In this article, we are going to talk about the Oracle Service Bus, a very powerful product by Oracle Corporation. We will cover all the important topics such as what is Oracle Service Bus? Why one should use it? What are its features, benefits, advantages, and disadvantages, etc? So, let’s get started.
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Oracle OSB – Table of Contents
What is Oracle OSB?
The Oracle Service Bus or OSB is a product based on an Enterprise service bus. It is responsible for transforming complex and fragile architectures into agile integration networks. It does so by managing, connecting, and visualizing associations between applications and the services. Moreover, it offers standard-based and low-cost integration for SOA environments where serious requirements such as reliability, scalability, and extreme performance are fulfilled. Further, it allows companies and organizations to understand the value of their portfolio of enterprise applications. It enables them to support all their investments in many new ways ranging from on-premise and mobile devices to the future. Oracle OSB improves the overall performance and flexibility of Oracle SOA and API Management.
Why Oracle OSB?
There are a lot of similar products in the market such as Mule ESB, Fiorano ESB, etc but Oracle Service Bus has features, functions, and operations that stand out and provide the customer satisfaction by keeping the best interests of its customers in mind. It has a message delivery that is based on standards such as HTTP, Java Messaging Service (JMS), and SOAP that provides a great method for the IT departments of the company to promote communication. Not only this but OSB is also designed in such a way that it acts as an interface, mediation, and interface layer. With the help of popular protocols like SOAP and Rest, it can talk to almost any system present. Therefore, most of the companies use this software to promote communication between new systems and old systems that helps in removing the gap and keep them in service.
Why you should use Oracle OSB?
A service bus is a complex tool to use and navigate but it is a very important tool for an organization. There is a lot of important things that a service bus must do so one should make sure that the service bus they choose must perform all the processes that are needed in their organization. No enterprise service bus has all the functions. However, Oracle Service Bus provides all the basic and extra facilities needed by an organization to fulfill its requirements.
- It sends the request to a service provider.
- OSB easily converts the format of the business service requests into a format and structure that is required by the service provider.
- It modifies the messages as per the requirements of the service provider.
- Enterprises are completely secured and protected from unauthorized access.
- It accepts the consumer’s protocol as input and communicates with the service provider through a different protocol.
- Interprets business service to service implementation.
- In particular, it manages the orchestration of various implementation services.
- Gives a single unit of work and a framework for coordinating with different services.
- Request management is done by accepting the requests and delivering back to the clients.
- Lastly and most importantly, it manages complex business processes easily and efficiently.
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Oracle OSB Features
Its core functional features are separated into 4 parts as follows:
- Service Integration –
- Message Brokering
- Conditional Routing
- Message Transformation
- Service Callouts
- Database lookup from proxy services
- Native transport for Oracle data service integrator
- Data transformation tools
- Interoperability
- EJB and JEJB transport
- Service Security –
- Message security features
- Service Composition –
- Change center
- Test console
- Resource management
- Resource customization
- UDDI service registry
- Error Handling
- Service Management –
- Service Logging and Monitoring
- Custom Operations Console
- Service Versioning
- Service Level Agreements
Oracle OSB Architecture
The architecture of the Service Bus is ideal for integrating the applications through services. It uses those applications so that they can expose the data through services. After that, it implements the application integration or service orchestration using OSB. Service Bus provides features that include transformation, filtration, validation, and enriching data to complete the application integration process.
- On top of the high-level architecture comes the service consumers. They are the users that send the request to the service providers.
- Now, the next layer is the service management layer. It consists of monitoring, reporting and SLA alerts tasks. It is responsible for gathering statistics, sending SLA based alerts, searching capabilities by extracting information, and at the same time, it supports logging of selected parts of the messages.
- Another equally important layer is the message brokering layer that is responsible for content-based routing, error handling, service switching, and dynamic transformation. Content-based routing of messages and transfer of data is done here.
- Besides messages brokering is the configuration framework. It is the change center for making several configuration changes inside the service bus. Also, it is responsible for validation and service discovery.
- Afterward, the fourth layer is the service bus security that does the authentication, authorization, encryption, and decryption. It maintains the identities and message security.
- In the messaging and protocol layer, there are many protocols available such as HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, JMS, SMTP, FTP, MQ, etc. that allow the system to communicate and integrate with almost any other system.
- Lastly, there are service producers at the end of the architecture. In other words, they are responsible for responding to consumer requests and providing them with the services.
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Oracle OSB Benefits
To begin with, Oracle Service Bus acts as a communication backbone for the routing and transportation of the messages across an organization. This software is designed for reliable message delivery and high-throughput. It provides the following benefits:
- Service Visualization – It ensures that any service customer can access any service provider from any given platform.
- Loose Coupling – It mediates between a service provider and user without which they’ll create dependency on one another.
- Location Transparency – This is a feature that hides the actual physical location of a service provider from the service user. This allows greater flexibility for managing the services.
- Seamless Connectivity – OSB ensures that all the assets like SOAP can be accessed easily. Moreover, it offers comprehensive and rich integration options to standard interfaces.
- Routing – This software gives reliable, efficient, and secure ways to transport and deliver messages and data.
- Performance – Oracle Service Bus is stateless and lightweight. Thus, it improves performance and gives the best results even in stressful conditions.
- Transformation – It provides runtime transformation capability. Also, it supports the industry’s standard for middleware.
- Security and Policy – It implements security for integration, controlling the security issues resulting in high standardization.
- Service Polling – This feature automatically detects that which services are live and then removes the others that increase the overall performance.
- Load Balancing and Failover – OSB greatly supports load balancing algorithms so that the load can be balanced between the endpoints. Besides, it detects and removes a failover.
- Service Throttling – This new feature specifically restricts the load on a particular service.
- Monitoring – It provides proactive and reactive monitoring features.
- Message Validation – Schematron validation and data level value check validation are supported.
- Value Added a feature – Lastly, it supports domain value map, cross reference, package application adapters, and advance message formats.
Oracle OSB New Offerings
Oracle is a part of the Oracle Service Oriented Architecture. It launched a new update of Oracle Service Bus in which a lot of new features and operations were introduced. Below is a list of all those features:
- Single Installer
- Single IDE
- Debugger
- Graphical MDS
- SOA Templates
- BPEL Sub Process
- Re-sequencing
- Adapter
- Xquery Mapper
- Enterprise Service Scheduler
- Translate Activity
- MDS support
With the help of these new capabilities, customers now don’t have to compromise on their needs as the software fulfills them well. Hence, it lets them handle, manage, and coordinate the distributed endpoints quickly. Thus, it provides centralization in the organization improving efficiency and performance.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Oracle OSB
Oracle Service Bus is widely used as a service abstraction layer in many organizations. It hides the actual implementation, allows service providers and users to communicate, and handles all the issues proficiently. However, one should always take a look at the pros and cons that it has.
Advantages –
- It is lightweight and easily integrates with various databases, applications, and web services.
- It greatly helps in creating reusable and well-defined services.
- Support for all synchronous and asynchronous transport protocols is provided by it.
- Certainly, features like data mapping and transportation into various formats make it even better.
- Security application to the integration layer, location transparency, and service aggregations of different services are some other advantages that come with it.
- Administration features help in updating the business service endpoints globally.
- Lastly, the administration console gives a dashboard to identify service issues.
Disadvantages –
- There is a great need for the application to support more adapters as the integration points constantly change.
- Generally, the connectivity with the solution is poor. Requests are lost because of low connectivity.
- The service implementation is not agile and the architecture is super complex. As a result, it creates so many layers to traverse along with high latency.
- Rest service support is not good. Also, the JDeveloper IDE sometimes consumes a lot of resources.