This release of RIB defines the full lifecycle of the RIB software product. The RIB lifecycle and phases are described in detail in the software lifecycle management section of this document. For every lifecycle phases and task that RIB defines it provides corresponding tools and utilities to manage and operate on those phases. The tools and utilities are described in detail in the RIB Operations Guide.
There are several prerequisite steps that should be followed to have a successful RIB installation and deployment.
Understand the RIB Core Concepts.
Understand the integration message flow paths.
Understand the deployment options.
Understand the RIB Life Cycle.
Understand the physical and logical requirements and limitations of the RIB Components.
Understand the RIB Operational considerations.
The process of implementation should follow these general steps:
Work with the teams at your organization dedicated to Oracle Retail to coordinate plans for the number and type of environments needed (for example, Dev, Integration, Production).
Each type of environment needs to be sized, deployed, and managed in conjunction with the implementation of the Oracle Retail applications.
It is critical to understand the volume requirements of the production system so that the appropriate decisions can be made about the deployment option and the physical location and sizing.
All deployments have integration to existing retailer systems. It is critical to understand the position of the RIB as it fits into the overall integration architecture and that the current operations and architecture team understand the RIB and its capabilities.
Select a deployment option (centralized or distributed),
This may be mixed depending on the phases of deployment. Development and test may be centralized and production distributed.
Understand the operational complexities of each and plan for the staffing.
Work with the application server administration team(s) to determine the physical and logical placement of the RIB components.
Work with the system administrator and database administrator to appropriately place, size, and configure the AQ JMS.
Work with the system administrators to select the central RIB management location(s); rib-home.
The installation of the RIB has many pre-requisites and dependencies that require the understanding, support and effort of database administrators, system administrators, application server administrators, and your organization's Oracle Retail application teams. It is a critical role of the RIB system administrator to work with each team, regardless of the site organization structure. See the RIB Installation Guide.
The operation requirements and considerations are covered in the RIB Operations Guide. The guide should be understood before the implementation so that the factors can be considered in the planning.
Create operational plans for the RIB Life Cycle. See the RIB Operations Guide.
Create plans for environment monitoring and maintenance. See the RIB Operations Guide
Plan to performance test. The RIB supplies tools to aid in the testing, but it is a difficult task that involves the database administrators, system administrators, application server administrators, and the Oracle Retail application teams.
Verification is the process of reviewing, inspecting, testing, and documenting that the product behaves in a manner as defined by the product requirement specification. Validation on the other hand is the process of making sure that the product's runtime behavior meets the retailer's needs and requirements. RIB provides tools and utilities to verify that a RIB installation is configured correctly and works properly when business events (messages) occur in your enterprise. RIB also provides tools to test your integration infrastructure standalone independent of any Oracle Retail applications.
The RIB Diagnostic and Monitoring Tool (RDMT) can be used to verify your installation and configurations. The RDMT configuration report utility generates an extensive configuration report of your runtime environment. It is recommended to regularly perform full RIB health check using the RDMT tool sets to proactively find problems and recover before any problem becomes a serious issue.
Identifying the ownership of an integration problem is one of the hardest problems in any integration project. Data mismatch problems always show up in the integration layer but in reality it is the source and the destination applications that has mismatch data model. To be able to isolate integration infrastructure problem versus retail application API problem it is very important to be able to test the integration infrastructure independent of the retail applications.
In this release, RIB provides two test harnesses that allow you to build a standalone working integration environment without the need to install any Oracle Retail applications. The test harnesses simulate Oracle Retail PL/SQL applications (RMS and RWMS) and Oracle Retail Java EE applications (SIM, RPM and AIP). The test harnesses are known as plsql-api-stubs and javaee-api-stubs respectively.
See the RIB Operations Guide for further detail on the RIB test harness.