Using Oracle Service Bus (OSB) as a Replacement for MPL

This section describes the installation and configuration of Oracle Service Bus (OSB) as a replacement for the Multi-Purpose Listener (MPL).

Oracle Utilities Application Framework (OUAF) has long utilized the MPL for integrating the product with a larger enterprise infrastructure. While it has served its purposes over the years, it has fallen behind accepted industry standards based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The majority of MPL functionality can be replaced with out of the box solutions provided by Oracle Service Bus (OSB). For the two exceptions, Outbound Message and Notification Download Staging (NDS), the framework includes resources for integrating these with OSB.

OSB is extensible by defining transports. A transport is a software entity whose sole purpose is to produce a message to be processed by OSB and consumes the result (normal or error) returned by OSB. By utilizing the two custom transports, OUAF Outbound Message and NDS, to define what messages to process, an implementation can fully utilize an OSB development environment to define how to process these messages.

Before developing OSB integrations for OUAF, the developer should be familiar with OSB development such as creating proxy services, business services, and message flow/routing. These terms are defined as follows:

Business Service: In OSB, a Business Service is an entity that receives a message from OSB and processes it. This should not be confused with the OUAF Business Service entities. In this section we use Business Service or OSB Business to refer to a business service in OSB. If we need to refer the business services in OUAF we will refer to them as OUAF Business Services.

Proxy Service: In OSB, a Proxy Service is the entity that receives a message from a source and routes it to a Business Service. These replace the MPL Senders and Receivers. An OSB replacement for an MPL Receiver will receive a message from an external source (such as a web service, email, or file) and deliver messages to OUAF via a Business Service created from an XAI Web Service or Inbound Service. An OSB replacement for an MPL Sender will receive a message from OUAF (Outbound Message, NDS) and deliver it to an external destination (web service, email, etc.).