Oracle and Distrilogie are presenting different “Monthly Oracle Partner Training” programs and the first month (September) the focus lies on SOA.
This is a partner-dedicated event aimed at informing the Partner community about Oracle Acquisition strategy and “Best-in-Class” offerings that are critical to meet the customer needs.

My task was to give the partners a practical view on Oracle Enterprise Service Bus using a pre-sales case I’ve worked providing an answer to the customers’ specific technical requirements.

This presentation first gives an insight on the business requirements stated by the customer and then focuses on the business value of ESB for each of these requirements.

• The first requirement was regarding the ability to work with one General Business Object (GBO) that described the customers’ data model. The answer in ESB is using an XML Schema Definition File (xsd) where we describe the required data in an hierarchical, nested manner. Given the customer the possibility to work with the same object throughout the whole business process.

• The second requirement ‘How can we make a synchronous call from existing applications to an ESB Service?’ ‘How can we propagate changes to our different systems’? The first answer uses file- and ftp-adapter to bacth-read a CSV file. The file is polled for using the file adapter, format the file in a required format using the transform-functionality of ESB and put this file on the ftp-server of the client. For the second question regarding propagation I’ve given a demo where a JMS queue will listen for new messages. Once a message has been received a call will be made to a procedure on the database to unpack the message and create a new record. In this demo I’ve also mentioned the managed- and non-managed approach when implementing ESB Services which explains the virtualization-features of ESB.

• The 3d requirement was regarding two-way synchronous services were I’ve integrated the ESB Services with an ADF Faces Web Application. Giving the customer an insight on the ease of integration between Oracle ADF and ESB Services using the data binding layer on Web Services.

• In the last requirement the customer was curious about the integration-possibilities of web services and database procedures, jobs. The question that popped their mind: ‘Can we schedule a web service call using a database job?’. And this is no hastle at all, not for ESB and not for our Oracle Database. We can use the utl_http-package or utl_dbws-package to call our web service endpoint and the procedure holding the pl/sql functionality will be scheduled using dbms_job.

This demo and presentation gave me and the customers a real practical hands-on experience of Oracle’s Enterprise Service Bus and convinced us of the ease of integration when using such technology.

A pragmatic approach and an open vision using practical demo’s and hands-on sessions is the answer to every Enterprise Integration Challenge.