1 Introduction

Oracle Retail Enterprise Integration Styles

There is no one integration approach that addresses all criteria equally well. Therefore, multiple approaches for integrating applications have evolved over time. Oracle Retail has focused on three main integration styles:

• Asynchronous JMS Pub/Sub Fire-and-Forget

• Request/Response

• Bulk Data

Request/Response Integration Style

The approach taken by Oracle Retail is not to choose one style to use every time but to choose the best style for a particular integration opportunity. Each style has its advantages and disadvantages. Applications or solutions may integrate using multiple styles so that each point of integration takes advantage of the style that suits it best.

With this release, the introduction of the Retail Service Backbone (RSB), Oracle Retail has added the Request/Response Style of Enterprise Integration to the Retail Integration Suite of products. The Retail Service Backbone (RSB) is the product that defines the Oracle Retail Enterprise SOA Architecture and provides the infrastructure for the Services domain.

The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) platform is the integration infrastructure product at the core of the Oracle Retail Service Backbone (RSB) set of products.

RSB products include pre-build Services and Flows and the integration API end points for all of the Oracle Retail Application's web services and the Enterprise Solution web service integration points and contracts for external application to connect to as part of the Solution business processing.

To productize Oracle Retail web services for delivery to customers, the Oracle Retail Service Backbone (RSB) also delivers as product a set of security enablement tools and the tooling required to automate the creation and packaging of the configurations for OSB and to manage the full life cycle of web services (Compile, Deploy, Patch, Monitor).

RSB enables the loose coupling between Oracle Retail and external applications and applications within Oracle Retail Suite.

• RSB provides automated OSB configurations for web service deployment and security configurations

• RSB packages all of the Oracle Retail Web Services

• RSB provides tooling for the full life cycle management of OSB hosted Web Services (Development, Compilation, Deployment and Upgrades) and automatically adds instrumentation for runtime operations monitoring (using Retail Integration Console application)

RSB features centralized software product lifecycle management. All configuration and management is from a single centralized location using specific tools to support all phases of the Software Product Lifecycle.

The framework and the tools for the common deployment model and the software life cycle management are located in rsb-home.

This provides an architecture and infrastructure for enterprise services, integration flows, transformations and BPEL-based components for RGBU enterprise integration solutions. Any enterprise level integration logic (complex integration flows, adapting/connector applications) can be installed, patched and upgraded from this centralized configuration location.

Note: See the Life Cycle of this document.

OSB and RSB

There are many reasons for choosing OSB as the infrastructure component for RSB.

• Oracle Service Bus is a core Oracle SOA Suite product within the Fusion Technology stack.

  
  

• OSB connects, mediates, and manages interactions between heterogeneous services, legacy applications, packaged applications, and multiple enterprise service bus instances.

• It delivers standards-based service integration for high-volume, mission-critical environments spanning the enterprise and the cloud.

• Customers are using Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) as the integration platform of choice for integrations between Oracle Retail and their legacy and third party systems.

• Services are truly loosely coupled. Applications need not worry about integration logic, since it is completely separate and delegated to OSB.

• OSB provides built-in management and monitoring capabilities and supports out-of-the-box integration with SOA governance products.

• The OSB is specifically designed for the task of provisioning, integrating, and managing services in an SOA.

• SOA architectural style is the primary architecture pattern/strategy for Oracle going forward. Oracle Service Bus is central to Oracle's Fusion Architecture. OSB is the fundamental service infrastructure for Enterprise level SOA solution.