Oracle Service Bus is an important component of Oracle SOA Suite. It allows you to manage connections, incoming service requests, routing, and logic, and to control the flow of communication between different services. It also enables you to oversee your services and the corresponding service level agreements. However, the Oracle Service Bus is just the communication backbone that processes, transports and routes the messages across your entire organization.
If you need to change something in a service’s payload or interface, you can use Oracle Service Bus to mask the differences to other service customers. You can further mask the location of the services so that you can easily migrate your services from one server to the other. These are just two of the many use cases for the Oracle Service Bus.
Message delivery at its best
Oracle Service Bus is designed for reliable and high throughput message delivery to your consumers and service providers. It makes use of XML as its native data type, as well as other data types. It gets and transmits messages via a variety of protocols such as JMS, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, JMS and File.
And remember, it only acts as an intermediary. If you are familiar with Mediator in SOA Composite, then you will be familiar with some of the services of Oracle Service Bus:
- validation,
- routing,
- transformation and
- filtering.
Comparing Mediator and Oracle Service Bus
The difference between Mediator and Oracle Service Bus is that the former is designed to work only within the SOA Composite, while the latter can pretty much stand alone and can communicate within all SOA applications as well as non-SOA applications. What’s more, Oracle Service Bus’ biggest benefit is that it protects the app developers from modifications and changes made in the service endpoints, as well as avoiding overloading the systems with requests.
The four different functional layers
There are four different functional layers in Oracle Service Bus:
- messaging layer,
- security layer,
- composition layer, and the
- management layer.
The messaging layer makes use of several standards, such as WS-Security, WS-I, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, SOAP, RMI, EJB, HTTP and others to connect any service. The layer also supports the creation of customize transports via the Custom Transport SDK.
The security layer secures all levels, including SSL for transport security, WS protocols for message security, SSO, and identity management access for console security and policy.
The composition layer allows you to model your message flows.
The management layer gives you a single dashboard to monitor and manage your services. This is where you define SLAs for your services, check the reports, and see alerts on message pipelines and metrics.
You would need the Oracle Service Bus to help you manage your services. It gives you a robust environment for message transformations, orchestrations and routing. It gives you the ability to make use of adaptive messaging, while also keeping your security in check. If you need to learn more, call Four Cornerstone at 1 (817) 377-1144. We can provide you with a team of Oracle certified experts who can help you with anything related to Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA!
Photo courtesy of Oracle.
