Oracle Service Bus: How to create Proxy and Business Services Part 1: Concepts

Oracle Service Bus: How to create Proxy and Business Services Part 1: Introduction and Concepts  Oracle Service Bus allows you to manage Web services and deliver authentic message brokering through the configuration of proxy services in the Oracle Service Bus design-time environment. The underlying concepts of Oracle Service Bus are briefly described in this section. Oracle Service Bus manages the routing and transformation of messages in an enterprise system to promote seamless application integration. The following diagram illustrates key functional components of Oracle Service Bus. Proxy Services and Business Services Oracle Service Bus provides intelligent message brokering between business services (such as enterprise services and databases) and service clients (such as presentation applications or other business services) through proxy services that you can configure using Oracle Service Bus development and run-time tooling. Proxy services are Oracle Service Bus definitions of intermediary Web services that Oracle Service Bus implements locally on Oracle WebLogic Server. With Oracle Service Bus message brokering, service clients exchange messages with an intermediary proxy service rather than working directly with a business service. Oracle Service Bus lets you implement proxy services independently and configure them dynamically, as driven by your business needs, without requiring costly infrastructure development and re-deployment efforts. The configuration functions are separated from the management functions in Oracle Service Bus. A proxy service can route messages to multiple business services; you can choose to configure a proxy service with an interface that is independent of the business services with which the proxy service communicates. In such cases, you can configure a proxy service message flow definition to route a message to the appropriate business service and map the message data into the format required by the business service interface. Business services are Oracle Service Bus definitions of the enterprise services that exchange messages during business processes. A business service and its interface can be defined and configured using the Oracle Service Bus design-time tooling. To configure a business service, you must specify its interface, the type of transport it uses, its security requirements, and other characteristics. A business service definition is similar to that of a proxy service, but it does not have pipelines (a message flow). What is a Message Flow? In Oracle Service Bus, a message flow is the implementation of a proxy service. You configure the logic for the manipulation of messages using proxy service message flow definitions. This logic includes such activities as transformation, publishing, and reporting, which are implemented as individual actions within the stages of a pipeline. What is a Pipeline? Pipelines are one-way processing paths that include no branching. A pipeline is a named sequence of stages containing actions, representing a non-branching oneway processing path. It is used to specify the message flow for service requests and responses. A stage is a user-configured processing step. Messages fed into the pipelines are accompanied by a set of message context variables that contain the message contents. They can be accessed or modified by actions in the pipeline stages. What is a Pipeline Pair? Pipeline pairs are request and response pipelines. The request pipeline definition specifies the actions that Oracle Service Bus performs on request messages to the proxy service before invoking a business service or another proxy service. The response pipeline definition specifies the processing that Oracle Service Bus performs on responses from the business or proxy service that the proxy service invokes before returning a response to a client.