Why Oracle Service Bus 11g ? Key Benefits and Advantages

This blog covers key benefits and advantages we can achieve with the implementation of Oracle Service Bus 11g. Actually I have been asked by Client to list down the capabilities they will get with the Oracle Service Bus 11g Implementation and this is what they got from me and lead to this blog finally.

1. Service Virtualization :

                      A core principle of SOA is to ensure that any service consumer can access any service provider - and from any platform. This has been considered as key principle in OSB and it provides robust way of Vitalizing the Service. It’s a great value add in SOA Architecture.

2. Loose Coupling

                     OSB provides loose coupling by mediating between Service provided and Consumer. Without mediation Service consumer and provider will create dependency to each other. A change in single side provider/consumer will lead to the change dependent consumer/provider respectively. OSB bridges the gap of transport, message format, security technology etc.

3. Location Transparency

                     It’s a strategy to hide physical location of actual physical location of service endpoints from the Service Consumer. All Service consumers should know only single logical machine & port name for each service. This allows for greater flexibility when managing your services. You can add, move, prioritize and remove service endpoints as needed without needing to recompile your service consumer again.

4. Seamless Connectivity

                     While newer applications may expose services over standard, easily consumable interfaces such as SOAP, an overwhelming majority of the services available in enterprises are still locked in legacy systems, from mainframes to custom applications. The first task of an OSB is to ensure that all these existing assets can be easily accessed and integrated. An OSB offers rich and comprehensive connectivity options to standard interfaces (SOAP, messaging, etc.) and also to packaged applications and legacy systems via adapters such Siebel Adapter, Peoplesoft Adapter etc.

5. Routing

                     After having a seamless connectivity next task is that data and messages need to flow reliably. OSB offers efficient, secure and reliable transport options. OSB also provides advance routing facilities to determine where the data needs to go. Such routing can be done based on headers, content or other external rules.

6. Performance

                      OSB is stateless & light weight; hence provide the excellent performance result under stress conditions as well.

7. Transformation

                       Oracle Service Bus provides run time transformation capability and support industry standard for middleware :XML, XSLT, XQuery & XPath.

8. Support for Event Driven Architecture

                       Oracle Service Bus support Oracle’s latest Event Driven Architecture.

9. Security & Policy

                        OSB provides centralized way of implementing the Security for Integration which results into highest level of standardization and control on security issues. Security is best enforced using policy driven framework because it allows to implement security details outside of the Application & easy to maintain. This makes it complete pluggable component & highly Agile which can be changed without modifying the actual application as per the organization policy’s and compliance.

10. Service Polling

                       Oracle Service Bus supports service polling. This allows to OSB to automatically detect live service and remove others from the list. This has a significant impact in performance.

11. Load balancing & Failover

                       Oracle Service Bus supports multiple load balancing algorithms to load balance between endpoints. It automatically detects a failover and removes it from Load balanced urls.

12. Service Throttling

                       Service throttling is a new feature in Oracle Service Bus which allows to restrict the load for particular service. This has great value when it comes to Service up time.

13. Monitoring

                       Oracle Service Bus provides two way monitoring.
Proactive Monitoring: Here Integrator can monitor the dashboard and check the performance of the service bus which can help to tune the server effectively. Tracking the server performance over time can help to plan capacity planning well in advance.

Reactive Monitoring: Here OSB will monitor the Server and look for specific conditions to occur and it will automatically sends the Alert to users, Admin etc. Alert can be in the form of Email, JMS, SMS etc.

14. Message Validation

                       Oracle Service Bus support normal data level value check validation as well as Schematron Validation.

15. Value Added Feature

                  a. Support for Domain Value Map

                  b. Support for Cross Reference

                  c. Support for Package application Adapters

                  d. Support for Advance message formats such as SWIFT and FIX in financial Service Domain.

HermesJMS - Installation, Setup & Monitoring JMS Queue, Topic

This blog is specifically for the people who requires real time monitoring of the JMS resoruces and their in & out. This posting is for installation & setup of HermesJMS Tool on windows environment for monitoring Weblogic 9/10g/or higher versions's JMS resources.

From weblogic 9 onwared , bea (now oracle) started providing web UI for monitoring JMS messages but for a single flow of message traveling through many number of JMS resources like topic , queue etc on Web UI is such headache. At this time HermesJMS is very handy tool to monitor and capture all those details.

HermesJMS Installation, Setup & Monitoring Tutorial

HermesJMS is an extensible console helps you communicate with JMS providers making your life lot easier to browse or search queues and topics, copy messages around and removing them. It fully integrates with JNDI letting you discover administered objects stored, create JMS sessions from the connection factories and use any destinations found. Many providers include a plugin that uses the native API to do non-JMS things like getting queue depths (and other statistics) or finding queue and topic names

Supports following providers :

• Active MQ
• Arjuna MQ
• Tibco EMS
• Fiorano MQ
• JBoss MQ
• JORAM
• OpenJMS
• Oracle, Pramati
• SAP
• SeeBeyond ICAN
• SeeBeyond JCAPS
• Sonic MQ
• WebLogic
• JMS
• WebMethods
• WebSphere MQ

Ok so, lets start Setting up HermesJMS
1. To install HermeJMS first download HermesJMS from sourceforge and run "java –jar hermes-installer-1.12.jar” where you have placed your installer jar file. Open and edit /bin/hermes.bat or hermes.sh. Add the path to your WLS JVM at the beginning of the file right after the REM comments

set PATH=C:\bea\jdk160_05\jre\bin
set JAVA_HOME=C:\bea\jdk160_05

Save hermes.bat/hermes.sh whichever is applicable in your case.

OR

1.you can download Latest version of SOAPUI 3.5 and install it on your machine. HermesJMS will be installed with SOAPUI 3.5 automatically and you can start HermesJMS as shown in below screenshot.


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After installation of hermesJMS on any of the above way, if you are using jdk1.6 then you also need to modify /bin/hermes.bat file.
Add -Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true in startup command.


2. On HermesJMS Window select Action menu and select New -> New Session that will display Preferences screen. In bottom of the window select "providers" tab as shown below.


Click on the image to enlarge.





Right click inside the window and select Add Group. And provide the name say Weblogic10g in classpath group name.

3. Expand the Weblogic10g group and add library to the classpath group by right clicking on library.

For weblogic 9.0 you will require to add weblogic.jar file but if you are using weblogic 10g or higher version you will require to create wlfullclient.jar file from utility provided by Weblogic as mentioned in below steps.

• go to C:\bea\wlserver_10.3\server\lib path on command prompt
• execute java -jar wljarbuilder.jar command
• And file will be created with name wlfullclient.jar in current directory.

4. Now go back to session tab and enter the Session name "Weblogic JMS Local"

In plugin name select "Bea Weblogic" and In Connection factory frame select "weblogic10g" and click on Apply button so that it can load required properties which you need to set as shown in below screenshot and after that click on OK.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Note : ProviderURL propery needs to be set to
t3://host:port

Many users found it difficult to setup Hermes for Clustered Environment. So here is a trick, you will require to give here host and port of any of the cluster. Like t3://:host_name_of_any_single_cluster:port_of_that_same_cluster

Note : Sometime you may not get plugin name listed then just click on OK & close the Preferences window and reopen it, it should get displayed.




5. Now in left side window in HermesJMS you should be able to see the session "Weblogic JMS Local". Right click on that session and select "discover". HermesJMS will find out all the JMS resource located in Weblogic server and list it for you as shown in below screenshot.

Click on the image to enlarge.

In this list Select and particular Queue and right click on it and then select "browse". It will display all messages contained withing that queue in right pane of the window. And you can go through the content of messages.