Tag Archives: 12c

AIA Rides Again?

23 Thursday Jun 2016

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canonicaldatamodel

For those who have been using the Application Integration Architecture on top of Oracle SOA Suite, will probably know that Oracle have sunset AIA as of 12c.  For 12.1 there are Core Extensions to help transition onto the 12c platform but 12.2 leaves these behind.

One of the more valuable parts of AIA for many has been the prebuilt but extensible canonical data model, which are then used by the Prebuilt Integration Packs (PIPs). Having a ready built canonical form can save an enormous amount of effort (consider the amount of effort invested by OASIS and other standards bodies to define standardised data definitions).

So with AIA not moving forward and the canonical form (i.e. XML Schema) no longer being maintained. The question begs how to move forward?  Well given that the model is represented by XML schema you could harvest the schema from an 11g environment, package them up and deploy them in a standalone manner in a 12c environment.  Whilst this will work, it does mean that the data model wont have any future evolution other than by home grown effort.

Depending on your commitment to the AIA model, there is another option to adopt another prebuild form.  I know as result of talking with several other Oracle AIA customers that people are adopting OAGIS.  This isn’t surprising as they have similar characteristics in the way to extend, the way the definitions are defined and structured etc.  Not to mention some common ancestry. However if you have a significant level of utilisation moving to a new model is potentially going to have a significant level of impact.

image008As we have also elected to go the OAGIS route (but fortunately are fairly youthful in our adoption so have elected to switch quickly for all but a couple of objects types. Given this,  I periodically check in with the OAGIS website to come across the following:

Oracle Enterprise Business Objects Contributed to OAGi 
We are very pleased to announce that Oracle has contributed their Enterprise Business Objects (EBOs) and associated IP to OAGi!
The Oracle EBOs are based on OAGIS BODs from a past release and no longer supported by Oracle so they contributed them to us to harmonize with the current version of OAGIS and preserve a technology path for EBO customers.
This also gives OAGi an opportunity to further improve OAGIS content and scope.
I take this as proof of Oracle’s commitment to Open Standards and plan to say so in a press release.  I personally thank Oracle for this commitment.
Scott Nieman of Land O’Lakes will be presenting his Project Definition to begin the process of harmonization on Friday, June 3, at 11 AM EDT at the Next meeting which, as members, you are all invited. Please let me know if you don’t have an invitation and I will forward it to you.
Please join me in thanking Oracle and also please try to engage in our harmonization process to improve OAGIS.

So the basis of this is that OAGIS will gain greater coverage of their domain views. But additionally Scott Nieman will be blazing the way to easing the migration path. I have been fortunate enough to meet and talk with Scott at Oracle Open World and it will be worth keeping an eye out for his findings.

From AIA to SOA Suite 12c

10 Friday Jul 2015

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Oracle has elected to move away from offering AIA Foundation Pack in its current form. Many of the features offered are being offered in a different packaging – predominantly SOA 12c Core Extensions, and some of the tooling which has not been heavily used will not be available in 12c.

AIA 11g Foundation Pack then it will be replaced by Oracle SOA Suite 12c Core Extensions via a SOA Suite 12c upgrade process for those who have already licensed it. The key consideration is the changes in feature availability in on premise upgrades and the ability to exploit all the tooling particularly into the SOA cloud is unlikely in the future.

Based on this we would recommended that any capabilities not offered natively in 12c should be retired from use, to remove potential issues as a result of upgrading or adopting  a  lift and shift cloud strategy. There is 1 possible caveat to this in the form of utilising the AIA canonical model, more on this  below. The sections shows how AIA capabilities have been re-aligned and you might move forwards.

A lot of the UI features have moved to products such as the Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER 12c) as a result the retirement of the Lifecycle Workbench and a few features have been retired.

Reference Process Models

Reference Process Models, are more aligned to the process of solution analysis and design. The capabilities here can be obtained from other tooling. Separating out process models from a product that is more technically aligned makes sense. We would recommend you want to look at process models in a solution independent capability – particularly as your processes maybe split across platforms and products and even between on-premise and the cloud.

Personally I have seen little use of the top down business process models wrapped up by AIA outside of prepackaged PIPs where process models have been considered they have been examined by business architects before determining by the technologists the delivery approach.

Common Objects

The canonical model piece is lost in the transition to 12c. The canonical model is presented through a series of XML Schemas and HTML documentation, so could be packaged up and continued to be used irrespective of of the SOA versioning – subject to ensuring no licensing constraint on where the schemas are applied that might prevent them being used in the SOA cloud for example.

If there are to be constraints around carrying schemas forward then a strategy of migrating to another broad canonical model such as OAGI  would be recommended. OAGI is particularly appealing given it strongly influenced AIA’s model but also their specialist domains leverage it as base definitions for example HR Open Standards.

Composite Application Validation System (CAVS)

CAVS provided a means by which it is possible to build integration tests that exercise composite components. This component could be leveraged by any Continuous Integration infrastructure. We have done this in the past before Oracle’s significant progress in adopting Maven and Hudson.

This is now part of the SOA Suite Core Extensions pack.

AIA Error Handling Framework (AIA-EH) including Resubmission Feature and Logging

This provides the common error management framework that can be extended to provide automated error handling – for example delay for a period and retry. This one of the most valuable capabilities offered in terms of functionality as it provides a unified framework on which you can do basic error trapping and retry to far more complex advanced capabilities. As part of 12c this has been advanced as well.

This is now part of the SOA Suite Core Extensions pack.

AIA Deployment Plans

Deployment plans tooling has now gone as the deployment mechanism (AID) has also been dropped. More on this below.

XSL Mapping Analyzer & reporting(XMan)

This tool provided the means to identify and understand how mappings have been customised or extended from base. This has been superseded by the Mapping Editor tooling in 12c which offers a better approach to this activity.

AIA Installation Driver & AIA Installer properties

This capability wrapped up a series of smaller WLST based processes to deploy a PIP either licensed or custom PIP. As the concept of custom PIP has been dropped in favour of a collection of composites and other artefacts as would be applied if building using just SOA Suite. The capabilities use within Specsavers’ has in the past been shown to be mixed with some people preferring the SOA deployment approach rather than the wrapped up AIA mechanism.

PIP Auditor

The PIP auditor was provided AIA 11g as a means to perform a health check on the configuration of a PIP including custom PIPs. Whilst  it is possible also include this tool into a Continuous Integration process  aide quality management it requires a lot of work to break the lengthy report into more manageable  . However this was not heavily adopted, and also not known to be used manually either, therefore the impact of not continuing its use is negligible.

Framework & Methodology

Still applicable as this is simply a set of architectural approaches utilising Oracle Middleware products such as SOA Suite

Project Life Cycle Workbench including AIA Artefact Generator

As a design tool this has been deprecated. However from a Specsavers viewpoint this has minimal impact as the workbench has not been heavily used in this form (this includes AIA Artefact Generator) as the elements can be generated manually by SOA during the development process.

As the above diagram shows, the life cycle processes are all underpinned by the development process itself.

With respect to the deployment of artefacts such as composites,DVMs etc this is still available through standard SOA mechanisms such WLST. Viewing deployed artefacts can still be done through various management consoles.

Push Notifications with a Bit of Java

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Java Cloud, Oracle, Technology

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So continuing from my previous posts:

We’re going to use the Prowl API and create the equivalent classic “Hello World” App using the push framework – but cutting out the need for Growl etc.  For this blog post we’re not going to use the Oracle Java Cloud as we need to see the code working locally and get ready to promote the code to the cloud.  Once we’ve got some code working we can look at setting up the Java Cloud environment, package and promote what we have here using our IDE into the cloud environment.

As we’re cutting Java code now – you can obviously use your own preferred IDE, I’m going to use JDeveloper 12c if for no other reason than it being a huge improvement on 11g (download here) and I’ve become somewhat disappointed with Eclipse.  Whilst talking about IDEs;  you should be aware that Oracle provide an Oracle Cloud SDK which integrates with a number of IDEs to make some of the interactions with the cloud straight forward.

The SDK provides Ant and Maven scripts to help the build and deploy process – so we will be using those later, plus command line tools to help manage other activities, a number of code examples and HTML documentation.  To setup the SDK you will need to unpack the file into a folder and add that folder into your PATH environment variables. The bundle includes a readme that contains just enough to show what is required to get unpacked and make the command line tools work.

To download from Oracle you will need to setup an Oracle Technology Network (OTN) account – so if you don’t have one now is the time to create one – there is no cost to this, we’re going to need

We could use the REST based API that is provided by the ProwlApp, but at least to start with we’re going to follow the approach using a library to make using the API very simple. By using the API provided on SourceForge (jProwlAPI). Using an API will allow us to show the use of 3rd party libraries in the cloud deployment but also follows some of the Oracle ideas of offering ‘adaptors’ to simplify integration.

So you need to download:

So with this downloaded we are going to:

Setup an new Maven based project (or copy my file structure into place and import) using a maven quickstart archtetype (org.apache.maven.archetypes:maven-archetype-quickstart) . We will probably need to modify this later to leverage the full cloud capable archetype. This will build your project environment and retrieve a bunch of plugins you might need.

Next lets take a peak inside of the jProwlAPI download. You’ll see an example bit of java that shows how to fire the API.  Rather than tinker with this we have created a small package and JUnit test as we would if writing a proper solution created with the maven archetype.

PushedHelloWorld directory structure

We also need to make the JProwlAPI jar file available to the project. So we use maven pattern, and create a folder called lib and copy the jar file into it. We then add the lib folder to project setup.

 

 

pushedhello-RunConfig

To be able to create the deployable artefact we need to load the jar file into the local repository, which we can do with a command line instruction (presuming maven is also available by your PATH variable).

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=./lib/JProwlAPI-0.5.jar -DgroupId=prowl -DartefactId=JProwlAPI -Dversion=12.1.3-0-0 -Dpackage=jar

We’ll come back to the command line in a bit, but within JDeveloper the code I have provided needs 1 change from yourself – replace the references to –YourAPIKey– in the run execute command and in the JUnit class with your own key.

JDEveloper 12c Run Config

In the the ProwlProcessor class I have included a man in method so we can just execute the class to see things working. So having done that we can then repeat by running the class via the JUnit test. You should see the same result. When we we’ve deployed or class to the cloud we can use the JUnit test to invoke the cloud.

ProwlProcessor - main method

The last step, within the IDE we have been compiling to get the class, but not creating a deployable jar file. We could do this with the IDE but we would also in a real development condition be creating artefacts via a Continuous Integration tooling which will effectively fire the maven command line like interface. So let’s do that to create the jar files, using the following command:

mvn clean package

You should then see a folder created if not already there and a jar file reflecting the values in the POM file, that we can see below.

JDeveloper 12C - view of a simple POM

So we have enough now we could in theory deploy a jar to a weblogic container and fire it from a Unit test. In the next post we’ll deploy and execute the unit test, and throw a crude front end into the mix.

JDeveloper 12c

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

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So I have been using JDeveloper 11g for a while and have to admit that I wasn’t a big fan finding a bit flaky and prone to crashing. The biggest driver to using it has been the fact that it offers a lot of XMLSpy like features without the stupidly high XMLSpy license costs.

With JDeveloper 12c arriving I took the opportunity to give it a go. Wow, is it so much better – quicker particularly during the startup cycle and way more reliable. The features around XSD editing haven’t significantly changed but just feels subtly easier to use.

With all the features around working with SOA Suite 12c and Weblogic 12c for core Oracle development I can imagine it is a huge step forward.

With the easier deployment of 12c getting PoC work done should be a lot easier. It’s just a shame still needs that huge 8GB footprint to do anything meaningful and my company laptop being a notebook (great for travelling with) doesn’t pack that punch and Oracle isn’t yet offering low cost SOA Suite deployments in the cloud yet.