Our final detailed visit to  Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) covers the final 3 chapters which engage with the Scheduler, Look and Feel customisation and the relationship with integration and service concepts (dare I use the acronym SOA).

The chapter on the scheduler is pretty short, but then compared to many other chapters the size of the product/component is small. The book relates how the scheduler behaves compared to the Schedule Management offered in EBusiness. The surprising things is that each product domain (Financials, HCM, CRM etc) has its own scheduler rather than a single shared service; the book doesn’t attempt to explain the rational here which is a shame.  It does describe how it deploys into each domain, where the configuration exists and how to work with the configuration of the scheduler itself (e.g. where logging goes etc) and attempts to address some obvious questions from a administration perspective.  It then goes onto how to create a custom scheduled process with a worked illustration. All very well done, although I have to admit to a nagging feeling of I’m missing something – it maybe simply that deployment is very much through server administration rather than through an automated mechanism (so if you develop and test in a preproduction environment, you can package up the process of deploying config custom app to your production environment without needing to repeat the admin UI interactions, so you can be assured there is no inconsistency between deployment instances).

The Look and Feel chapter is about largely applying the changes so that the product feels like part of your business’ corporate solution – important if you’re exposing any aspects of it to the outside world. So aside from the use of the tools you have the ADF controls to effectively ‘skin’ the product. The chapter provides a brief but concise view of how skinning works, in relation to the old EBusiness technologies (CLAF and UIX) and current HTML technology of CSS and the key part of ADF (Rich Faces). More importantly it points out the relevant documentation on all the sources of information, and tooling such as the skinning editor. Not to mention addressing the issue of deployment. Obviously there is a short illustration demonstrating an element of skinning.

ADF Architecture

The initial emphasis on the last chapter is the reality that organisations can’t simply migrate all non Fusion Apps such as EBusines, Seibel etc to the Fusion solutions in one hit therefore you need to provide a degree of integration between solutions for as long as the transition may take. This neatly leads into the question of well how do I know what components exist to support integration, which brings OER (Oracle Enterprise Repository) into the picture. So obviously the book provides a brief overview to the use of OER. The various Fusion apps offer different interfaces for different tasks (from bulk data export to business events) so each of these ‘patterns’ are briefly explianed and as Fusion apps is offered as a SaaS solution how that might impact the ‘pattern’ availability. The chapter finishes by walking through the use of using a SCA Composite and web services to interact with a Fusion App – probably one of the most common approaches to integration at a transactional (rather than bulk) manner.  The only thing missing for me would be a brief discussion on Process Integration Packs (PIPs) which leverage all of  the technologies underpinning Fusion Apps into a custom package of integration operations or ready made integrations.

So the final chapters provide a strong close to the book continuing to offer an excellent overview, pointing you to resources to ‘deep dive’ as necessary.

Previous Chapter reviews:

• • Chapters 1 & 2
  • Chapters 3 & 4
  • Chapters 5 & 6
  • Chapters 7 & 8
  • Chapters 9 & 10
  • Chapters 11 & 12