management model, end-to-end security, and unified metadata management.
Oracle SOA Suite includes the following components:
Oracle Business Rules makes processes and applications more flexible by enabling business analysts and non-developers to easily define and modify business logic without programming. By defining and maintaining business rules outside of the related process or application and using a separate, more intuitive web-based interface, Oracle Business Rules provides faster, easier rule modifications and reduces subsequent redeployment costs.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Rules, the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite, and the Oracle Fusion Middleware Language Reference Guide for Oracle Business Rules.
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM), an application built on an innovative, message-based, event-driven, and memory-resident architecture, is a complete solution for building interactive, real-time dashboards and proactive alerts for monitoring business processes and services.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Activity Monitoring.
Oracle B2B (Business to Business) enables an enterprise to define, configure, manage, and monitor the electronic exchange of information with its trading partners. It enables document management, transport and exchange management, partner management, reports and monitoring, and system management.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle B2B.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a runtime environment for BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) processes, provides a comprehensive, standards-based, and easy-to-use solution for creating, deploying, and managing cross-application business processes with both automated and human workflow steps. It provides high-performance, reliable execution of service-oriented business processes defined with the BPEL standard.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager includes a native BPEL engine that executes the processes. This approach not only permits reuse, but also enables visibility into in-flight business processes at the individual and aggregate level (the latter being provided by Oracle BAM), and lays the foundation for closed-loop business process management, process improvement, and compliance.
For more information, see the "Getting Started with Oracle BPEL Process Manager" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.
Oracle User Messaging Service enables two-way communication between users and deployed applications. It supports both Java APIs and web services for integration. The channels supported include SMS, e-mail, instant messaging, and voice messages. Oracle User Messaging Service also supports intelligent messaging in which the final destination of a message is determined by a user's preferences.
For more information, see the "Oracle User Messaging Service" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.
Oracle Human Workflow is responsible for managing the lifecycle of human tasks, including creation, assignment, expiration, deadlines, and notifications, and presentation of tasks to users. It supports sophisticated, dynamic task routing that leverages declarative patterns and tight integration with business rules. The three main subcomponents of Oracle Human Workflow are Task Editor, Task Service Engine, and Worklist Application.
For more information see the "Getting Started with Human Workflow" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.
Oracle Mediator provides a lightweight framework to mediate between various components within a composite application. Mediation capabilities include selective routing, transformation, and validation capabilities, along with various message exchange patterns, such as synchronous, asynchronous, and event publishing or subscriptions. Besides mediation, Oracle Mediator converts data to facilitate communication between interfaces exposed by various components, which are connected to build a SOA composite application.
For more information, see the "Getting Started with Oracle Mediator" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.
Oracle Business Process Management Suite(Oracle BPM Suite) provides a unified BPM platform for managing processes around people, systems, and documents, and enables users across the enterprise to access and collaborate on tasks through simplified business process management.
Oracle BPM combines BPEL and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 and provides a unified process engine that controls the integration of enterprise systems and simplifies their implementation. It executes BPEL and BPMN processes in addition to implementing workflow rules and is integrated with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management.
Guided Business Processes help you to organize the activities in your process into milestones. They hide the complexity of the process and guide you through the relevant tasks. Guided Business Processes improve the user experience by providing a guided visual representation of a process flow and an encapsulated hierarchical view of the business process.
Guided Business Processes leverage Oracle SOA Suite, which provides a foundation for, and access to, reusable services. In addition, SOA and the process orchestration infrastructure acts as the controlling agent for the business process across multiple disparate systems.
Guided Business Processes use Oracle BPEL Process Manager to provide a comprehensive, standards-based, easy-to-use solution for creating, deploying, and managing composite application business processes with both automated and human workflow steps—all in a service-oriented architecture. Guided Business Processes also rely on Oracle BPEL Process Manager to coordinate tasks, combining Oracle BPEL Process Manager, worklist applications, and human task flows to link disparate human tasks to a long-running process.
For more information, see the "Working with Guided Business Processes" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management.
Oracle ADF is an end-to-end Java EE framework that simplifies application development by providing ready-to-use infrastructure services and a visual and declarative development experience. It supports rapid application development based on readily available design patterns and metadata-driven and visual tools.
By minimizing the need to write code that implements the application's infrastructure, Oracle ADF simplifies Java EE development. This enables users to focus on the features of the actual application.
Oracle ADF is also focused on the development experience to provide a visual and declarative approach to Java EE development through the Oracle JDeveloper development tool. For more information, see Section 4.8, "Oracle JDeveloper".
Oracle ADF couples a service interface with the built-in business services to make it easy to develop flexible applications that expose data as services. This separation of business service implementation details is performed in Oracle ADF through metadata. Use of this metadata-driven architecture enables application developers to focus on the business logic and user experience, rather than on the details of how services are accessed.
Oracle ADF is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. An MVC application is separated into 1) a model layer that handles interaction with data sources and runs the business logic, 2) a view layer that handles the application user interface, and 3) a controller that manages the application flow and acts as the interface between the model and the view layers. Oracle ADF further separates the model layer from the business services to enable service-oriented development of applications. The Oracle ADF architecture is based on four layers:
The business service layer simplifies building business services by providing access to data from various sources and handling business logic. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the business service layer is implemented in ADF Business Components. ADF Business Components are prebuilt application objects that accelerate the delivery and maintenance of high-performance, highly functional, database-centric services and provide a ready-to-use implementation of Java EE design patterns and best practices. They provide the key components (entity object, view object, and application module) to simplify building database-centric business services.
For more information, see the "Getting Started with Business Services" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide and the "Getting Started with ADF Business Components" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
The model layer connects the business services to the objects that use them in the other layers. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the ADF Model layer stores the implementation details of the business services in metadata to enable developers to exchange services without modifying the user interface, making the application extremely agile. Developers creating user interfaces need not be concerned with business service access details. Instead, they can focus on developing the application interface and interaction logic.
For more information, see the "Using Oracle ADF Model in a Fusion Web Application" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
The controller layer manages the applications flow and handles user input. You typically design your application flow by laying out pages and navigation rules on a diagram in Oracle JDeveloper. Using ADF Controller, you can break your application's flow into smaller, reusable task flows; include nonvisual components such as method calls in your flow; and create page fragment flows that run inside a region of a single containing page. This approach encourages maximum reusability for user interface fragments and simplified integration into portals and mashup applications.
For more information, see the "Getting Started with ADF Task Flows" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
The view layer provides the user interface of the application. The view layer for Oracle Fusion Applications is based on the ADF Faces rich client framework, which includes a set of over a 150 Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces (JSF) components that let you build a richer user interface for your applications. Ajax is a combination of asynchronous JavaScript, dynamic HTML (DHTML), XML, and an XmlHttpRequest communication channel. This combination enables requests to be made to the server without fully rerendering the page. While Ajax enables client-like applications to use standard Internet technologies, JSF provides server-side control, which reduces the dependency on an abundance of JavaScript often found in typical Ajax applications.
For more information, see the "Getting Started with Your Web Interface" in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide and the "Introduction to ADF Faces Rich Client" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
In addition to ADF Faces, Oracle ADF also supports the following view technologies:
Apache MyFaces Trinidad, the open source code donation from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation. ADF Faces components are based on these Trinidad components.
Java Swing and ADF Swing. ADF Swing is the development environment for building Java Swing applications that use the ADF Model layer.
ADF Mobile, the standards-based framework for building mobile applications built on the component model of JSF.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Mobile Browser Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
ADF Desktop Integration provides tools and components to integrate Microsoft Excel workbooks with applications built using Oracle ADF. At runtime, Excel workbooks configured by the Oracle ADF Desktop Integration module can invoke Oracle ADF components to manage data retrieved from Oracle Fusion applications.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Desktop Integration Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.
Oracle Fusion Applications uses ADF Security, a framework that provides a security implementation based on JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service). The Oracle ADF implementation of JAAS is permission-based. JDeveloper supports making permission grants to enable fine-grained security for Oracle ADF resources of Oracle Fusion Applications.
Oracle JDeveloper is the integrated development environment (IDE) used for Oracle Fusion Applications. JDeveloper is used for building service-oriented applications using the latest industry standards for Java, XML, web services, SQL, and SCA. It supports the complete development lifecycle with integrated features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying applications. User-friendly wizards are provided to simplify many common tasks such as connecting to IT systems.
For more information on how to use JDeveloper for Oracle Fusion Applications, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide.
For general information about JDeveloper, see the JDeveloper online help.
Oracle HTTP Server is a web server based on the Apache HTTP Server infrastructure. It provides a web listener for applications and the framework for hosting static and dynamic pages and applications over the web. Oracle HTTP Server includes significant enhancements that facilitate load balancing, administration, and configuration. Features such as single sign-on, clustered deployment, and high availability enhance the operation of Oracle HTTP Server.
Oracle HTTP Server enables developers to program their site in a variety of languages and technologies, such as Perl, C, C++, PHP, and Oracle PL/SQL. It can also be a proxy server, both forward and reverse. A reverse proxy server enables content served by different servers to appear as if coming from one server.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle HTTP Server.
Oracle HTTP Server WebGate is a web server plug-in that is shipped ready-to-use with Oracle Access Manager. Oracle HTTP Server WebGate intercepts HTTP requests from users for web resources and forwards them to the access server for authentication and authorization.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Access Manager with Oracle Security Token Service.
Oracle Web Services Manager (Oracle WSM) provides a policy framework to manage and secure web services consistently across your organization. The framework includes the Oracle Web Services Manager Policy Manager (Oracle WSM Policy Manager) that enables you to centrally define policies. It reads and writes the policies, including predefined and custom policies, from the Oracle WSM Repository.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Introducing WebLogic Web Services for Oracle WebLogic Server.
Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite provides an integrated suite of products designed for managing content. It features the following components:
Oracle Universal Content Management enables you to leverage document management, web content management, digital asset management, and records retention functionality to build and complement your business applications.
For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Content Server.
Oracle Inbound Refinery is a conversion server that manages file conversions for electronic assets such as documents, digital images, and video. It also provides thumbnail functionality for documents and images, story boarding for video, and the ability to extract and use EXIF data from digital images and XMP data from electronic files generated from programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Oracle Imaging and Process Management provides organizations with a scalable solution upon which to develop process-oriented imaging applications and image-enablement solutions for enterprise applications.
Note:
Oracle Fusion Applications implements Oracle Imaging and Process Management in Advanced Queuing mode, which has implications for what administration features can be used. For example, you cannot use the Oracle Imaging and Process Management Work Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications.For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Imaging and Process Management.
These components can be deployed as applications to an Oracle WebLogic Server domain.
Oracle Data Integrator is a comprehensive data integration platform that covers all data integration requirements: from high-volume, high-performance batch loads, to event-driven, trickle-feed integration processes, to SOA-enabled data services.
Oracle Data Integrator extracts, loads, and transforms data for the product families.
For information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Data Integrator.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides a familiar user interface to Internet search users and enables a high-quality, secure search across all enterprise information data sources—websites, file servers, content management systems, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, business intelligence systems, and databases.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is the search engine for Oracle Fusion Applications Search. It provides the fundamental search capability that includes indexing, querying, and some value-added functionality such as security.
For more information, see the "Managing Search with Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.
For general information on the search engine for Oracle Fusion Applications Search, see the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Administrator's Guide.